“We’re not sure. The Basin was there, but it was a clever illusion. Fooled even Severin. No one knows how long the thing’s been gone. Could have been since the Blood Compact ceremony weeks ago.” His eyes found mine. “Could be anywhere.”
The words hit like a physical blow.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered. “You said it was sealed… guarded…”
“And it was. Around the clock. Inside a locked room, secured by wards. The same godsdamned room it’s been in for hundreds of years.”
“Then how…”
“We don’tknow.” He shoved his wet hair out of his face and stalked past us to the cabinet, pulling out a bottle of scotch from behind a stack of dishes. “We don’t fucking know, except….”
He tipped the bottle to his lips and chugged, throat bobbing before he wiped his mouth and handed the bottle off to Dante.
“I picked up some old traces of magic around the perimeter of the room where the illusion had been anchored into place. Magic that has a unique footprint. And a unique color. Red. DiSangue magic, though I couldn’t narrow it down to the caster, but itissomeone powerful.”
Silence crashed down around us, blood roaring in my ears.
Dante took a step forward, his entire body going rigid. “You told Severin what you saw?”
Nico shook his head. “No, not yet. I told him I had to check out a lead and came straight here. By my estimate, the spell was weeks old. They’ll bring in investigators, and while they might not be able to narrow down who cast the spell, they will figure out the Basin’s been gone for a while.”
“Which means the Basin could be on another continent.” I sounded more desperate with every word. “Are you sure about how long it’s been?”
“Damn sure. Weeks.”
I’d never really wondered about Nico’s strange abilities, never asked about his magic or those shadows I saw so clearly, but I wondered now, and a cold, creeping dread began to spread through me.
He’d been inside my dream.
And he’d been real.
“If Emilia is involved, this changes everything,” Dante pointed out, frowning.
“Yeah, no shit. I can’t believe she’d sell us out, though. I always thought she was on our side,” Nico muttered, looking like he’d been betrayed. He’d blame himself for losing the Basin, but not as much as I was blaming myself.
We should have stolen that Basin the second we realized its importance.
Now Giovanni was one… no, ten steps ahead of us.
And somehow… we hadn’t even known we’d fallen behind.
41
DANTE
Iwaited until Emberline was fast asleep before I grunted out Nico’s name and headed outside to the garden. I was still blindly jealous of the bastard, but for my wife’s sake, I was willing to play nice.
Well, nice-ish.
“Run through this fucking disaster again,” I growled. I could not believe that fucking monk had gotten over on us.
“The Basin is definitely long gone,” he rubbed his jaw. “The illusion fell apart the second I touched it, the whole thing collapsing around itself. No sign that the fortress or the wards were breached. No idea how they got it off the island and through the gate. The thing just… vanished, and nobody even noticed.”
“How the fuck is that possible?” I snapped, pacing the length of the garden. Sure, this was a plusher version of my stone cell, but I was still trapped inside four fucking walls with no way out.
“It’s not,” Nico shot back. “There isn’t a single hole in our security. I double and triple-checked. None of this makes sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Gabriel said quietly from the corner. “I got your message. Came as soon as I could get away. It appears we’ve all misjudged Emilia.”
