But Mahiya shook her head. “No, she only entered the room half a minute ahead of me.”
Which meant Eris had been left this way on purpose—displayed like a trophy, or a warning. But who would dare play such a game with Neha? Another of the Cadre? It was something to consider. As was the fact that Eris hadn’t simply been killed; he’d been tortured. Again, his suffering could’ve been intended to hurt Neha, but there seemed something deeply personal about this.
Everything was close contact, from the strangulation to the way the man’s other organs had been removed—by a small blunt knife, if Jason was reading the marks on the bone correctly. He was gut-certain the brain had been left for last, so there was a high chance Eris had remained conscious as the killer hacked out pieces of his body. He’d have drowned in pain and terror . . . which explained the raw flesh around his mouth, the cuts on his tongue and lips.
A gag of some kind to muffle his screams.
Rising, he took in Eris’s silken pants and vest embroidered with traditional designs that would’ve exposed his muscled chest. “Did he dress like this normally?”
“Yes—he was never untidy, never ungroomed, but he had long forgone the formality of court.”
And instead, Jason thought, chosen to embrace the languid sensuality that would appeal to his wife. A wife who had not forgiven him in three hundred long years. Looking around the room, Jason saw a clean floor beneath the recent bloodshed, polished statuettes, and gleaming walls. Clearly, servants had entrée into the palace.
So, he recalled, did others.
Kallistos, the vampire who’d sought to kill Dmitri, had known the location of Eris’s home in the United States, though it was a place many had forgotten. There was a good chance the vampire had received the information directly from Eris, either in return for some favor or by putting together discrete pieces of information Eris had let drop. Thus access to this palace was not an impossible thing.
“I’ve seen enough.” He headed toward the archway through which they’d entered, waiting so Mahiya wouldn’t fall behind, though he’d had time enough to assess her level of threat and decide she posed no danger at his back—she might move as quiet as the wind, but she wasn’t quiet enough. More, she had no heavy weapons on her body, her sari falling flawlessly around her form, the curve of her waist naked beneath the drape.
Her walk was too fluid for her to have a knife in a thigh sheath, and her bangles too thin to conceal a garrote. However . . . the pins in her hair were very, very sharp. Used the right way, they could blind a man, cut his carotid, even stop his heart. They were the weapons of a woman who wasn’t a trained fighter, but who did not intend to be a victim waiting to happen.
Jason felt a curl of unexpected fascination awaken within him. What other secrets do you hide, princess?
Stairs wide enough for a being with wings greeted him to the right of the doorway, the fading moonlight falling onto the higher steps colored in the reds, yellows, and blues of a stained glass window that was maybe two handspans across but at least three feet long. Walking up, he ignored the hallway that led to the rooms on this level, and turned right instead—to go through a pair of doors set beside another long window of stained glass.
They opened onto a wide balcony enclosed on all sides by stone carved into delicate filigree that would’ve allowed Eris to look out into the yard but would’ve hidden him from the view of those below. Exquisite in its workmanship, it wasn’t an unfamiliar form of ancient architecture, though in most cases, it had been used by males to hide their lovers and concubines from the view of those who might covet them.
Stepping to the stone filigree, he found himself looking out over the city beyond the lake at the foot of the fort—the steep drop that led to it would’ve been a quiet torture to a winged being forbidden to ride the winds. “I heard a rumor that Neha clipped Eris’s wings in truth.” Despite the violation of the rest of Eris’s body, the wings Jason had just seen had been whole.
“I was too young at the time to remember it myself,” Mahiya said from where she stood with one hand on the doorjamb, “but I’ve heard it whispered of by others. However, she didn’t repeat the punishment once his wings grew back . . . and I think she regretted ever having done it.”
Love, Jason thought, could be the most debilitating of weaknesses.
“Jason, I’m sorry I scared you, son. I did not mean to rage.”
Walking further down the balcony, he took in the windows along the inner wall, each created with ten red and green pieces of stained glass. The individual pieces were squares roughly the size of his palm, the effect delicate against the stone of the palace. The glass was echoed in the doors that stood open to reveal a bedroom that appeared to occupy most of the second level, its inner walls gently curved to embrace the central core of the palace.
A magnificent chandelier poured muted, flickering light from the ceiling. Its crystal sconces cradled a thousand candles, many of which had burned down, else the light would’ve been sharper, brighter. “Eris didn’t care for modern things?” he asked the woman who’d entered the bedroom from the corridor.
“No, he just preferred candlelight in his private chambers.”
Which meant the room downstairs had acted as his receiving area. “How many guests was he permitted?”
“It depended on Neha’s mood.” An answer that said much about Eris’s existence. “Never any women aside from Neha and myself. Even the servants who worked in this palace were all male.”
