Page 10 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

I narrowed my eyes.

“Me, too,” Evangeline said bluntly. “But I escaped either way, didn’t I?”

I went to stand beside Evangeline’s chair, arms crossed like a bodyguard. It was cheap posturing, and I knew Damien, who had moved through court politics for the past decade, would recognize it as such, but I didn’t care.

“You said you had something urgent to tell Evangeline,” I prompted. I didn’t like the curious, hungry way Damien studied her apartment, and I wanted him out of her space as quickly as possible.

Damien twitched slightly, as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been. “Yes,” he said, gathering himself. “I would have come sooner, but I’ve been busy since you broke out. I laid a false trail through the woods that should distract Morgana’s people, at least for a little while. There’s also…” He sighed, shifting on his feet a little. “I figured out the location of the knife that Lord De Montclair used to curse you.”

“That should be good news.” Evangeline frowned. “Why doesn’t it sound like good news?”

“It’s in one of the vaults at the citadel. Lady De Montclair had—” I flinched, and his eyes flicked to me. “Has,” he corrected himself, “a pretty large collection of magical curiosities, including a few cursed knives. The one used on you is one of them. But Roland is planning on moving the artifacts out of town soon, so if we want to get the knife back, we need to act fast.”

“‘We’?” Evangeline asked, quirking an eyebrow. “What about maintaining your cover?” It sounded like she was repeating something she’d been told.

Damien winced. Interesting. Damien was a political animal. If he was letting Evangeline see his reactions, then it could only be an intentional choice. “I’m not planning on breaking in with you, but I can do my best to keep attention away from you.”

Evangeline rolled her eyes and scoffed.

“The vaults are heavily secured,” I said, watching Damien’s face smooth back into something neutral and calm when he took his eyes off Evangeline. I curled my hands into fists where he couldn’t see them, feeling the sting of my nails pressing into my palms. “Surely it would be easier to wait until the items are in transit and more likely to be vulnerable?”

Damien grimaced and scratched at his chin. “Your father’s not really… the most organized. He’ll be moving stuff to a bunch of different locations, and when I asked him if he had plans for what would go where, he waved me off. I could try to track down inventories for each shipment, but honestly, I don’t even know if he has inventories or if he’s just going to have people shove things into crates at random. Chasing down each shipment individually would be a crapshoot, and a time-consuming one.”

“And I don’t have that sort of time,” Evangeline said calmly. “I can already feel the curse starting to crawl back inside me. It’s slower than it was last time, thank fuck for that, but it’s coming. Everything is already starting to feel… sharper. Pricklier.”

I dropped a hand to her shoulder and squeezed gently, and she shot me a brief smile, ghosting her fingers over my knuckles.

“So, we need to get into the citadel and break into my mother’s vault,” I said.

“I have a plan,” Damien said. “It should be simple enough to get in and out of the building, but the vault presents more of an issue.”

“My mother tends to be fairly assertive when it comes to protecting her things,” I agreed. “Which vault is it?”

“She has more than one vault?” Evangeline muttered under her breath. “God. Vampires.”

“The one in the east wing,” Damien said.

I scowled. “Of course it’s the east wing. Unfortunate.” At Evangeline’s questioning look, I elaborated. “The citadel houses all of the ruling families, with a section for each. Vampires, werewolves, etcetera. Each section has a public-facing area, primarily for governmental concerns, and a private area for the family and household staff.”

“I did the tour when I first moved here,” Evangeline said. “Kinda felt like when I got to visit the White House as a kid, but with a lot more goth paintings.”

“A reasonable comparison,” I agreed. “The east wing of the section my parents—my father—occupies is one of the private areas. Damien and I would be able to move around freely, but for anyone else it would be much more complicated.”

Damien cleared his throat. “You would be able to move around freely as long as you’re still on the approved list.” He was using that careful, neutral voice he reserved for bringing up something my father wouldn’t be happy about, and it rankled. I resented his need to manage me, and I resented that if I snapped at him I would prove him right.

“You think I’ve been removed?” I was surprised at how deeply the idea wounded me. It wasn’t as though the citadel was my childhood home—we’d only moved to the city a few hundred years ago. I’d never even properly lived there, although there was a suite that was inexplicably designated as mine, hung with the paintings I’d taken a liking to in my early hundreds.

Still, it was the site of countless awkward family dinners. Countless quiet pieces of advice passed on by my mother, countless stilted talks with my father, all the meetings where I was expected to be a silent presence. I couldn’t say that the citadel was part of a particularly happy side of my life, but it was a major part, nonetheless.

“I don’t know,” Damien admitted. “Your father hasn’t been willing to talk about you. He’s been… difficult, lately.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we have a man on the inside, or we’d never get useful tidbits of intelligence like that,” I said snippily.

“I’m sorry that telling you about the cursed knife wasn’t enough,” Damien said mildly. “I should have been more focused on family gossip.”

I ground my teeth. I dearly wished he wasn’t the one in the right.

“So, like I said,” Damien continued, “getting into the building is the easy part, even if we will have to go into the private wing. It’s the vault that’ll be tricky. If we’re going to break through the wards quickly and quietly, we’re going to need an incredibly powerful witch.” He looked intently at Evangeline.

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