The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(89)

Laila rocked back on her heels, then winced sharply. Something had jabbed into the back of her neck. She reached up with one hand—and felt flesh. The cold, clammy skin of someone’s wrist. And beneath that wrist, a blade.

Laila went still. She snatched her hand away, her back rigid as a board. In a moment, she would have to turn. Slowly, she moved her head. As she did, she slipped one hand into her satchel. It was still open, now fallen across her lap. Her fingers closed around a Night Bite.

“Please,” said a shaking voice behind her. The voice of the person who held a knife to her. “Please.”

Something snapped inside her. She knew every contour of that voice. How it dipped low in a laugh. Rose high in excitement. She looked behind her: Tristan.

Tears streamed down his face. But even as he wept, he did not lose his grip on the knife that he held to her throat.

“Please,” he begged, and he did not sound like himself but like a boy haunted and hunted. “Please, you don’t understand.”





26





SéVERIN


Fifteen minutes before midnight

Séverin opened his eyes.

He was kneeling. He knew that much. His knees ached. The muscles of his neck throbbed. When he looked down, he noticed his hands were bound together. As if in prayer. His mouth tasted sour. A hint of clove burned on his tongue.

“Do you know where you are, Monsieur Montagnet-Alarie?”

Séverin glanced up. Roux-Joubert stared down at him. Séverin shifted from one knee to the next, feeling the heavy weight at the bottom hem of his left pant leg. Before he’d stepped foot into the catacombs, he’d placed a time-weighted bag full of diatomaceous earth and sulfur in the lining. A trail, he’d hoped, but now he wasn’t sure the others would find it in time.

Séverin bit his lip, hoping the pain would jog his memories. He remembered entering the catacombs. He remembered seeing the strange grooves carved along the floor of the stage. He pushed himself, new images rising to the surface of his thoughts. Laila. Laila screaming at him, reaching for him just as he was reaching for the helmet that had been stuck tight to Tristan’s head.

“He’s fine, my boy,” said Roux-Joubert, as if he could read his thoughts.

Séverin bit back a growl.

Roux-Joubert had laid a trap for them. And he had placed irresistible bait for Séverin: Tristan.

Séverin looked up. The scarlet curtains, once pulled close, had been flung back. The Tezcat door sprawled before him, towering like a great beast of polished obsidian. Through the Tezcat, he could see the Forging exhibition. Objects hovering above black podiums. The stingy light of sulfur lamps draping the scene in shadows. But that was not all that he could see. Standing just on the other side of the Tezcat, feet planted firmly in the Forging exhibition, their hands shoved into pockets and smug grins on their faces were Enrique and Hypnos. Séverin looked away from them, his heart beating fast in his rib cage. His gaze swept the stage. Only two people stood there. Roux-Joubert, dressed in a black suit, his honeybee pin prominent and polished on his lapel. Behind him, a stout man with a strange bowler hat, the brim of it gleaming as if … as if it were a blade.

Séverin tried to twist his neck to look behind him, but he couldn’t. Laila and Tristan were gone.

“Where are they?” he croaked.

“They’re waiting to bear witness,” said Roux-Joubert.

He took a step toward Séverin, then stopped. He reached for a handkerchief in his pocket, coughing violently. Even now, his head still swimming with the remnants of nightmares, Séverin could see the other man was not well. The handkerchief was blood-splattered. Séverin opened his mouth to speak when the man in the blade-brim hat held out an object from behind his back: the helmet.

Blue sparks traveled up the glass exterior, and Séverin shuddered. That thing was the last object he had touched before collapsing. He remembered how it had invaded his thoughts. Images darting through his mind, grabbing his soul in a tight fist—his mother screaming at him: Run! Run, my love! Run! Tristan crouched in a rose-bush. The cuts of thorns crosshatching his skin. Golden-skinned pheasant on a dish. Laila’s hand falling limp to the floor. Ortolan bones cutting the inside of his mouth.

Nightmares. All of them.

“The Phobus Helmet needs no introduction to you,” said Roux-Joubert. “Though you do seem surprised to see it. It was banned about ten years ago by the Order of Babel. Quite a pity, considering it produces excellent results. No one motivates you better than yourself. And who knows you better than, well, you?”

Séverin remembered Tristan’s face when he pulled back the helmet. The bruises beneath his eyes. As if he hadn’t slept in days.

“It’s astounding what one might reveal in their worst nightmares,” said Roux-Joubert.

The man in the blade-brim hat pulled up a chair for him, and he sat, crossing his ankles and smoothing the front of his jacket as if they were sitting down for tea.

“Including an acquisition of a Fallen House bone clock.”

Séverin’s gaze hardened.

“Oh, don’t worry, my boy. It’s still particularly impressive that you were able to figure it out. Frankly, I wasn’t sure you would, but I left the trap there just in case.”

Séverin fought against the ropes binding his wrist, but they didn’t budge.