Page 104 of Heartless Enemy

Chapter39

The whole courtroom buzzed with apprehension. We were technically not supposed to be here, but they shouldn’t use metal locks if they didn’t want me to melt them. Even though I could move freely through the north side if I wanted to, Eve and I had still snuck across unnoticed. And now we were sitting at the back of the courtroom, wearing ridiculous but admittedly very convincing disguises.

It had been a week since Ulric Smith had been arrested in the middle of the Main Square. To have someone they had appointed as Chief Constable arrested for high treason was apparently a very embarrassing thing for the democratically elected Parliament of Malgrave, so they had wanted to get this over with as fast as possible. It was all the same to us. Eve’s plan had been foolproof.

When she had shown up on my doorstep in the rain that night, crying and screaming that she was going to march straight back to the north side and kill Ulric, I had stopped her. She hadn’t understood why at first, and had kept insisting that she wanted him dead. But I knew that she was angry and heartbroken. So I had told her what I knew she needed to understand at that moment.

You don’t want him dead.

You want revenge.

And by all hell, Eve Sterling sure knew how to take revenge.

All I had done was to stop her from giving Ulric a quick and easy death.

Eve had done the rest.

The best way to get revenge is to give someone exactly what they want, to make them feel like they finally have everything, and then to take it all away. And that was exactly what Eve had done.

After she had calmed down, her anger and heartbreak had sharpened into merciless cunning. She had plotted out the perfect path to vengeance. And what a scheme it had been.

She had started it while she was still working for the South Side Department. Casually slipping comments about how tight she and Ulric had always been, she had reinforced the belief that the two of them had always been partners. And she had also told them that Ulric was working on a way to come back from his forced retirement.

After that, she had followed Captain Wright home and killed him.

The signs weren’t immediate, but that was the best part of Eve’s incredible scheme. Taken separately, the clues were too vague to make sense. But once she kept sprinkling more and more of them, the full image was so clear that it was impossible to deny the truth of it.

When she killed Wright, she had made sure that the scene was covered with signs that only magic from the Great Current had been used inside the house, which would rule out a dark mage attack.

Then she had gone to Ulric’s house the day of his reinstatement. For several reasons. She had buried the kitchen knife she used to kill Wright in Ulric’s yard. She had also planted a journal with pages upon pages of anger and resentment towards the new captain. All in Ulric’s handwriting, of course. Courtesy of my brilliant forger Sonia.

The final reason why she had gone there that morning was so that everyone would see the two of them arriving to the constable force’s building together, as if they were still a tightknit family.

Framing him with accusations of cheating and making his wife divorce him had just been a side project. That, with hindsight, I think had more to do with the fact that Eve didn’t want Ulric’s wife to also be implicated in the murder charges.

Eve knew when she left for Helspire that she would most likely be fired, and that had been part of the plan. So when she had gone to their office early that morning, she had gone through the archives and made notes of all of Ulric’s unsolved cases.

After that, she had gone to Chief Anderson’s office and promptly been fired. But not before making sure that the Chief Constable of Malgrave knew that Ulric had always personally vouched for her.

After that, she had continued to plant the seeds that Ulric was crooked. When she took over her father’s tavern, she had proudly declared to the whole room that she had always been a dark mage sympathizer who had been working for me for years, and that her captain hadknown about it.

Those rumors naturally spread, further adding to the tangled web she was spinning around Ulric.

Then I had made my second contribution to her master plan. More forged documents from Sonia.

Eve had broken into Ulric’s house and stashed papers that contained evidence that all of those unsolved cases of his weren’t actually unsolved. The notes, in Ulric’s handwriting, detailed all the bribes he had taken from various dark mages in exchange for closing the cases.

However, during that meeting with the chief when she was fired, she had also learned that Anderson had known about what Ulric had done. The original plan had simply been to keep framing Ulric for Wright’s murder and for being a complete crook. But then the white boots had attacked before White showed up with his army.

So Eve had proposed an amendment to the plan.

She would kill Chief Anderson too.

It would both buy us some time and satisfy Eve’s need for revenge, so it was a good idea. And besides, who was I to say no to a little murder and mayhem?

So Eve had completed her second assassination.

To be honest, I had been fucking terrified that night. I was pretty sure that there were still ruts left on the shore where I had been pacing relentlessly back and forth while waiting for Ferry to bring Eve back. I was also fairly certain that Eve had downplayed how intense that fight had been, and how close she had come to losing.

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