Page 153 of The Golden Rose Of Valenul

With a shake of her head, Emillie yanked at her arm. Ariadne turned back with a frown and stopped short at the look of panic on her sister’s face.

The rush of excitement soured into dread. “What happened?”

“After the dance,” Emillie whispered, drawing her in close with the quiet tone, “I overheard the General speaking with Captain Jensen.”

Nothing new, though Ariadne’s pulse began to quicken. She looked around the room for a second time. Loren had taken to the dance floor again, but she could not see Nikolai anywhere. “What does this have to do with Madan?”

“I think they have him.”

She was going to be sick. For two weeks, he had been missing. Two weeks in which she had watched Azriel slowly spiral out of control until he finally broke. His brother—the last of his family—had been taken, and for what? What did they have planned?

“What did they say, Em?” Ariadne croaked, gaze landing on Azriel, who once again seemed to sense her and look up. She wiped her face of any expression and turned back to her sister. “Why do you think this?”

Emillie shook her head, face paling more. “The General told the Captain to make sure…to make sure that that bastard’s cousin keeps quiet. I have never heard him speak of anyone else but Azriel in such a manner.”

“Gods.”

“He told the Captain to check the rotations,” Emillie continued, and now her eyes shimmered with tears. “And that asking questions about it will get him killed.”

Ariadne could hardly think straight. Keep him quiet. Check the rotations. Get him killed. None of it made sense except for exactly what Emillie suggested: Loren had abducted Madan for his own purposes. What they could be was bad enough to not even tell his most trusted officer.

“Where do you think he is?” Emillie’s voice sounded so far away.

Rotations. The guard rotations. Ariadne remembered the night she had waited by the pond at the Harlow Estate for Azriel to pass. He had been checking on the guard rotations.

“Stay here.” Ariadne squeezed her sister’s hand and scanned the room again, careful not to catch Azriel’s eye. “Tell no one else what you heard.”

Emillie nodded, then froze as Ariadne pulled away. “No—wait. Wait…Ari, what are you doing?”

“Please, Em.” Ariadne gave her what she hoped was a convincing smile. “I will be right back.”

Before her sister could argue further, she slipped away to join the tail end of a small group of debutantes and pulled an earring from her lobe. Emillie could not come with her. Not this time. A single vampire would be more than enough for a bit of reconnaissance. She could not approach Loren or anyone else without foolproof evidence of his misdeeds.

Ariadne abandoned the young Caersan women when they passed by the foyer. She smiled at the butler, claimed to have lost an earring in her carriage, and ignored his protests to find it for her as she exited the front door on her own.

No one walked the front lawns but the coachmen and servants looking for a bit of fresh air. Looking over her shoulder, no one followed. A relief that neither Emillie nor Azriel demanded to know what she was doing. If she was going to get any confession out of Loren, she needed to see for herself what he had done.

Each step farther from the manor made Ariadne’s hands shake a little more. The long drive, lit by hanging lanterns, seemed to stretch on forever into the darkness. Bushes lined the narrow gravel roadway. If she focused too long on one, her mind played tricks on her.

Red eyes glowed out from the shadows.

But at the perimeter of the grounds, the guards still roamed in pairs, talking and laughing as though there was no threat to any of them. Fools.

The guard house near the front gates lit up like a beacon. Though guards were stationed at the top, their focus remained outward, and their chatter just as jovial as the others. No need to keep eyes inside the place they were protecting. Again, a mistake.

Ariadne kept to the shadows and crept toward the guard house door, pausing at a window to look inside. No one. Not yet, anyway.

It was not long before an inner door opened, and Nikolai Jensen stepped through. She sucked in a sharp breath of alarm before hiding around a corner. The Captain closed the outer door with a bang.

“This is not a game, gents,” he called to the guards at the top of the gate towers. “Vigilance requires concentration.”

“Yes, Captain,” another called back, and the laughter evaporated.

Nikolai’s footsteps faded. Ariadne counted back from ten in her head in a desperate, futile attempt to calm her nerves. Had the method ever truly worked? She could not think of a time it centered her completely.

It would have to be enough.

Checking around the corner again for any lingering guards, Ariadne took another deep breath and eased her way to the guard house door. It opened and shut without a sound. Praying to the gods her luck kept up, she slunk past the winding stairs that went up to the rooms and roof and to the door Nikolai had come out of.

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