“Happy now?” I snarked as I pressedSendand showed Finn the phone as proof.
“Yes. This truly brings me the greatest joy in the world, darling,” he mocked in my direction. “Having to break up a fight and text a potential spy to see if we’ve been deceived our entire lives. You’re right, happy just about sums it up entirely.”
PART TWO
“‘When we come into the land, you must leave this scarlet rope hanging from the window.’”
Joshua 2:9
23
CALLUM
SCOUTING DAY 13 (6 days since last contact with Guild)
Blood splattered across my boots,and I shook my head in annoyance. The stars-damned guards had attempted to trail us for the past four blocks, thinking that we hadn’t picked up on our tail. It was my fault we were in this situation.
I knew it. Axel knew it.
And he sure as fuck wasn’t going to let me forget it anytime soon.
We’d gotten all the information we needed for Elion to move to the next phase of this mission. We’d sent the data files late last night after scouring the top levels of the Solis Court one last time. We had every piece of evidence we needed to end Lucanus’s reign of terror over the Solis Quarter.
It had been my idea to return to the temples one final time. And it had been my idea to follow Raelyna’s sister into the temples when Lucanus’s guards had collected her on the streets outside the temple district, which is how we’d discovered that Lucanus was on our trail.
I should never have danced with her. It had been too exposed . . . too out in the open. There had been far too many surveillance drones around. And yet, my mind flashed back to that night. To the feel of her in my arms as we danced across the room. To howrightit had felt in that moment.
Never in the centuries that I’d been running missions as the head of the elite Shade for the Aurelian Guild had Ieverlet a female distract me during a mission—a scouting mission, nonetheless. Any initiate could run a scouting mission . . . I’d been doing these since Elion had first picked me up off the streets of Aurum. And yet?—
And yet, one choice. One decision to dance with the stars-damned female whose eyes sparkled like starlight, and our cover had been compromised. A surveillance drone of all things had gotten too close and flagged us in the systems as intruders. And now, not only had we been discovered, but they had stars-damned footage of us.
Centuries of work building my cover. All for it to be blown by one stars-damned dance.
We needed to leave the Quarter. Elion had already sent the demand for us to return. Everything had been in motion—plans set into place.
And yet, I’d fucked it up.
Worse yet, I knew without a shadow of doubt that I’d do it again, just to have her in my arms. A low growl of frustration at the mess I’d found myself in slipped from my lips.
“A little help here, Blackwood.” Axel’s disgruntled command snapped me back to attention, just in time to see another guard rushing toward me. I ducked to the left, spinning as I rounded a kick to his side that had the guard grunting and clutching at his ribs.
With jerky motions, the male grabbed a blade from his waist. His wings flared wide on either side of him, and he charged through the air toward me.
Shit.
My gaze darted around us in a flash. Satisfied, I tugged on the muscles on my back, my own wings emerging in a hue of shimmering golden feathers. My wings expanded wide, nearly stretching the distance of the alleyway we stood in as power flooded my body.
Onyx wings flapped toward me as the guard roared his rage.
I stood, wings outstretched, fists raised as I watched the moment that the guard’s eyes widened in shock. Realization flashed through him, then terror, as he realized who he was facing and perhaps that he’d just signed his life away.
The Shade of the Aurelian Guild.
My wings flapped instantaneously, lifting me above him as he charged toward me. He threw his blade before drawing another, but I was quicker, my wings pushing me high above the weapon as I flipped through the air before landing behind him, pulling two knives of my own.
In a rapid procession, I launched the blades through the air, the tips embedding in his wings on either side as they pinned him against the wall, and I stalked forward.
The guard whimpered as he tried to remove the blades to no avail, before I reached him.
