The muzzle of Casmir’s customized trench gun pressed into the hollow beneath Fennick’s ear before the sentence could even finish bouncing off the subterranean glass. "Back away," Casmir said. The velvet drawl from the ballrooms was gone, stripped down to raw iron. His thumb clicked the hammer back. "Step three paces into the light, boy, or I repaint this vitrine with your thoughts." Fennick stayed still, his gaze anchored on Olesia. "You have to listen to me, Lesia." Olesia reached out, her palm striking Casmir’s forearms with enough force to sting. "Drop the aim, Casmir." He refused to yield. His frame remained locked over hers, shielding her torso with a hard, territorial arrogance that felt suffocatingly real. His eyes never left Fennick's throat. "He’s smelling of copper and salt, little viper. That means he came through the lower drainage sluice. Nobody breaches that sector unless the House of Morvane's rival syndicate gave them the master keycard." Olesia went rigid. Her knuckles turned white around the cuff of her silk sleeve. She maneuvered past Casmir, putting herself squarely into the line of fire. "Fennick. How do you know Tevin’s schedule? How do you know what he intends for the relic?" Fennick swallowed. The sound was dry in the damp air of the catacombs. He raised both hands, knuckles scarred from their youth running errands in the Dross Quarter. "Their rivals intercepted me outside the perimeter. Two days ago. Before you even secured the blood-wax." "Why would a rival syndicate approach you?" Olesia demanded. "You’re my quartermaster. You’re nobody to them." "They took Sanna." The name hung between them like a blade swinging from a thread. Sanna was twelve. She spent her days tending hydrangeas in the walled courtyard Olesia had bought for Fennick’s family when their first syndicate haul paid out. "They took her from the music academy," Fennick muttered, his voice cracking against the glass tiles. "They slid her hair ribbon under my door soaked in lye. If I refused to feed them the route you took into the palace, they were going to drown her in the canal sluices. I had to, Lesia. God help me, I had to." Olesia felt the air thin in her lungs. Betrayal tasted like bitter ash coating the back of her throat. This was the boy who had bandaged her collarbone when Tevin first ousted her from the inner circle. The only one left she had trusted with her blind spots. Casmir did not soften. His weapon did not waver an inch. "Keep talking. What did they tell you about the relic?" "It’s not just Tevin’s wedding gift," Fennick choked out, looking at Olesia with pleading misery. "Tevin made an alliance with them behind his bride’s back. He wants the Council of Seven eliminated. But if he poisons them, the Rostova bloodline gets hunted to extinction by the outer cartels. He needed a scapegoat with pedigree. Someone disgraced. Someone with an axe to grind." "Me," Olesia stated. Her tone dropped below freezing. "He orchestrated my arrival. The tailor shop. Leaving the blood-wax accessible to a known dealer. He wanted me inside this palace." "He laid out the bait," Casmir murmured, his lips brushing near her temple as he shifted, never dropping his sightline on Fennick. His scent of bergamot and gun oil cut through the moldy cavern air. "He knew you would spit on his shoes during the vows and take your family’s birthright back on your way out. You steal the reliquary. The elders choke on their wine. The lockdown seals you in the vault with the corpses, and Tevin inherits the entire northern basin without firing a single round in public." A terrible, jagged clarity clicked into place. All her brilliant schemes, her weeks of tracking supply carts, her meticulous revenge—it was an iron cage Tevin had built, painted gold, and left the door open for her to walk right in. "He thinks I'm his executioner," she whispered. "You were meant to be the corpse left at the scene," Fennick said. "The poison is already moving. The toasts were poured ten minutes before the sirens went off. If they find the Council dead and you standing by the dais, it's over." "We aren't running," Olesia snapped, her spine straightening with absolute venom. The humiliation burned through her veins, scorching away every scrap of hesitation. "We don't slip out the drainage duct like cornered sewer rats." Casmir’s mouth curled into a dark, feral grin. "Now that’s my vicious girl. What’s the play?" "We take the relic before he frames me with it," she said, every word clipped and hard. "We secure the evidence of his secret pact, and we shove both down his throat at the altar. Fennick, you stay behind us. If you reach for a comm-link, I will personally let Casmir skin you." "I’ll take the lead," Fennick offered frantically. "I know the service duct behind the High Chantry." "You walk in the middle," Casmir growled, shoving Fennick forward with the barrel of his sidearm. "And if you twitch toward her again, little rat, your sister won't have a brother left to mourn." They moved through the catacombs at a dead run, their soles slapping wet stone. The spiral service stairs brought them directly up into the private gallery flanking the High Chantry—the sanctum where the seven Morvane elders gathered to sign the bloodline registries before the public ceremony. The air here smelled wrong. No perfume of roasted lilies or vintage pinot lingered. It smelled of scorched almonds and curdled bile. Bitter hemlock. Olesia reached the mahogany double doors first. They swung inward without resistance. The lock mechanism had been shredded by an interior charge. She stepped into the chamber and stopped dead. Candles flickered in brass sconces, casting long, grotesque shadows over the circular velvet table. None of the seven elders were seated upright. Lord Varis hung sideways out of his carved high-back chair, black fluid dribbling from his nostrils onto the ivory carpet. Lady Marcolf lay facedown in a platter of frosted figs, her spine twisted at an unnatural, agonized angle. Across the table, Patriarch Rostova—Tevin’s own uncle—sat stiff as petrified wood, his jaw gaping open, eyes staring blankly at the vaulted ceiling. All seven. Cold. In the center of the table, perched atop an ornate brass pedestal, sat the Morvane Succession Relic: an obsidian cylinder wrapped in three interlocking platinum bands, containing the genealogical seals of the founding families. "Too late," Fennick wheezed from the doorway, pale as tallow. "The toast happened before the alarm. They're gone. Lesia, we have to go now—" The heavy iron service door behind them slammed shut, the hydraulic bolts engaging with an ear-splitting crack. No siren sounded. Instead, the stained-glass partition separating the gallery from the private hall shattered into a rain of colored crystal. "Target acquired!" a synthesized voice barked through a tactical respirator. Four men in full Rostova crested armor poured through the ruined archway, heavy suppressors raised, red laser reticles painting the darkness. They shouted no commands. They didn't demand surrender. They had come to produce a crime scene with no living witnesses. Casmir shoved Olesia behind the thick mahogany pillar, throwing his body forward to return fire. His heavy pistol roared twice, blowing the lead guard backward through the fractured glass, but two more took the flank, their submachine guns tracking directly onto his exposed torso. "Down!" Casmir roared, his coat catching the fringe of muzzle flash as a spray of 9mm rounds chewed through the wood inches from his temple. Across the open, blood-soaked floor, the pedestal stood entirely exposed. The platinum bands of the Succession Relic gleamed beneath the candlelight, five yards away. If she lunged for the relic, she could secure the one piece of leverage that proved Tevin's treason to the outer syndicates. Across the room, the second guard raised a high-velocity carbine, the laser sight centering squarely between Casmir's shoulder blades as Casmir reloaded his empty magazine with frantic speed. She couldn't reach both.

The Bait