From beside Cole, Dax translated the gesture.
“Come on. We will work out what happened.”
The witch allowed Malakai to lead her away.
Chapter 39
As Malakai led the woman away, she looked back once.
Fear filled her eyes, accompanied by something that did not belong beside it. Her gaze searched Rhen’s face as though she recognized something she could not remember.
The expression twisted sharply inside him.
He despised witches. Every instinct demanded that he distrust her kind, and nothing about her impossible arrival suggested innocence.
Yet the look in her eyes had not been cunning or calculated.
She appeared to have been thrown into the center of a nightmare without knowing who had sent her.
The uncertainty made Rhen’s fury burn hotter.
When she disappeared into the back corridor, Dax moved toward him. His attention shifted between Cole and the passage through which Malakai had taken the stranger.
Rhen turned to him.
“Stand the strike team down.”
Dax’s attention snapped back to him.
“The assault?”
“Postponed. Those rogues weren’t feeding. They were waiting.” Rhen looked toward Cole, whose body continued to jerk beneath the storm trapped inside him. “Whether they knew our target or not, they pulled three of us into a prepared kill zone before midnight and nearly took one of us out. We do not walk the rest of the clan into whatever they arranged next.”
Dax studied him for a moment before nodding.
“I’ll maintain the lockdown and keep the inner guard around Norse.”
“Nobody leaves the stronghold until we know how much the enemy anticipated.”
“And X?” Dax asked.
Rhen’s expression hardened.
“If the heretic was telling the truth, X is no longer missing. He is compromised.”
Dax reached for his phone, transmitting the order before his attention shifted toward the passage through which Malakai had taken the stranger.
“And her?”
“I don’t know.”
The scent of her magic remained in the hall, clean, intoxicating, and vile.
“But I will find out.”
“And when you do?”
Rhen did not blink.
