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She plucked a loch cigarette from a side table, fumbling for a match in the darkness. It would have been easier to ask Hadrian to use his magic, but she didn’t dare wake him. She found the small box and struck it. The fire burned bright and hot before igniting the paper wrapper.
Sweet relief came to her instantly at the taste of the illicit drug. Her chronic illness had been getting … worse. The debilitating pain hitting more and more often.
It didn’t help that Dozan Rook was gone. And with him his cadre of exceptional magic users. Amond, a loch user himself, had been able to heal her pain more than anyone else ever had when she got bad like this. Now, she just had the cigarettes. The dwindling quantity cigarettes at that.
She didn’t know what she’d do exactly if it ran out of loch.
Clover left the cigarette dangling from her lips as she shuffled out of bed. She tugged on a black silk romper that Darby wore around the house. Clover was a half-foot taller than her, so her ass hung out the bottom. But she didn’t care around the workshop.
Thea had long gone home. The tinkers were silent. She struck another match and lit a lantern to stare down at the row of shiny and metallic amulets.
Despite her misgivings, Thea had convinced her to ramp up their production. Ramp up … everything. Clover had agreed because what else could she do? The streets were empty. The people terrified of the Red Masks’ next move. A curfew had been implemented. Soldiers patrolled, beating half-Fae and humans alike for no reason. Work was harder to find since there was an explicit list of employment allowed for half-breeds and lesser folk. People were disappearing with no explanation. And there was no one to go up against them. Not with their dragons and magic and the little orbs they all carried around with them to keep others in place.
Clover shuddered. She put the cigarette out in a tray on the table.
No, her work was here. Buried in this shop, where no one knew that the RFA movement was still in existence. Where the Red Masks couldn’t reach them. And she could tinker, just as her father had.
The necklace around her neck was cold in its place. She hated every moment that she took it off to give to the masons who were trying to replicate it. Not that anyone had gotten it to do a damn thing.
Only Clover.
Beyond that jump they’d made in the tournament, she’d just gotten it to light up, but not do anything.
She pulled the necklace off from around her neck and felt the glow begin at once. It was like the sound of her mother’s singing and the touch of her father’s hand on her cheek and the happiness of a home before it was shattered, all wrapped up into one perfect light. A memory that she scarcely remembered having.
A smile came to her face.
She had been happy once.
A child with a mother and father and a life.
The Red Masks had taken that from her for this amulet. And here she was, doing the work all over again. Trying to have a fighting chance against the bastards when their time came to fight back.
“Neat trick,” a voice said from the opposite door.
Clover jerked up at the sound. Not Hadrian. Not Darby. No one else was here.
But she recognized the girl from her nightmares.
She put the beautiful, pale face and white-blonde hair to a name that made her shiver with disgust and terror. “Isa.”
“Ah, you’ve heard of me,” the assassin said, leaning against the doorframe.
“What are you doing here?” Clover demanded.
“Following up on a lead.” She gestured to Clover. “And look where it led me.”
Clover gritted her teeth. Isa had magic. She was a deadly assassin. She’d almost killed Kerrigan. And she was the Father’s right hand. There was no world in which she came out ahead of this. Not as a human with nothing but an amulet that didn’t work. Not when her two loves were in a room behind her, so jumping away, if she could even get it to work, was out of the question. She’d die before leaving them behind.
“How did you find us?”
“You think you’re so hidden?”
“Yes,” she ground out.
Isa shrugged, unconcerned. “Well, you’re not great at it. Not you. You didn’t leave. Smart. But others come and go. Workers and such.” Her eyes flicked to the amulets on the table. “Interesting.”
Clover swallowed. “There are others here. They’ll stop you.”
Isa laughed softly. “Oh, dear, you and I both know exactly who is here right now. No one is coming to your rescue. Not unless you’re harboring a particularly wanted criminal with curly red hair and freckles.”
Of course, it always came back to Kerrigan.
She wasn’t dead. Her heart soared with the news. If they were still looking for her, sending people out for her, then she was alive. Clover had known in some way that she couldn’t be dead, or her head would have been on a pike in front of the mountain, just like Helly’s. But she hadn’t known either. No word for months, and she didn’t know what to make of it. This was the first piece of hope she’d had … even if it came at the hands of an assassin.
