Page 171 of A Vow of Embers

He looked up at me. “All clear.”

I handed him the candle and then climbed down the ladder. Someone had dug deep and created a huge room that was filled to the brim with gold and salt. Tears came to my eyes as I thought of what had been taken from my people, the way they were suffering because of one person’s greed and ambition.

“When I am king, I will restore all of this.” His voice had turned rough and deep. “Everything that was illegally taken from Locris will be returned.”

Just like Io had said. Nodding, I turned to face him, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand. “I appreciate that. Do you have somewhere we can take this now? So that she won’t find it?”

He let out a sigh. “I could try but my fear is that she’ll use her resources and locate it. Steal it back and leave us in the same position. If I try to send a ship to Locris with it, she could just send other ships to capture it. Her spy network is extensive.”

“We can’t risk that happening. Quynh told me that Erisa plans to bribe the archons to get their vote. We have to remove her ability to do so.”

He nodded, as if this weren’t new information. Thrax had probably told him. I wondered how many times things like this had happened, where he knew details that I was completely unaware of.

Like the fact that Thrax and Quynh were in love. How could Thrax claim to love her and involve her in this kind of mission when she was so untrained?

I shook my head. I had to stop myself from getting sidetracked and to stop blaming Thrax for things that were not his fault. I needed to focus on what was happening right now and figure out a solution.

We had to put the money beyond Erisa’s reach. And we were going to need a lot of hands to quickly and quietly move it. People who weren’t being bribed by his stepmother. I needed someone I knew I could trust.

“I have an idea of what we can do,” I said.

He nodded. “You should choose what happens to it. It’s your people who have paid the price.”

And it would be his people who would benefit from it.

“When I held that blade to your throat ... can you take me back to that neighborhood?” I asked.

He didn’t question what my plan was and just said, “Yes. Let’s go.”

As if he trusted me.

The thought made me slightly uncomfortable. Like he might be setting up another trap for me to fall into.

But I decided I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

We climbed out of the underground room and closed the trapdoor in the floor, putting the rug back in place. He opened the front door slightly, checking the street to make sure it was clear. He whistled once, sharply, and it was quickly returned.

“It’s safe,” he said.

He went out into the street and I followed close behind him. It didn’t take us long to get to where I wanted to go. When we entered the neighborhood, we walked past the place where I’d pushed him into the wall. We went past the point where I had thought I’d lost my sister, and then I came to a stop.

“The hetaera house again? Is there something I should know, wife?” he asked in a teasing tone.

I knocked on the door and it was all so eerily similar to the last time I’d been here, except Xander wasn’t bleeding from his throat. A young hetaera opened the door and I requested to speak to Mahtab, giving her my name. She let us in and I stayed close to him. Thankfully, he didn’t flirt with the waiting hetaerae, as he had last time.

The girl who had opened the door for us stood at the top of the stairs and beckoned for us to come up.

When we reached her, she said, “We must hurry. Mahtab doesn’t want you to be seen. Lykaon is here.”

My older sister’s betrothed? I heard a woman yelping in pain and then a sound like a loud slap. I started toward the room but the hetaera stopped me.

“You can’t go in there. The woman in that room chose this. Mahtab charges him an outrageous fee to discourage him, but there are some here who agree to spend the night with him because they will earn so much. They know what he is and what he will do, but they’re willing.”

I wanted so badly to go in there and end him. Maybe after tonight no hetaera house in the city would welcome him, as they would no longer need his coin.

“He is supposed to marry my sister,” I remarked.

“My deepest apologies,” the girl said to me.

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