For a man who had been a favorite of women, it would’ve been akin to having a limb amputated. “Do you think the rule was observed?”
“I think Eris did not have any wish to anger Neha further.”
That didn’t answer the question, and the way Mahiya had subtly angled her face away from the light as she spoke told him she knew more than she was saying.
The stealthy hunter in Jason rose to full wakefulness.
6
“A leopard, as they say,” he murmured, his mind working at the question of Mahiya’s true loyalties, at whose secrets she kept, “does not change its spots.” Eris had never been good at self-denial where women and sex were concerned.
An adoring conquest looking up into the face of the golden god who was Neha’s consort, her eyes blazing with shy desire.
Jason had witnessed that particular scene approximately a century and a half after Neha’s marriage, during a ball given by the archangel Uram. At the time, he’d put Eris’s responding smile of sensual invitation down to male vanity, never considering the other man might ever actually accept such an invitation.
Yet Eris had needed to have his ego stroked enough that he’d fathered a child upon the sister of the woman he’d sworn to honor. Jason didn’t fool himself that Eris had loved Nivriti—the man had been a narcissist, had cared about no one but himself. And in spite of his trespass, he had survived. What was there to stop such a man from taking another risk and seducing a lover within the walls of his luxurious prison?
“Tell me,” he said, pinning Mahiya with his gaze, “Did Eris have a lover?”
Mahiya had avoided his earlier question, having realized far too late that she’d betrayed a knowledge and a curiosity beyond the woman she was meant to be. Her only defense for the unprecedented failure was surprise—it had been so very startling to speak to someone who watched her without judgment or pity, and who did not divine a lack of understanding simply because she chose to keep her silence . . . but of course he wouldn’t. Jason was a man who guarded his words, yet she had not a single doubt that his intelligence was a piercing arrow.
Now, looking into eyes a deep, impenetrable brown that stripped her to the bone, she realized it was too late to put the mask back on.
Jason had already seen her.
There was a strange exhilaration in showing her true face. “I have no proof of a new infidelity,” she said, “but there were times of late that I caught a certain musk in the air.” A woman should not know such things about her father, but Eris’s only claim to paternity had been through their shared blood.
“You didn’t tell Neha.” It wasn’t a question.
Mahiya held that dark blade of a gaze. “I would not be the messenger who bears such tidings.” Neha would’ve struck her down, ended her for it. “You’re welcome to attempt it.”
His response to the challenge was a calm “Let us see if it proves necessary.”
The exhilaration in her bloodstream slowly turned to ice as she watched him explore every inch of the palace that had been Eris’s home. She knew his reputation, but it was only now, after witnessing his thorough, meticulous search, that she realized the exact level of Jason’s skill, his dedication . . . and understood that none of her plans would come to fruition should he decide to pledge his skills in service to Neha.
Gritting her teeth to fight a shiver, she realized the sands had just begun to fall with increased speed through the hourglass. The Seven were meant to be an impregnable unit, immune to enticement from others in the Cadre, but Neha had had a glint in her eye that said she held an ace. If she did . . . Mahiya and her traitorous intent had to be long gone before Jason accepted the archangel’s offer.
Heart thudding hard enough to bruise against her ribs, she shut the door on those thoughts lest they betray her, and followed Jason into a large bathing chamber below the level that held the receiving area. Curls of steam rose from the clear water. “This was meant to be turned off,” she said, sensing the fine tendrils of hair at her nape beginning to curl from the humidity. “I’ll take care of it after we leave.”
Not responding, Jason began to walk the edges of a bathing pool so large, it could’ve easily accommodated five adult angels. Ancient by design, the chamber had been put in when the palace was constructed for Eris’s incarceration, and he’d made good use of it. Many a time when she’d been sent by Neha to see if he needed anything, it had been to find him lounging in the bath.
“Has Neha not slit your throat yet?” A bored sigh, his wings spread as he leaned against the edge, arms lying on the painted tiles carried from Italy by angelic couriers. “A pity.”
The stab of memory wasn’t enough to distract her from catching the subtle twist of Jason’s hand as he slipped something into his pocket. “What’s that?”
No surprise or guilt on his face. “I assume this is Eris’s?” he said, retrieving the object.
Walking to stand nearer to him than she had till then, she examined the thick gold ring set with tanzanite, dangerously conscious of the penetrating intensity of the spymaster’s eyes. “Yes.” Only centuries of practice kept her voice from cracking under the silent, inexorable pressure. “Not a favorite, so he may well have forgotten it here.”
Jason placed it in her hand. “I would not want to be accused of stealing.”
Mahiya felt color tinge her cheeks at the gentle, lethal words. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to imply anything of the kind.” What she’d meant to imply was that he was hiding something from her. That, she couldn’t permit.
