Tecca, the usual young dhampir who comes to greet us, doesn’t show, so Skar knocks harder—
And the door creaks open on its hinges, unlocked.
I gasp. “Shit.”
We spill into the hallways of the Chained Sisters.
Every room is empty. A few chairs are overturned. All garments and tapestries hung from the walls to voice their opposition to the Five Ministries have been stripped.
I sputter from one room to the next, throwing open doors. I gain two steps at a time to get upstairs and go into the bedrooms. No one’s there. “Everyone’s gone,” I croak once I reach my men in the main conference room.
There, like a beacon to a time forgotten, rests the giant painting of my mother, hanging from the back wall. Naked and staring at her audience, relaxed on her side on a sofa.
There’s a giant slash through the painting, ruining it.
The sight almost brings me to tears. For years, the painting of Jinneth has been a symbol to the Sisters. A sign of our resistance, parading my mother’s curvy, large, feminine form unabashedly. A triumph of female empowerment in the face of utter tyranny and deprivation at the hands of the Five Ministries.
Now it’s ruined. Someone dragged blades through the canvas as if to silence my mother. It makes me fear for her life. “Where the fuck is everyone?” I ask aloud. My voice cracks. “Dead? Captured?”
I sniffle as Garro wraps an arm around my side, pulling me close for comfort. “Or escaped, lass.”
I waddle in a haze toward the painting.
Skartovius investigates the canvas, standing under it, staring up with the same fierce determination and anger I’m used to seeing from the vampire lord. The fierce determination I came to love before I started resenting him.
As he begins to turn away, something catches his eye. Furrowing his thin brow, Skar peeks into the painting, past the deep grooves of the cuts. He pulls something out—
A folded piece of parchment.
We huddle around as he unravels the page, which reads a single line:
TANMOUNT WAS A LIE
My brow threads. I read the short sentence again. “Tanmount? As in the tower in the Commerce Ward, where everything went to shit?”
“Where we purposefully got you captured,” Vallan says. He pulls at his beard. “Interesting.”
“This was meant for us,” Skar says.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“There are very few of us who know of the Tanmount and what it represented. From there, you were able to meet Lukain again, in Sutlis Spire where you were jailed. You’re right, love, it was the beginning. But not the beginning when everything went to shit . . .”
Garroway picks up as his master trails off. “. . . The beginning of our rebellion starting in truth. Without the Tanmount, there’s no Sutlis Spire. There’s no jailbreak. There’s no freedom, littlehoney badger.” He frowns at Lukain on the other side of me. “And there’s no Overseer Verant or Lukain Pierken.”
I set my jaw. Take the note from Skartovius and crumple it in my hand. Everyone looks at me.
“Then what are we waiting for?” I ask. “We all know where to go now.”
“Deeper into the heart of the beast,” Skar agrees.
It could be a trap,I think.
It couldalwaysbe a fucking trap.
It usuallyisa fucking trap.
We wait in the shadows of the Tanmount Tower anyway. This tall, spear-shaped structure in the middle of the Commerce Ward, rising above other skyrises here, all of the rainbow-hued structures under the protection of Overliege Liolen Sesk—the sole interfolk vampirex of the Three Ministries. The only Minister I would truly like to meet, if only to learn how they managed to ascend to such heights starting out as a lower caste among the vampire gentry of Olhav.