Go enjoy yourself. I’ll see you in a few days.
The white screen burned her eyes. Message me when you’re home safe.
She shut that window. And didn’t dare open up her audiomail. She usually had to be in one of her monthly emotional death-spirals to do that. To hear Danika’s laughing voice again.
Bryce loosed a long breath, then another, then another.
She’d find the person behind this. For Danika, for the Pack of Devils, she’d do it. Do anything.
She opened up her phone again and began typing out a group message to Juniper and Fury. Not that Fury ever replied—no, the thread was a two-way conversation between Bryce and June. She’d written out half of her message: Philip Briggs didn’t kill Danika. The murders are starting again and I’m— when she deleted it. Micah had given an order to keep this quiet, and if her phone was hacked … She wouldn’t jeopardize being taken off the case.
Fury had to know about it already. That her so-called friend hadn’t contacted her … Bryce shoved the thought away. She’d tell Juniper face-to-face. If Micah was right and there was somehow a connection between Bryce and how the victims were chosen, she couldn’t risk leaving Juniper unaware. Wouldn’t lose anyone else.
Bryce glanced at the sealed iron door. Rubbed the deep ache in her leg once before standing.
Silence walked beside her during the entire trip downstairs.
14
Ruhn Danaan stood before the towering oak doors to his father’s study and took a bracing, cooling breath.
It had nothing to do with the thirty-block run he’d made from his unofficial office above a dive bar in the Old Square over to his father’s sprawling marble villa in the heart of FiRo. Ruhn let out a breath and knocked.
He knew better than to barge in.
“Enter.” The cold male voice leached through the doors, through Ruhn. But he shoved aside any indication of his thundering heart and slid into the room, shutting the door behind him.
The Autumn King’s personal study was larger than most single-family houses. Bookshelves rose two stories on every wall, crammed with tomes and artifacts both old and new, magic and ordinary. A golden balcony bisected the rectangular space, accessible by either of the spiral staircases at the front and back, and heavy black velvet curtains currently blocked the morning light from the tall windows overlooking the interior courtyard of the villa.
The orrery in the far back of the space drew Ruhn’s eye: a working model of their seven planets, moons, and sun. Made from solid gold. Ruhn had been mesmerized by it as a boy, back when he’d been stupid enough to believe his father actually gave a shit about him, spending hours in here watching the male make whatever observations and calculations he jotted down in his black leather notebooks. He’d asked only once about what his father was looking for, exactly.
Patterns was all his father said.
The Autumn King sat at one of the four massive worktables, each littered with books and an array of glass and metal devices. Experiments for whatever the fuck his father did with those patterns. Ruhn passed one of the tables, where iridescent liquid bubbled within a glass orb set over a burner—the flame likely of his father’s making—puffs of violet smoke curling from it.
“Should I be wearing a hazmat suit?” Ruhn asked, aiming for the worktable where his father peered through a foot-long prism ensconced in some delicate silver contraption.
“State your business, Prince,” his father said shortly, an amber eye fixed to the viewing apparatus atop the prism.
Ruhn refrained from commenting about how the taxpaying people of this city would feel if they knew how one of their seven Heads spent his days. The six lower Heads were all appointed by Micah, not elected by any democratic process. There were councils within councils, designed to give people the illusion of control, but the main order of things was simple: The Governor ruled, and the City Heads led their own districts under him. Beyond that, the 33rd Legion answered only to the Governor, while the Aux obeyed the City Heads, divided into units based upon districts and species. It grew murkier from there. The wolves claimed the shifter packs were the commanders of the Aux—but the Fae insisted that this distinction belonged to them, instead. It made dividing—claiming—responsibilities difficult.
Ruhn had been heading up the Fae division of the Aux for fifteen years now. His father had given the command, and he had obeyed. He had little choice. Good thing he’d trained his entire life to be a lethal, efficient killer.
Not that it brought him any particular joy.