Page 105 of House of Crimson Cloak and Silver Teeth

“You’ll get there,” I tell her quietly. “The Southern Isles. Warm sand, no one knowing your name. You’ll make it.”

“Promise?” Her voice is small.

“I promise.”

Shade just takes another bite of pastry as she stares at me and Kitty. “That does look comfortable. Should I try sitting on someone?”

Kitty laughs, sliding off my lap. “Shade’s protecting the Queen of Aelfheim, Wolf’s playing bodyguard to Aelfheim’s golden boy, and I just bought myself thirty days of freedom. Look at us. Moving up in the world.”

“We’re Grimsbane, Kitty. The lowest of the lows. There’s no moving up from where we are.”

“Speak for yourself. I clean up very nice.” She stretches like her namesake. “Though I admit, this is strange. All three of us in Aelfheim at the same time, all on high-profile contracts.”

It is strange. Too strange to be coincidence.

Unless someone arranged it.

Kitty moves to the window and perches on the sill, silhouetted against moonlight. Shade follows, settling on the opposite side. They look like matching bookends, both comfortable in high places.

I drag my chair over, turn it around and straddle it backwards. My arms fold across the back and I rest my chin on my forearms, positioning myself so I can watch them both.

Especially Shade.

Worry gnaws at my gut.

There are rumors circulating through the guild. Whispers that the Judges don’t want Shade reaching his hundredth mission. They don’t want him freeing his mother from the crypts. The Nightingale knows too much. She has too many secrets about the guild’s inner workings. Her son gaining that kind of leverage is unacceptable.

I’ve been watching his assignments get progressively harder. Missions that should go to teams, not solo operators. Targets in fortified locations with impossible odds. Each one designed to push him closer to failure.

Or death.

This current contract is the worst yet. Protecting the Wiolant queen, living in the palace surrounded by potential enemies, guarding the family that destroyed his mother.

It’s a perfect trap.

If Shade fails, he goes to the crypts. If he succeeds, they’ll just add more requirements before he can free his mother. And if he does something stupid like try to kill a Wiolant, the guild has legal justification to execute him for contract violation.

They’ve boxed him in completely.

I study his face in the moonlight, searching for any sign of what he’s thinking. But Shade’s expression reveals nothing. Those pale eyes could be contemplating the weather or planning murder and I’d never know the difference.

That’s what terrifies me most.

“Does Rainer know you’re related to him?” Kitty asks the question in my head bluntly to Shade.

He’s quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he says, considering. “If Rainer does know he doesn’t seem to care. He drinks, talks and I listen. It seems to help him.”

He pauses, then adds, almost like it’s an afterthought. “But he tells me many things he probably shouldn’t.”

That makes something cold settle in my gut.

Shade’s face reveals absolutely nothing. Those pale eyes reflect moonlight but give away no thoughts, no plans, no intentions whatsoever. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely content with this assignment or if he’s lying to us, biding his time for the perfect moment to put a knife in a Wiolant.

It would fail his mission spectacularly and send him straight to the crypts beside his mother.

But Shade has never been rational about the Wiolants.