Page 63 of Lady of Ashes

“Listen, my Lord, I’m just doing my job. I don’t ask questions,” he answered, lifting his palms placatingly. “But if someone gets down there who isn’t supposed to be, it’s my ass.”

“You don’t even know what you are guarding?” Sorin asked.

“Not my place to know,” the man answered.

“What if he is doing horrendous things?” Sorin pushed.

The man snorted a laugh. “We’re assassins. We were trained to do horrendous things.”

“To innocent people?”

“Not my concern,” he answered with a shrug. “My concern is who the fuck you are, and if you’re allowed to be down there.”

“That is no longer your only concern,” Sorin said calmly. Between one breath and the next, the man had a dagger in the side of his head.

“Sorin,” Cyrus sighed, bending down to drag the man to a corner where, hopefully, no one would stumble upon him until they were long gone. “We need a low body count.”

“We had a problem. I took care of it,” Sorin answered, wiping the dagger off on the dead man’s shirt.

“We cannot kill every problem, Sorin,” Cyrus said. “Not this time.”

“We also do not have time to sit and debate this,” Sorin answered, gesturing at Arianna to continue leading the way.

The dungeon halls were eerily empty. Every once in a while they passed a cell that was occupied, but that was it. The people in those cells, though? They were clearly being starved. Their eyes were hollow and sunk in. How long had they been down here? And why?

His thoughts turned back to Scarlett as he followed Arianna deeper and deeper into this underground network of halls and rooms. He didn’t know what state she was going to be in. Arianna had said she was chained and seemed thin and weak, but she didn’t have anything to compare her to. She’d never met Scarlett before.

Or he was trying to convince himself she wasn’t in the state Arianna had described.

They continued down more halls, their footsteps seeming to echo off the walls no matter how much they tried to soften them.

“How much farther?” he asked in a low voice.

“Assuming she is in the same room, just around the corner,” Arianna answered.

But when they reached what appeared to be a study of some sort, the room was empty. There were places to anchor shackles on the wall beside a large wooden desk. A sofa stood along the wall, and everything was neat and orderly. And her scent. Citrus and embers. Jasmine and lavender and night. It lingered in the room.

Arianna hesitated just inside the doorway. “This is where she was,” she said, Mikale’s voice sounding strained.

“Then we check the other rooms down here before we start searching the upper levels,” Cyrus cut in before Sorin could lose his godsdamn mind.

They had planned for this. Nuri had given a list of the most likely places she would have been moved to, starting with the private dungeon rooms the Assassin Lord used for his personal business and moving progressively up through the other floors. His private wing would be the hardest section to gain access to, but was also a likely place she could be. They made quick work of the first few rooms. The doors were open and clearly empty as they passed, but as they rounded a corner and found three men standing outside a door, they’d obviously found the room they were looking for.

The men glanced at Mikale, but as soon as they saw Sorin and Cyrus, weapons were drawn as they approached.

“He said only you and—”

The man didn’t get to ?nish what he was saying as a dagger left Cyrus’s hand and lodged itself in his throat.

“What happened to not killing every problem?” Sorin asked with a smirk, drawing a sword to meet the other two men now running towards them. One didn’t make it past Arianna as she drew a blade as fast as any Night Child, slicing it across his middle and then his throat when he dropped to his knees.

“I thought I’d follow the lead of my prince,” Cyrus retorted.

Sorin swung his sword, slicing clean through the remaining man’s neck, his head rolling in the opposite direction of his body. He could have used ?re, he supposed, but they’d all agreed to savethe small bit of power they might be able to access. Despite Arianna’s claims and the wards he had felt, he could still feel his ?ames. He knew he could access them, likely because of the ring he wore. It was to be used only as a last resort inside the wards.

“Scarlett would be so proud,” Sorin said mockingly.

Cyrus rolled his eyes. “She would have said fuck covertness, announced her arrival, and then made a competition out of who could make the most kills.”

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