Page 100 of Power's Fall

“Second, someone told them. Are any of your men poor?”

“Listening? No, that can’t… Poor?” Sinaver sounded shell-shocked.

“Are any of the men in your militia poor enough that they would accept a bribe? Fifty-thousand rubles in exchange for a warning?”

Sinaver didn’t reply. Dahlia was lightheaded with relief that the questioning had veered off in the wrong direction.

Someone cleared their throat. “If I let you take them, I don’t get my money,” Sinaver said, and the words sounded practiced. This meeting wasn’t going the way he’d thought it would, so he was falling back to the mental script he’d prepared.

“You don’t need the money. You want to punish them.”

“This society is immoral. What they do is disgusting.”

“You’ve said that before, but I think we both know that you blame them because otherwise, you’d have to admit that your blackmail is what caused the resort to close, the tourists to leave, and your town to die.” The Spaniard’s voice was amused, condescending.

Ha, that’s exactly what she’d thought, though she hadn’t been able to say it to Sinaver’s face.

“Are you one of them?” Sinaver demanded. “Is that how you know?”

Dahlia shivered, and above her, Vadisk tensed.

The silence that followed had a menacing quality to it. She’d experienced this kind of silence before. Belize’s Maya Forest was one of the most incredible places she’d ever visited. It was alive with sounds in a way boreal and temperate forests weren’t. Birds trilled and shrieked while monkeys warbled and hollered, those sounds layered atop the constant buzz of insects. The noise was intense and constant.

Until it wasn’t.

Until everything but the insects went quiet. The instant dread she’d felt when the silence fell was a hindbrain instinct that told her sudden silence was bad.

The Nature Conservancy guide she’d been with had frozen, slowly scanning the branches of nearby trees as she whispered a single word:jaguar.

The presence of the forest’s apex predator had muted the smaller animals, and the silence the dangerous big cat evoked had been thick and hot with menace.

It was the same heavy, dangerous silence she felt coming from Sinaver’s office.

Dahlia gripped Vadisk’s calf, his muscles like rock under her touch.

Eventually, the Spaniard spoke. “I am not one of them.” There was a wealth of dark emotion in those words. “But I’ll be what ends them.”

Dahlia’s breath caught, and she dug her nails into Vadisk’s calf.

“I want some of them,” Sinaver said. “Give me a list and I’ll take care of them.”

The Spaniard snorted. “No.”

“Then tell me why? Why do they exist, why are there always three?”

“Good questions, and I’m fairly sure I know the answer. But I did unspeakable things to learn those secrets. I won’t give them to you for free.”

“If you want the—” Sinaver started.

“You don’t have them.” It wasn’t a question. “You killed one, but the other two escaped. You’re playing for time, hoping your band of racist morons downstairs finds them.”

The Spaniard was both intelligent and quick-thinking. Not good, since he’d just declared he planned to take down the Masters’ Admiralty, and probably the Trinity Masters too.

“They cannot escape,” Sinaver said after a hard silence. “There are checkpoints on the roads, no way to fly out, and every harbor is being watched.”

“I almost envy your stupidity,” the Spaniard said mildly. “They have resources and connections you can’t imagine. If you don’t have them now, they’re already gone.”

Dahlia wanted to bang her head against the wall. They were the opposite of gone. They were in the lion’s den, and their escape plan rested on?—

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