on her but couldn’t? Or tell her what it was that Eneko had done – was still doing most likely – sending recruits to the guild to slavery in Ikaras, having people assassinated for some plan that Petri could only guess at.
He couldn’t, any more than he could tell her why he didn’t want her to leave tonight, why he’d asked her to stay. Because Licio had asked him to. The king wanted to prove that Vocho was Eneko’s assassin, catch him in the act, and Petri had thought it best to keep Kacha as far away as possible. If there was one thing she was irrational about, it was that irritating tick she called her brother.
She glanced over at the clock on his washstand. “I really need to go. Vocho will be wondering where I am, and it’s a long day tomorrow.”
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to but couldn’t. He didn’t give a damn about Vocho. When he’d started on this, he hadn’t cared much for Kacha either, but now that had changed, and so had he. “Don’t go yet. I won’t see you for a long while. Do you know how long?”
She shrugged, but her smile had widened when he’d asked her to stay. “Who knows? As long as it takes. I don’t even know where we’re going yet. Just that the job involves escorting and protecting this priest.”
“Stay a while longer?” He shifted his arms and brought her in closer, felt her breath quicken on his neck. He couldn’t tell her, but maybe he could show her how she’d changed him, what a liability her brother was, that she was better off with Petri than him.
She didn’t take much persuading in the end, and she left at dawn wearing the signet ring his father had given him when he’d joined the guild.
Chapter Twenty-four
Vocho sat and sweated. He didn’t have a lot of choice chained up next to a brazier with a lot of metal sitting in it glowing a merry red.
“Honestly, if you just ask nicely, I’ll do it anyway,” he said. “You don’t have to go to all this trouble, really. One dead prelate, and then we can all be friends, right? Murdering people, I can do it in my sleep.”
“I’m sure you can, and I know you have,” Sabates said smoothly from across the room. “That is, of course, the worry. By the way, do you know that your left eye twitches, just a tiny bit, when you lie?”
Shit.
Sabates slid across the room, Alicia behind watching him avidly as though he was a choice little titbit to eat and she was starving. She had her gloves off today, the markings on her hands mirroring those of Sabates.
The warning bell chimed somewhere in the distance, muffled down here, wherever here was. Ten minutes to the change o’ the clock. Sabates came closer, and Vocho tried to shrink back into the wall with little success.
“As soon as your sister gets here, we can start. She won’t be long because she’s already in the Shrive. I think Egimont’s looking forward to seeing her again, though not in the way you might imagine. All that effort getting information from her, winding her around his little finger, and she drops him. With some vigour too, I gather. I don’t think he took it too well, and you know how the noble classes love their honour and revenge.”
Vocho was torn between hoping Sabates was lying about Kacha being in the Shrive and feeling a certain smug satisfaction that he’d been right about Petri bloody Egimont all along.
“She’ll be safe enough though, if you do as I say. She can take your place here, a guarantee that you’ll behave, while we take a little trip to the palace along with our friend Alicia here. Did you know the prelate had a mistress? Ah, the weakness of the flesh. Rather sad, I always think, that men of a certain age can be tempted by the thought of recapturing their youth. Of course, a little magic always helps, isn’t that so?”
This last was to Alicia. She came up behind Sabates and slid an arm around his waist. All very cosy. Explained a fair bit too.
Sabates touched her hand briefly and then moved over to where a stack of parchment waited with a scalpel and a brush.
“I don’t need any special blood for this to work,” he murmured. “A little bit of cosmic justice, though, to use it against him. ‘Magic has no