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It appeared that her father’s security personnel had ordered a thorough search of the auction house. It didn’t take them long to find the body, some man found in a ground-floor closet, strangled, his clothes stolen. His wallet had been tossed onto his naked chest as though the killer thought himself above petty theft.
It made the death seem worse somehow, a man killed only for his clothes.
A DNA stick had established the lowborn’s identity: some proxy for a foreign bidder.
Lila took out her palm and nearly typed Tristan a message, but she had no idea what to say. She felt as if she’d just relived Reaper’s death all over again.
Except this time she had held the gun, rather than Tristan.
Her palm vibrated before she could put it back in her clutch. She opened it immediately, expecting little more than a message from the Randolph security office.
Good evening, Prolix. I trust you’ve had a few days’ rest? Interesting stuff on the news lately. Fallen highborn are so very entertaining, don’t you think?
Lila swallowed. Reaper had been the only one who knew about her fake Prolix account, and he was dead. She’d suspected that he had a partner, though, for Reaper’s tech had been wiped the day he died, including all evidence of his misdeeds.
Hers too. He’d written an article about her activities in BullNet and hosted it on his private server. The only saving grace was that it had been unconnected to any other webpage.
Lila could only assume it had been a message to his partner, a way of passing information back and forth without the pair meeting. If that were true, then his partner had finally gotten bored. If he grew bored enough to release the article, then she’d be arrested and hanged for treason. She’d only dodge the noose if her father and Chief Shaw admitted the truth. They’d been the ones who’d given her permission to infiltrate BullNet and find Reaper in the first place.
Searching for Reaper had put Lila on his radar.
The public wouldn’t care about any of that, though. They’d only see the scandal. They’d only hear that a highborn heir had been given unfettered access to BullNet and all the sensitive government data inside. They’d demand arrests. They’d likely demand executions.
Two lives traded for hers.
If she didn’t join them, she’d lose her career, her reputation, her family, and her home, for her mother would exile Lila from the family when the public turned against them.
It was what any matron would do.
Lila tried to put it all out of her mind. She quickly configured her snoop programs to do a cursory search of the sender’s ID, cross-referenced against a master list of all official logins.
She found no hits.
The ID was a fake.
Sitting down on a couch, Lila turned her back on the mirror, glad no one had barged into the bathroom yet. She’d been too busy with Oskar and Tristan all week to plug the last hole in her father’s job. This was the price. Some asshole now taunted her from afar.
Rubbing her jaw, she stood up, knowing she couldn’t stay locked away in the bathroom forever. She put on her gloves, jammed her earpiece into her clutch, and finger-combed her curls. She was a Randolph heir as well as the chief of her mother’s militia. Chiefs and Randolphs and heirs didn’t hide, and they certainly didn’t wallow.
As she padded downstairs, her father peeked his head around the ballroom door. His security watched her every step, obviously unhappy that the prime minister still insisted on remaining in the auction house.
“I was worried,” he said. “You were gone for quite a while.”
“I had to fix my makeup.”
“That man hurt you. I’m calling Dr. Booth to—”
“Father, I’m fine. I just needed a few moments to collect myself.”
Her father grabbed her chin, carefully avoiding her bruise. “I’m proud of you, Lila. You showed everyone today why you’re chief. You showed everyone what the Lemaires and Randolphs are made of.”
“You also managed to make the LeBeau militia look like incompetent fools,” her mother added. The chairwoman hadn’t even bothered to modulate her tone, causing a few LeBeau militia nearby to frown. “Come inside. People are starting to talk.”
“We can’t have that.” Lila sighed.
“Not when a rumor has spread that someone shot you again. It’s getting tedious.”
Lemaire took her arm and escorted her into the ballroom. Her mother stood on the other side, obviously intent on meeting the crowd as a united family. Half the crowd quieted when they entered. The other half trailed off in broken conversation. Even the LeBeau and Bullstow militias lowered their palms, enjoying the welcome break from recording witness statements.
