Traitor Born (Secondborn #2)(51)

“I don’t want it.” I move toward the door.

“Maybe not, but if you take it, that means your mother won’t get it. You can bury it wherever he asked you to take him, as a symbolic gesture.”

I pause. “Is that what you did?”

“I buried all their favorite things together.”

Turning toward Reykin, I hold out my hand. He drops the ring in my palm.

Suddenly a door swings open. Reykin and I both crouch to the floor like criminals. I peek from between the tables and see a pair of black boots. A voice says, “It wasn’t easy extracting the horns from Kennet Abjorn’s cranium. Whoever did it must’ve really wanted him to keep them.”

The voice of Agent Crow barks with laughter. “If you asked most people,” he replies, “they would swear the horns of The Sword’s husband were real!”

This elicits more cackles from them both.

“I had the room secured for your visit,” the technician says. “No other personnel have attended the bodies but me.”

“Show me all the corpses without monikers,” Agent Crow orders.

They walk from assassin to assassin. As they move, Reykin and I crawl along the ground, trying to make it back to the door unseen. My heart thumps in my chest when Agent Crow pauses at a table a few feet from us. I hold my breath.

“They don’t appear to have had monikers, wouldn’t you agree?” he asks.

“That is my conclusions as well!” the technician says proudly. “It’s astounding.”

“Quite,” Agent Crow agrees.

They wander toward my father, and Reykin and I scurry for the open door. In the empty corridor, I get to my feet and hug the wall. Reykin is beside me in seconds, breathing hard. We hurry up the hall, exiting the morgue the way we came in.

“That Census agent is everywhere,” Reykin mutters.

“You have no idea,” I reply with a shudder.

After backtracking through the medical center, I breathe easier. We take another air lift. My father’s ring is heavy in my fist. “You’re on lockdown until further notice,” Reykin orders softly. “Don’t even think about leaving the Palace grounds.” I don’t answer him.

The elevator doors open. “They didn’t have monikers,” I mumble. “What does that mean?”

Reykin’s expression is grim. “I don’t know.” He follows me out of the lift.

“I know my way from here.”

“Get used to me, Roselle. I’m not going anywhere.”

When we get to my apartment, I find a half dozen security stingers hovering around by it. I glare at Reykin, but he merely shrugs.

Once inside, I close the door immediately. Phoenix’s clanging steps ring out in the foyer. I smile, despite everything, and kneel to greet it. “Hey, I missed you, Phee. I have something important. Can you hold it for me?” The mechadome’s red lenses nod. I hold up my father’s ring. Phoenix lifts its vacuum arm and sucks the ring out of my palm. It disappears inside the squat bot. “Thank you.”

Reykin is already in the den after securing the apartment with his whisper orb. He sits on the sofa, leans his head back, and closes his eyes. I cross my arms and rest against the doorframe. “No one touches Hawthorne.”

Reykin doesn’t open his eyes. “Not your decision,” he replies, his jaw tight.

“It is if you ever want my help with anything in the future.”

“We have your friends.”

My eyes narrow. “We’d all risk our lives for Hawthorne—and he’d do the same for us—so he won’t talk. Tell them what I just said. Make Dune and Daltrey understand that this point is nonnegotiable. You kill him, I kill all of you.”

Reykin opens his eyes and lifts his head. “They’re going to want to use him.”

When Hawthorne was secondborn, he hated the way things were. Now that he’s firstborn, I don’t know what he’ll do. He says he loves me, but he’ll think that joining the Gates of Dawn is treason. This is going against everything we were raised to believe. Breaking that kind of indoctrination doesn’t happen overnight—if ever. “I’ll see what I can do to explain things to him, but I can’t promise anything. He has fought against the Gates of Dawn in active combat. It’ll feel like he’s betraying the soldiers he commanded.”

“Tell him his life depends on it—no—tell him your life depends on it.”

“Does it?” I ask.

“All of ours do, Roselle.”



My plan to sneak into Hawthorne’s room shouldn’t terrify me, but it does. Under the cover of darkness, I pad softly out onto my balcony. Scaling the ornate stonework of the building, I climb several stories to a ledge wide enough to walk on. My footsteps don’t make much noise as I hurry across the outside of the Halo Palace. The balmy breeze carries the scent of roses from the garden below. I’m turning frosty from the phantom orb in my pocket, which masks my body temperature from the stingers. The swatch of lead covering my moniker does the rest.

Having memorized the route, I’m almost 100 percent certain that the balcony below me is Hawthorne’s newly issued suite, granted to him while he answers questions about the attack against the social club. He has a sea view, like me, but on the other side of Grisholm’s residence.