Chapter 30

Lena's POV

I did not think about it.

Thinking was how you talked yourself out of things. I had learned that a long time ago, in a different life, before Ashwood, before any of this. You stopped thinking and you moved and you dealt with what you found when you got there.

I pulled my shoes on and went out the door.

Mira was in the corridor.

She took one look at my face and my shoes and said nothing. Just fell into step beside me.

"The courtyard," I said quietly. "South side."

"I know which one," she said.

We moved fast through the corridor, down the back staircase, through the passage that ran along the inside of the south wall. Mira knew this fortress the way she knew her own hands. She had been walking these passages longer than anyone still living here. She did not hesitate once.

We came out at the side entrance to the courtyard.

I looked through the gap in the door.

Lena was still there.

Still talking to Voss's man. But something had changed in the last three minutes. She was not bent forward anymore. She was standing straight, arms at her sides, and she was listening. The man was talking now, low and fast, and her face was doing nothing. Completely blank. Processing.

Whatever he was telling her, she had not expected it.

I watched her take it in.

Watched her jaw tighten.

Watched her say something short and flat that made the man step back slightly.

Then she turned and walked back toward the fortress entrance without looking around her.

Confident she was alone.

She was not alone.

I pressed back against the wall as she passed the door. Close enough that I could have reached out and touched her shoulder. She walked straight past and did not look left and her face in the half second I had to read it was not warm. Was not composed. Was not performing anything.

She looked like a woman who had just been given a deadline.

Her footsteps faded.

I looked at the courtyard.

Voss's man was already gone.

"Mira," I said.

"I saw," she said.

"Who is he," I said. "That man. How long has he been here."

"He came with Voss," she said. "Three months ago. He does not mix with the other guards. Eats separately. Nobody knows his name."

"He knows Lena," I said.

"Yes," Mira said. "He recognised her the night she arrived. I saw it. I did not know then what it meant."

I looked at the empty courtyard.

Thought about the shape of it.

Lena arriving the same night Cain left. Lena going straight to the elders. Lena feeding Damon information about Vane while simultaneously stirring chaos in the sitting rooms and corridors. Lena in the silk robe at midnight not going to Damon at all but going outside. And Voss's man, who had been here for three months, standing in a dark courtyard telling her something that wiped the performance off her face.

Three months.

Voss's man had been here for three months.

Lena had arrived three days ago.

But they already knew each other.

Which meant Lena had not come here because of Cain's fall.

She had been coming here before that. This had been planned before that. Cain's whole visit, the alliance, the pressure on Damon, possibly all of it had been building toward this. Toward Lena arriving at this gate.

Not for Damon.

For something else.

Something in this fortress.

"Mira," I said. "The northern pass. What do you know about it."

Mira looked at me.

"Everything," she said simply. Because Mira knew everything. That was her particular gift and she used it the way she used everything, sparingly and precisely and only when it mattered.

"There is a vault," she said. "Under the north tower. Old. Pre-dates the current fortress by about two centuries." She paused. "It holds the territorial deeds. Every pack boundary in the northern region. Every alliance document. Every land grant going back two hundred years." Another pause. "Including the deed to the northern pass itself."

I stared at her.

"The physical deed," I said. "The original."

"Yes," she said. "Without it the pass ownership is legally contestable. Anyone could claim they have historical rights and it would take years of council proceedings to disprove." She held my gaze. "With it, the ownership is absolute. Irrefutable. No council can touch it."

I pressed my hand against the cold wall.

"And if someone took it," I said.

"Then the northern pass becomes the most disputed piece of territory in this region overnight," Mira said. "Every pack within two hundred miles files a claim. The council is tied up for years. Damon cannot move, cannot expand, cannot negotiate from strength because everything is in question."

"And whoever has the deed," I said.

"Has all the leverage," Mira said.

I breathed.

There it was.

Not Damon. Not the Luna position. Not the bond or the council or any of the drama Lena had been manufacturing in the sitting rooms and the corridors and the breakfast table.

The deed.

That was what she was here for.

