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“Who are you?” Arden demanded.
The prisoner didn’t answer.
“Answer her question,” I hissed.
His cheeks flushed, more out of anger than anything else.
“Has he spoken at all since you put him in there?” Lex asked an enforcer. The enforcer shook his head.
“So, we’ll pull it out of you.” I held my hand up to the spell barrier keeping the prisoner inside, making it fall. The prisoner shrank back, but I grabbed him by the collar. “You really think we have time to convince you to talk? To be diplomatic when you tried to kill our mate?”
“I’m Keane,” he said, as if doing so hurt him.
“Keane.” I let go of his collar and gave him a small bubble of space. “Want to explain yourself? Why were you trying to kill Arden, and who sent you?”
He shook his head, tears dampening his dark eyes. “I can’t tell you.”
Lex laughed, ruffling Keane’s hair with a gentle breeze. From the way Keane started breathing more heavily, Lex had thinned the air out in Keane’s immediate vicinity.
“You can’t, or you won’t?” Flint asked, stepping in.
“Both!” Keane tried to move, but his cuffs kept him grounded. “There’s a spell on me. It’s already eating away at me because I told you my name. It’ll kill me if I tell you who sent me. Please. You don’t have to torture me.”
“Then talk fast.” I created a ball of fire in my palm, just to see the fear flash across his eyes. “You either die because of that spell, or you die because we drown you or suffocate you or turn you to ash. Or even bury you alive—Arden could do that for us.”
Arden didn’t even flinch.
Keane’s entire body trembled, his mouth pressed into a line. I made the ball of fire drift closer to his head, as innocent-looking as a firefly. It circled around his head, inching closer and closer until it started to burn his hair.
“I’m from the Order,” he said in one breath. “Just a soldier. From the Laurent bloodline, though on the far edges of it.”
This little fuck was related to me, even at a distance? I was going to burn him off our family tree.
“I was told to kill Arden,” he continued. “I thought she was alone with that guy. I wouldn’t have attacked if I had known she wasn’t alone.”
I extinguished the fire to lull him into a false sense of security.
“You really thought we’d let her walk around unguarded?” Lex asked, raising an eyebrow. “For a secret organization, you aren’t very cunning.”
Keane’s nostrils flared in annoyance before his whole body jerked, almost as if he’d been punched.
“Talk faster, or we’ll make the last moments of your life a lot more painful. And I’ll enjoy it, too,” I said, creating the fire again and stretching the ball out, letting it hover just over his sleeves. Just enough to make him afraid to move.
His body trembled, the fire catching on the long sleeves of his shirt.
“We needed to do it. It was worth the shot,” Keane said, his voice shaky. “We can’t risk the Aridunns coming to power. Once we found out her true identity, we had to act.”
“How did you figure out who I was, anyway?” Arden asked, stepping forward.
“We keep tabs on the potential locations of the remaining Aridunns.” Keane coughed, specks of blood splattering on his pants. “We noticed a portal was activated near a possible location of the keeper and saw it was you. You were mates with one Royal. Well, two now. And you control the earth element, the only one of the four elements that isn’t represented. We heard rumors that you were searching for who the Aridunns were as well, so we kept an eye on you, too.”
Arden swallowed, crossing her arms over her chest. “Are you really trying to prevent this prophecy from happening because you’re intimidated by a female in power?”
Keane laughed, then coughed up more blood. “Intimidated? Never. We want the natural order of things.”
“Such a natural order, having ripped them out of the fabric of history,” Flint scoffed.
“My ancestors—all of your ancestors—did what needed to be done. Hundreds of lives’ worth of magic were sacrificed to remove the evidence, but look at us today. We’re prosperous. Why change what doesn’t need to be fixed?”
