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But then he saw her.Mether. And he knew at once they’d never be friends.
“Those twin girls who escaped three weeks ago?”
Harrow’s voice dragged him back to the table in time to see her creamy ale slosh over the side of her glass as she set it down. When the foam dribbled over her fingers, she licked it off.
“The Crimson Moth stole the pair the night you were supposed to transfer them to the palace prison. Remember?”
How could Gideon forget? They were exactly his sister’s age when she died. Skinny little things. He could picture them huddled behind the bars of the cell he’d locked them in: wide-eyed and trembling as they clung to each other. “I remember.”
He also remembered when they disappeared from that same cell one night later. A casting signature had appeared over the cot where they’d slept. Gideon could recall the mark perfectly in his mind’s eye: a delicate, blood-red moth fluttering in the air. He’d been so angry, he’d wanted to grab the thing and squeeze it. But it was only a signature—the mark left behind after a witch cast a spell, like an artist signing their name to a painting.
The moth faded less than an hour later.
Harrow sipped daintily at her beer. “A dockworker found signatures aboard a cargo ship three days ago, after it docked in Harbor Grace. The two witches must have illusioned themselves to look like cargo.”
And when the illusion faded, the signatures would have remained behind.
Harbor Grace was a busy port on the mainland. Everythingthis island didn’t make, grow, or mine was shipped over via that port.
Gideon frowned. “Were they recaptured?”
Harrow shook her head. “No. But …” She glanced around and leaned in toward him. He could smell the ale on her breath. “The cargo ship belongs to Rune Winters.”
What?
The alehouse spun around them. Gideon flattened his hands on the beer-sticky table to steady himself.
That can’t be right.
“Are you certain?”
Harrow leaned back, taking another sip. “My contact saw the signatures himself, in her ship’s cargo hold.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s involved,” said Gideon, thinking it through. “Just because Rune owns the ships doesn’t mean she knows everything that goes on with them. It could easily be one of the crew stowing witches away without her knowledge.”
“But it makes her a suspect,” Harrow pointed out. “And the best lead you’ve had in a long time.”
For months now, Gideon had suspected the Crimson Moth was someone who traveled in elite circles. Someone with access to the most exclusive balls and private dinner parties. Someone who regularly rubbed shoulders with the powerful and well connected.
Could that someone be Rune Winters?
Gideon remembered Rune at the opera, her conversation growing more and more irritating the longer she kept talking.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “There’s not an intelligent thought in that girl’s head.”
And the Moth was intelligent. To go toe-to-toe with Gideon, tooutwithim, she had to be. And if the mutilated bodies they kept finding across the city were her victims, she was also ruthless. Disturbed.
Evil.
It was difficult to reconcile those things with the ridiculous girl in the opera box.
If he needed more proof of Rune’s innocence, all Gideon had to do was go back two years. He’d been at the Winters’ estate when the Blood Guard arrested Kestrel Winters in her home. His orders? To watch Kestrel’s adopted granddaughter, Rune, while the other soldiers seized the witch from her chambers.
Gideon hadn’t taken his eyes off the girl—not an arduous task, to be sure. Rune was just as beautiful then. Like those marble sculptures adorning the lavish mansions of the aristocracy, existing solely to impress the guests. When a Blood Guard officer smashed his pistol into Kestrel’s face, her granddaughter hadn’t even flinched. Only watched, coldly and calmly, as they stripped the old woman down, found her scars, and dragged her off to be executed.
Rune had shown no hint of remorse.
If Rune had been Kestrel’s blood relative, Gideon might consider her more carefully. But the girl’s birth parents had been nothing more than fancy merchant folk. There were no witches in her bloodline—Gideon had checked—making it impossible that she was a witch.
