Page 214 of The Mercy of Dawn

Just like now, when she decided to give her damn hands a break and take a walk back to the palace proper for a change of scenery.

Maybe to be a little nosey too.

A hand-holding and back-rubbing dinner—as Mikael less than enthusiastically called it—had been underway for a few hours now. The reluctant prince was filling in for his stable, but still wholly unwell, older brother.

Cyril got the impression that these events were not something Mikael spent much—or any—time at, and probably for good reason. Prickly, Runa had referred to him as once, and Cyril couldn’t agree more.

Truthfully, she was relieved that this was the type of event she didn’t receive an invitation to. Running the barracks left her nearly dead on her feet and her patience had run remarkably thin with, well…idiots. A wandering hand from a certain crooked-nose councilor may have spelled disaster.

But the dinner meant the barracks were quiet.

Busy still, with bodies coming and going, but not with the sort of people who would stay and chat, or tease her and help pass the time.

She blamed Mikael for getting nothing but polite hello’s and thank you’s as the mostly green guards came and went with their supplies. The poor trainees were terrified of him and the commander persona he wore when he barked orders at them. Apparently, that made her guilty by association.

It was also his fault, she decided, that any of the King's Guard worth their merit—namely, the ones that liked to come and pass the time with her—were assigned out on discreet overtime to scour the city for leads, or stuck working security detail for the dinner.

A show of solidarity and reassurance, it was supposed to be, that required the best of their best to be on display. But that didn’t stop Kaia, Ari, and Gunner from groveling about it when she talked to them the day before.

They played their part well though, all cleaned up in their dark blue and black dress uniforms, stationed along the hall outside the ballroom’s main doors.

Kaia spotted Cyril first as she came down the hall to the state ballroom.

The pained smile and sagging shoulders she greeted Cyril with spoke to how thrilling their assignment was.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Kaia chuckled as she ran a hand through the shaggy-cut, white hair on the top of her head. Her other hand stayed firmly planted on the hilt of her sword, sheathed at her hip.

Cyril learned that was the easiest way to tell the ascended and non-ascended guards a part—the size of the weapons they carried.

Ari and Gunner—who waved at Cyril from their posts down the hall—usually carried a variety of knives with them, but never anything larger than a short sword. They were both ascended, and for many years at that. Ari being a wind-aspected shifter, and Gunner? A fire wielder, much to Cyril’s dismay.

But Kaia and Cyril were cut from the same cloth of fucking nothing.

So Kaia leaned towards big and beefy blades, as she put it, to give herself some peace of mind. Many of the other guards held similar beliefs.

Cyril offered Kaia a smile before she let her attention drift to the double doors beside her. Just the faintest droning rumble of masculine chatter drifted through the ornate wooden panels—it sounded fucking boring.

“Has he come up for air yet?” she asked.

Kaia’s hazel eyes followed hers, and she shook her head.

“Not yet, the poor bastard. And talk about piss poor timing, with the shit from the city.”

“What shit from the city?” Cyril blinked.

Not that they’d talked much that morning when Cyril was half-conscious in bed and Mikael less than gracefully stumbled about the room in the dark trying to get ready. She barely had both eyes open when she’d helped with the finishing touches of his finery, and then the prince was gone.

“Did he not tell you what we found out this afternoon?”

“No…I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

“Oh, well then,” Kaia scoffed and leaned back against a pillar of moonstone running between the wallpapered panels of the hall, her arms crossed in front of her. “You know how Byron, Nik, and Silas headed out last night to go check out some of those warehouses, right?”

That much, Cyril knew. She just didn’t know every single what and why of the operation, because she’d fallen asleep while Mikael was explaining it all. It had something to do with a bit of information they gleaned from Astor, from his “treatments” in the city. Still nothing about Reyna’s whereabouts, but it was something.

“Yeah, Mika mentioned that.” Cyril tipped her head. Kaia made it seem like… Her eyes widened. “Did they find something?”

The brief flicker of hope that swelled up in her banked and died as soon as Kaia shook her head.