Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(35)

His sister pulled back from the paper, from him, as if struck. And then she turned on her heel and swept out.

Soro walked in just as Ilsa rushed past. The two nearly collided, but Ilsa had a way of parting the world around her, and the other Sunai leaped gracefully out of her path. A second later, Ilsa’s door closed, a single punctuating note—the loudest sound she’d made in months—and August let out a low, hard breath.

Soro considered him. Their silver hair was swept forward, falling into gray eyes, but August could still tell they were raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t ask,” he said.

Soro shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

August leaned back, shoulders resting against the shelves.

“You are tense,” they said.

He closed his eyes and muttered, “I’m tired.”

Another beat of silence. “I heard . . . about the ambush.”

But Soro had never been one to stand around, had certainly never gone searching for small talk. He dragged his eyes open. “What do you want?”

Soro straightened, visibly relieved by the end of such an unpleasant task. “Want has nothing to do with it,” they said, already turning toward the door. “There’s something you need to see.”

August circled the bodies, trying to understand what he was looking at. It was like a riddle, a puzzle, a what’s-wrong-in-this-picture, only everything was wrong. In five years, he’d seen a lot of death, but he’d never seen anything like this.

It wasn’t the what that bothered him.

It wasn’t even the how.

It was the why.

A full FTF squad was made up of eight soldiers. A leader. A medic. A tech. A sniper. And crew. It was a rare thing these days to have a full squad. Too often soldiers were picked off, and casualties usually weren’t replaced until a group numbered less than four, and then they were folded into another unit.

That morning, Squad Nine had been made up of seven soldiers.

By midday, all of them were dead.

“What happened here?” asked August, half to himself and half to Soro.

“According to Control,” said the other Sunai, “they were on their way back from a recon mission. Their comms were off, and there’s no surveillance on this block.”

The bodies lay scattered in the street, a grisly tableau.

They hadn’t died at night, hadn’t been fed on by Corsai. August looked around, then squinted up at the sun.

Judging by the angle of the light, this part of the street would have been in shadow all morning.

But that didn’t explain the seven corpses.

The sudden and simultaneous turn of violence.

Bullet casings littered the ground, and a knife lay several feet away, stained to the hilt, but as far as August could tell, Squad Nine hadn’t been ambushed, hadn’t been attacked by any outside force, human or monstrous.

They’d attacked their own team.

Not one on six—this wasn’t a matter of one soldier going mad—every one of them had a weapon in hand and a fatal wound. It made no sense.

His gaze trailed across their faces, faces he knew and didn’t know, faces that had once been people and were now just husks. Like Rez, he thought, fighting down the sense of loss before it could surface.

“What a waste.” Soro stood to the side, absently twirling their flute, as if they were standing in a garden instead of a crime scene. The bodies on the ground wore FTF badges, but in Soro’s eyes, he knew, they were no longer soldiers.

They were sinners.

And sinners deserved whatever gruesome ends they met.

But still—what could possibly drive an entire squad to do this?

Was it a symptom of the rift within the Compound?

No, there was tension, but verbal sparring was one thing, and this—this was something else entirely. It was too broad a leap between annoyance and this level of aggression.

Some kind of foul play, then?

A Malchai?

He wondered, for a moment, if the dead soldiers were a message from Alice, some kind of morbid gift laid out like a feast. But the patches weren’t missing, and none of the wounds had been made by teeth.

No, as gruesome as the deaths were, they were done by men, not monsters.

“Does Henry know?” he asked.

“Of course.” Soro paired the words with a flat look, as if the thought of not reporting this had never occurred to them. August imagined it hadn’t—Henry was human, but he was also the head of the FTF, the general in their makeshift army.

“And the Council?” he asked.

At that, Soro shook their head. “Henry wanted you to see it first.”

August frowned. “Why?”

The Sunai shifted their weight. “He said you’ve always had a . . . sensitivity. A way of thinking like a human. He said you study them.” The words seemed to make Soro uncomfortable. “That you’ve always wanted to be one of—”

“I’m a Sunai,” said August, bristling. “And I don’t have a clue what happened here. If Henry wants a human’s take, he should send someone else.”

Soro looked relieved.

August turned away from the corpses and started back toward the Compound.





Sloan wiped the blood from his hands as he climbed the tower steps.

There was something foul about it—in a human’s veins, it was warm, vital. Outside, it was nothing but a mess.