Page 156 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

Garrik twisted andfellfrom the ledge. His eyes were closed, yielding to the power of his wings.

For a moment, Alora thought he would look back. Offer her some hope.

But she didn’t have time to cry out, to call his name. Before he slammed into the stones of the royal gardens far below, those wings flared wide and carried him deep into the mountains.

Sneaking through a castle made of stone was somehow more challenging than fumbling through a forest. Light spilled from under Thalon’s door when Alora passed it, the same as Jade’s. She didn’t have any real plan other than slipping through the foyer and finding an exit into the royal gardens to follow that tether to Garrik.

Wherever he went.

If only she could command wings. It would’ve been much easier to simply leap from her balcony and soar into the night.

Alora gripped Soulstryker inside her jacket and ran her hands along the throwing daggers strapped to her thigh. Guided by faelights, she escaped through the raven doors and ran across the bridge to Castle Karanagar. Treading lightly down the inner cloisters and high-arched architraves, past the waterfalls deep within the mountain until she rounded a corner that she knew housed endless levels of staircases, weaving higher and higher into the castle.

She expected Ladomyr’s main foyer to be empty this late. For drunken nobility to be sleeping in their beds. What she didn’t expect was Miwa, cloaked and walking through the center of the gold-laden wooden floor. Didn’t expect her eyes to be shifting around the room as if attempting to conceal a secret.

Distant voices of servants and the rustling of brooms echoed and stirred the maidservant to action. Furniture scraped along the wooden floorboards to Alora’s right. A cough somewhere up the staircase and down a hall to the left.

Alora cursed herself at the curiosity. Not abandoning but delaying the gardens, she waited until Miwa disappeared down a hallway and quickly decided to follow.

Miwa stopped under the flickering faelights.

Leaning against a hanging portrait of the late queen, a darkened figure stood. Darkness shielded their face as they spoke in whispers.

Miwa’s wings were tense, the vibrancy of white, now muddy and stressed. But not as critical as the downcast look in her amber eyes as the figure handed her…

Alora couldn’t determine exactlywhatit was from around that corner concealing her, but it looked to be … a bracelet, perhaps.

The encounter didn’t last for more than a few moments.

In a blink, the figure vanished. There one moment, then through the stones—the floor—existence itself—in the matter of a heartbeat, gone.

Something had the hairs on the back of Alora’s neck standing, and it wasn’t one of Garrik’s shields. It felt too predatory.

She cautiously turned, hand inches from sinking inside her leathers to draw Soulstryker, when a blood-gaze, inches away, stared through her entire being.

Like a cat who caught vermin, crimson eyes brightened, settling on her neck—her quickened pulse—as if Silas wished to find his hand around it. “White-hair,” he drawled. The very blood in her body emptied as if his words had sucked it from her veins. “If I catch you wandering again, I might think you mean to tempt me to seek out your every secret.”

The spymaster stood stiff as a statue. The only way she knew he was a living, breathing thing was by those calculating eyes that watched her retreat a step.

Dangerous. This wasdangerous.The rune-covered male rumored to auction faeries stood within arm’s length. He could lunge and shackle her, steal her away, and no one would know. Garrik wouldn’t know.

Garrik.She should’ve gone to the gardens, not here. Not to meet face-to-face with one of the deadliest things in Kadamar.

Silas methodically angled his head. That touch of malice in his eyes narrowed over her shoulder before he warned with vicious intent, “Isn’t there somewhere you should be?”

Alora turned to see intimidation and reluctance in Miwa’s eyes. The female, who was fierce and bold and strong, looked utterlypetrified as Alora blurted, “She has already attended to her duties. I dismissed her for the night.”

Miwa drew a long breath.

“Hmm,” Silas hummed, and it felt like death trickling down her spine. That careful attention of Ladomyr’s spymaster shifted to the grand foyer of staircases behind them. Disdain filled his features, but warmth hit her like lightning strikes.

The spymaster didn’t flinch. Didn’t move those bloodthirsty eyes. He merely cocked his tattooed head so slowly he didn’t seem real as Thalon placed his palm on Alora’s shoulder. As Aiden stood beside Miwa, draping his forearm over her, dangling a dagger from his fingers.

She suppressed that urge to gape at them, her Guardian and sea captain. Both with more life in their eyes since she’d last seen them ambushed and bruised in Garrik’s rooms. Both healed enough to be walking,talking, with Aiden still sporting a cracked lip and split cheek.

“Spymaster,” Thalon growled.

Eyes of crimson narrowed as a serpentine smile contorted Silas’s face. “Barbarian,” he returned, dryly.

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