Page 110 of Silvercloak

Detective Fevilan, a powerful Enchanter with a drink problem, had been disciplined earlier in the year for accidentally leaving a Bloodmoon case file in a tavern after a shift. Perhaps it was no accident, after all.

Another thought needled at Saffron, but she was afraid to look at it head-on.

Was there a darker reason Nissa was so willing to help Saffron? To find Nalezen Zares, to steal the tracing charm?

A darker reason Levan was willing to haul her from the brink of death?

A darker reason he’d so quickly executed her to begin with—to cover his tracks?

“I need to be able toportari,” Lyrian snarled at his son. “Laws be damned.”

“I’ve explained it to you a thousand times,” Levan replied, jaw gritted. “If you didn’t insist on using the weaverwick wand, I could have one withportariimported from Bellandry.”

“Mare-shit.” Lyrian clambered to his feet, woozy and stumbling, and jabbed his crooked finger down at Levan. “You knew there was a raid, and you let me get on that boat. Did youwantto see me killed? Is that it? Are you so desperate to be kingpin that you’d see me slain? Give me one good reason I shouldn’t execute you right—”

“The docks were crawling with Silvercloaks,” Levan said, his tone disaffected, but he couldn’t hide the sheen of sweat at this temples. He raked a hand through his dark waves, mussing them into twirled tufts. “If they heard me warn you, they’d know they had a rat in their midst.”

Lyrian swung a loose fist at his son, and Levan caught it blandly in his palm.

Combat training, indeed.

“How was I to know you’d start killing people left and right?” Levan dropped the fist. “If you’d just let them search the hold, let them find nothing, they’d have been forced to get off our backs. They wouldn’t have been able to search us again for at least a year, per customs law.”

“You—”

“They can arrest you now.” Levan stared coldly at his father. “Whenever they want. I don’t know if they will, because they likely want to stick an organized crime charge, not petty murder. But you can no longer leave the bounds of the wards. They won’t be able to breach them without a warrant from Dematus, and I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Saffron waited with bated breath for the inevitable next part.

“All of this is incidental,” Lyrian hissed, swinging on his heel. “Because the real question is how thehellsthey knew we were expecting lox tonight. And I’m not buying the routine search shit, because there were dozens of Filthcloaks waiting in the wings. That wasn’t a routine search. That was a planned takedown.” He glared at Saffron like she was a pail of animal filth. “I smell a rat.”

“You branded me with your own two hands,” Saffron retorted, although she felt a stomach-swoop of nerves as she invoked the brand once more. If there was any time the kingpin might abandon his belief in the spellwork, it was now. And yet what else could she do or say? “If I had anything to do with this, I’d have been struck dead on those docks.”

Lyrian sank to his haunches. Spittle gathered at the corners of his thin, cruel mouth. As he had on that first night, he jabbed the tip of his wand in the hollow beneath her chin, forcing her face upward in a way that made it difficult to swallow.

“Listen to me, Filthcloak. If this was you—and believe me, we will learn the truth—I’ll slaughter everything and everyone you’ve ever held dear.” He stood unevenly, but there was nothing weak in his vicious glare. “Levan, find Segal. Aviruna, take Killoran to the cells. Rough her up a little. Then she and I can have a little talk.”

THE CELL WAS A COLD, BARE SPACE MADE ENTIRELY OF CREAMSTONE. No chair or bed, no tap for drinking, just a hole in the ground for various ablutions.

Saff shivered as Rasso trotted in beside her. When Levan had tried to take him on the quest to find Segal, the beast had growled and bared his vicious teeth. Thanks topraegelos,he had bonded to Saffron, and Saffron could only be grateful for the ally—even if Levan was wounded by the betrayal.

Levan.At the thought of him, emotions stirred up like a forest floor in a gale. Emotions so contradictory and infuriating that she couldn’t separate them, couldn’t examine them individually. There was the way it felt to kiss him, and the way it felt to crouch over Nissa’s body knowing he’d killed her. The way it felt when he asked her to go to the arts festival with him, and the way it felt to watch him sever Nalezen Zares’s hand.

The way itfelt,all of it, when she was not used to feeling these things so deeply.

“Aren’t you going to rough me up a little?” Saffron asked Castian, her sardonic tone unfaltering even when her heart felt weak.

Castian ruffled Saff’s hair with a small flicker of wielded breeze. “I’m one of those freaks who believes in innocent until proven guilty. Don’t get me wrong—if it emerges that you did this, I’ll gladly obliterate you. But not before.”

“Very noble.”

Sarcasm, but Castian took it literally. “The only way you can survive in the Bloodmoons, emotionally.” Her skin was clammy, her movements twitchy, pained. She was going into withdrawal. “Retaining some kind of moral code, no matter how dark things get. If you survive this, I suggest you do the same.”

Saff rolled her eyes, absently petting Rasso’s head. “It’s hard toretain a moral codewhen the kingpin is threatening to brutally murder your family.”

“Believe me, I know.” There was a hollow, haunted look to her star-lined eyes. “But the kingpin is not always here. What you do in his absence matters.”

Saff twirled her wand between her fingers. “Speaking of which, aren’t you going to confiscate this?”

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