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Brien rose and offered his hand to Prosper. The lieutenant took it and came to his feet. The cuts on Brien’s face and elbow had already healed over. Prosper’s wounds were healing, too, although not as fast.
My breath whooshed out.
Brien had won. He was officially the new primus.
Instead of releasing Brien’s hand, Prosper raised it high above both their heads. “Hail to Primus Brien Leclerc.”
Talon and Cain took up the cry, and so did most of the other enforcers.
But not all of them.
Talon and Cain went to Brien to congratulate him. I’d started after them when something sharp touched my lower spine. I stiffened.
“Don’t move,” Matthew said in a barely-there rasp, “and say nothing. Or I’ll carve your fucking liver out. Nod if you understand.”
I lowered my chin in a tiny nod.
“You might think you can figure a way out of this,” Matthew said in an undertone. “Especially now you’ve removed your grandmother from the equation. But Kuro worked for me. I know everything he knew.”
“Kuro’s gone?” I asked to give myself time to think.
From her position in the circle a few yards away, Clarisse’s eyes flicked at us, a tiny smile on her lips.
“Yes. I miscalculated there. I didn’t think the prince valued you so much.”
Something in his tone—anger mixed with regret—helped me connect the dots. My gaze jumped to the ashes that were all that remained of the dhampir soldier Brien had slain.
“Kuro was Eugene,” I breathed.
“My only spawn,” he confirmed tightly. “Which is why slitting your throat will be the easiest thing I’ve ever done. An eye for an eye, so to speak.”
My eyes widened.
Matthew’s spawn?
“You were the one in the shadows,” I said. “Not him.”
That had been Matthew slinking around the ballroom that day. Kuro—or Eugene—had a similar way of moving, and that’s what had confused me.
Matthew grunted, neither admitting nor denying it. “Your grandmother might be stashed away somewhere safe right now, but we’ll find her, sooner or later. The Ghost is a dead woman, Lainey Q—and so are you, unless you do exactly as I say.”
My bowels iced. He knew my last alias and that my grandmother had been known as the Ghost. Even if he hadn’t mentioned Kuro, it would’ve been proof that he was working with SI. How else would a Maritime enforcer know all that?
More dots connected. Kuro/Eugene must have been a double agent, pretending to work for SI when his real loyalty had been to his sire, Matthew.
“What do you want from me?”
“Here’s my offer, and you should know it will expire by sunrise. Stake Brien before then, and you’re free, and I’ll call off the hit on your grandmother.”
He’d put a hit out on my halmoni?
My whole body went taut with anger. “You SOB,” I said between my teeth, not caring who heard me.
But everyone’s focus was on Brien, who was surrounded by several enforcers, including Talon and Cain, accepting their congratulations.
Matthew wasn’t finished. “I’ll personally send you off the island before anyone knows, and let SI know you’re ready for another assignment. I will not let that‘boy prince’”—he hissed that last part, and it took me a second to realize he meant Brien—”spoil everything.”
I glanced at Brien again, and suddenly, I knew. It was the final dot, the event that had set off everything which followed.