And every scene she had created since she arrived, every accusation and silk robe and carefully pulled hairpin, every elder charmed and every maid won over, had been noise. Beautiful, well constructed, completely convincing noise designed to fill every room in this fortress with drama so that nobody was looking at the north tower.

I turned.

Walked.

Fast.

"Where are you going," Mira said behind me.

"To wake Damon," I said.

"He is not in his study," Mira said.

I stopped.

Turned around.

"Percy came for him twenty minutes ago," she said. "Something in the east wing. I do not know what."

I looked at her.

"Then I am going to the north tower," I said.

"Sera." Her voice was flat. Not asking me to stop. Warning me about what I was walking into. "If she is already moving on the vault tonight, it is because that man told her she was out of time. Which means she will not be alone."

"I know," I said.

"She will have people with her," Mira said. "Voss's people."

"I know," I said.

"And you are one person," she said. "In a dark corridor at midnight with no weapon and no backup and nobody who knows where you are except me."

I looked at her.

She looked back at me.

"Then come with me," I said.

Mira was quiet for exactly one second.

"I am seventy years old," she said.

"And you know every passage in this fortress," I said. "Which means you know a faster way to that tower than the route Lena is taking."

Another second.

"Yes," she said. "I do."

"Then let's go," I said.

She turned.

I followed her.

She moved fast for a woman of seventy. Faster than she looked. Through the passage behind the south kitchen, through a door I had never noticed that opened onto a staircase I had not known existed, stone and narrow and cold, spiraling down before it went up. She did not carry a torch. She did not need one.

I stayed one step behind her and kept my hand on the wall.

Up.

Three flights.

The air got colder.

And then Mira stopped.

Put her hand flat on the door in front of us.

Listened.

I listened too.

Silence.

She looked at me.

Pushed the door open one inch.

Dark corridor on the other side. Stone. Old, much older than the rest of the fortress. And at the far end, where the corridor turned, a thin slice of light.

Moving light.

A torch.

Someone was already here.

I looked at Mira.

She pointed at the light. Then held up two fingers.

Two people.

I pressed my lips together.

Nodded.

And then from inside the corridor, from around that corner where the light was moving, came the sound of something heavy being moved. Stone against stone. Something old being opened.

They had found the vault.

I looked at Mira one more time.

She put her hand briefly on my arm.

Then I stepped through the door.

The corridor was ice cold. My shoes made almost no sound on the old stone. I moved toward the light and the sound of something being pulled open and the low voices of two people who believed they were alone.

I turned the corner.

And stopped.

Lena was crouched in front of an open recess in the wall. The vault. Small, iron-fronted, hinged open. Inside it, a collection of rolled documents, sealed, old.

She had one in her hands.

The deed.

I could tell by the way she was holding it. The particular careful reverence of someone handling something they had been sent specifically to retrieve.

Voss's man stood behind her with the torch.

Neither of them had heard me.

I looked at the document in her hands.

At the vault open on the wall.

At the man with the torch whose back was to me.

And I said, clearly and without raising my voice, into the cold dark of the old corridor:

"Put it back."

Lena went completely still.

The man spun around.

Lena stood up slowly.

Turned to face me.

And for the first time since she had walked through the north gate three days ago with her dark hair and her warm voice and her performance running at full power, she looked at me without any of it.

No warmth.

No smile.

No poor thing in her eyes.

Just Lena. Reading me. Reading the corridor behind me. Calculating.

"Sera," she said.

"Put it back," I said again.

She looked at the document in her hands.

Then at me.

And then she smiled.

But this smile was not the one she wore at breakfast or in the sitting room or in front of elders.

This one was real.

And it was much worse than all the others.

"I don't think so," she said.

The man with the torch took one step toward me.

And behind me, from the staircase I had just come through, I heard footsteps.

Not Mira.

Too heavy for Mira.

Too many of them.

I turned.

Three men filled the doorway.

And at the front of them, wrapped in dark travel clothes, looking at me with the particular satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for this exact moment for a very long time, was someone I recognised.

Not from this fortress.

Not from Ashwood.

From before.

From the life I had buried before I ever became Lena Cain.

My mouth went dry.

"Hello, Sera," he said.