The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves, #1)(20)

“Had I known what pretty company you keep, I might have met with you sooner, Séverin,” said Hypnos, not taking his eyes off Enrique.

Séverin let out a brittle laugh. “I doubt that. You’ve been a patriarch for two years, and you still have to run every inhale and exhale by the Order of Babel. I can’t imagine what they must make of your meeting with me. My understanding was that any Order member would be forbidden from speaking to me if they remembered my existence. Do they even know what you’re doing right now?”

Hypnos raised one eyebrow. “Do you want them to?”

Séverin didn’t answer, and Hypnos didn’t push it.

“You requested a meeting,” said Séverin. “Why?”

After all this time, Enrique thought.

Hypnos grinned. “I wanted to meet my thieves.”

“Well, you found us.”

Hypnos made a tsk sound. “Now, now. I only did a little bit of the work. You did the rest.”

Enrique shook off the dregs of the illusion. He took a step closer to Séverin. All his awareness shifted around the inflection of Hypnos’s words.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Lo! It speaks,” exclaimed Hypnos. He clapped his hands. “That fake compass you left me was a pretty decoy, but there was blood on it. And so I performed a little test … Whoever had stolen from me had bled all over my poor stone beastie. So, I added a bit of blood Forging to my letter to make sure that none but the thief could read it. I had my men deliver it to every person I could think of. Who, I wondered, would steal from me? And why? And then, of course, when I ran out of options, I sent it to you. The fancy hotelier with a reputation a little too spotless, who’s always a little too close to every theft of an Order object. So, you see,” he said, his expression suddenly quite serious, “I didn’t find you. You brought yourself to me.”

Enrique squeezed his eyes shut. Too late, he remembered glimpsing Séverin’s letter. The curious expanse of blank page. No wonder he couldn’t read it.

Séverin betrayed nothing. “Clever.”

“One can always rely on a man’s hubris. I figured you wouldn’t share the letter.” Hypnos tilted his head. “How devastating for you. To let down your team and admit that you’d failed. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Séverin. The Order may not have looked in your direction all this time, but I have.”

“I’m flattered you think I’m worth watching.”

Hypnos winked. “With a face like that? I must not be the only one.”

“What do you want, Hypnos?”

“You know what I can do to you. I can have you arrested, executed, tarred and feathered, et cetera. There’s no point, really, in detailing it.” Hypnos paused to smile. “But I don’t want to do any of that. I’m actually quite an exceptional human being, and, I fancy myself rather generous. So instead, I ask only two things. First, that you return the compass. Second, that you turn your acquisition skills to an object I’ve long desired. In return, I’ll give you what you want.”

Séverin’s face had gone rigid, his mouth flattened to a line, his dark eyes nearly burning.

Slowly, Hypnos raised his hand. His Babel Ring, a thin crescent moon that spread across the middle of his hand, caught the light. From where Enrique stood, it looked like a scythe.

“Mon cher, you and I always had so much in common,” said Hypnos. “Now, we have even more! Look at us. Two orphaned bastards with colored mothers.” He leaned closer to Séverin. “How strange … Yours doesn’t show up on the skin the way mine does. Mine was the daughter of slaves in a sugarcane plantation my father owned in Martinique. Once I was born, my French aristocrat of a father left her. But I remember you had your mother. That always made me rather jealous, I admit. She had the loveliest hair … what was she? Egyptian? Algerian? Her name was so beautiful too—”

“Don’t,” said Séverin, clipped. A muscle in his jaw ticked.

Hypnos shrugged lightly and turned to Enrique, smiling as if he were just another guest and this were just another day.

“Has he told you how the Order’s inheritance test works?”

Enrique shook his head.

“It’s like this,” said Hypnos, walking up to him. “May I, beautiful?”

Enrique managed a nod. Hypnos turned over his hand, sliding his brown thumb down his palm before stopping above his racing pulse.

“In each Babel Ring, there’s a core of the matriarch or patriarch’s blood. The blood fuels the Ring’s ability to House-mark, among other things. When the matriarch or patriarch dies, or if they wish to retire their seat early, a head of House is summoned to administer the inheritance test. First, the Ring that will be passed on is cut into the heir’s hand.” Hypnos dragged one edge of the crescent moon across Enrique’s hand. Through his skin, he felt a hum of power, like lightning traveling through his veins. “Then, the Ring of the witness is held over the bloodied Ring. If the heir is of the same blood as the matriarch or patriarch, both Rings turn blue. If the heir is not…”

“You are left with a handsome scar,” finished Séverin coldly.

Hypnos dropped Enrique’s hand.

“The Order is not above falsifying the inheritance test,” he said, facing Séverin. “It’s been performed in the past by families wishing to pass over one heir for a different family member.”