Arthie drew Calibore. “Touch me again, and I don’t care who you are. I will kill you.”
What’s stopping you now?
Killing the Ram in cold blood would make true her claim that they were alike, among other things.
“You think you can kill away your problems?” Arthie asked. “You think killing the Siwangs will stop me? You think killingmewill stop anything? Your reign was predicated upon lie after lie, and I would go so far as to predict that it will soon be over.”
Her words were met with the rumble of the carriage wheels. The quiet outside was broken only by the rustling trees, which meant they were nearing residential streets.
The Ram’s gaze burned into her, but it was too dark to decipher. “I don’t need to kill you to render you useless. I only need to keep you from the rest of your crew. Without you, they are nothing.”
Arthie swallowed a smile, biting the inside of her cheek to keep the thrill of a con gone right from showing in her eyes. This was what Arthie wanted.
“They will come for me,” she swore, even as she hoped they would not.
The Ram onlyhmmed.
Arthie crossed one leg over the other. “While you’re busy preparing to gloat in front of high society about twenty years of a horrible rule.”
“If you were Ettenian, you would know the purpose of a vicennial,” the Ram said at last. “It’s customary.”
If you were Ettenian. It took every ounce of Arthie’s will to keep her lip from curling and letting the Ram see that she’d struck a nerve. Arthie had never cared that she wasn’t Ettenian, but she had just returned from a place where she did once belong and found she’d become less rooted in Ceylan in the years away. To wheredidshe belong?
She released a careful breath. She needed to remain focused.
“We must often reassert our position in a country such as this, before officials, before lords, ladies, the Council,” the Ram continued.
The Council.Theyweregoing to be there, as Shaw had said. She only hoped Jin had risen from those bloody cobblestones with the calling card in hand. Arthie could not remember a time when she had relied so heavily on someone. They had always split tasks for a con, but never like this. Never where Arthie gave herself up, never where she relinquished control over her crew and a situation so completely.
The seat beneath her began to sway like a boat at sea, waves sloshing inside, blood at her ankles. She fought the feeling, gritting her teeth. This wasn’t the same. She wasn’t losing control.
She was trusting him.
“Am I right to assume you will use both the ledger and the word of the Siwangs as evidence against me in front of the Council?” the Ram asked with a smile.
“The dead Siwangs?” Arthie asked. She wasn’t foolish enough to present a ledger written in code to the Council, but the Siwangs had indeed been a part of their plan.
And why, again, was the Ram talking far too much and far too casually?
Did the Ram already have the Council in her pocket?It didn’t matter, Arthie reminded herself. They needed to replicate one of their masks, nothing more. Forging it would take Flick time, even with her skills, and they’d be cutting it close, but they would make do.
They had to.
Because between the Siwangs’ death, the Ram’s knowledge of Ripper vampires, and how close she’d veered to unraveling one of Arthie’s original plans, the crew’s chances of trouncing the Ram were growing slimmer and slimmer.
Darkness filled the walls, swallowing the dusky night sky and flooding through Arthie just the same. The carriage angled downward and eventually rolled to a stop, the brake yanked into place as the horses stomped their feet. Not a shred of light slipped through the window. They had parked inside some place.
“I thought you might want to see where I kept my daughter,” the Ram said, and stepped out into a narrow hall that opened to a well-lit space at the other end.
Her underground bunker.
Arthie stepped out behind her and glanced up at the ceiling. It was stone, hewn together with care, gray and drab, but nothing hinted at this being underground.
The Ram’s men marched toward Arthie, and she crossed her arms behind her herself before they could jostle her around. One of them grunted in surprise, and then she was dragged behind the Ram.
“I could have walked,” Arthie snapped.
They shoved her through to the light, and Arthie was shocked by how little the bunkerlookedlike a bunker. It was spacious and palatial, a lavish hideout and a milder version of the Athereum, which was to be expected, she supposed, for it was built in the vicinity of the palace for the monarch herself. The men followed the Ram, pulling Arthie behind them, passing a collection of rooms and halls.
