My dark thoughts continued further along the path. “Did Kristoff go to prison?” We’d left Stratford before his trial.

Scents of unease trickled through the room. I stepped forward, Braxton’s arm sliding off my waist. “What happened?”

Jonathon rose off the couch and met me halfway, face to chest. Even though he wasn’t tall for a supernatural, he was still taller than me. “Don’t panic, sweet wolf, but there was a bit of a mess-up with the Kristoff trial.”

A mess up? What the hell did that even mean?

“The reason it was so easy for Vlad and his cohorts to knock you out and move you around Vanguard was because they had help … help from Kristo–”

“No shitting way.”

“Fuck off.”

“What?”

The roars came from the Compasses. I was too pissed to speak. We’d all thought Kristoff’s plan to imprison the quads had been a separate incident to the attack-crap which had happened to me inside Vanguard. But now it seemed they had been connected. Jonathon’s eye’s shifted across the snarling quads and his growl reverberated around the room. He did not like them interrupting, so his wolf popped up to let them know who was boss.

Maximus was clenching and unclenching his fists at his side. “Tell me that you killed that slimy dickbag sorcerer.”

Jonathon’s words flowed from him in a gale. “We were on our way to do that. Louis, Lienda, and I gained entry to Vanguard, but he wasn’t there. No one had noticed yet, but upon investigation he’d been gone for about twelve hours. And … he managed to free Vlad and Scarface.”

“I thought they were dead!” I finally found my voice, it was hard enough to shatter glass.

Jonathon’s resonance matched mine. “I thought so too, but there is corruption in Vanguard. We need to have a mass turnover of the guards again. It’s generally required every few hundred years, and is the most effective way to break the cycle.”

I rubbed at my nose. “So you’re saying the motherfuckers who tried to rape and torture me, along with the sorcerer who schemed and murdered other supes to frame my boys, are out there running around free. And this is because someone on the inside helped them a second time?” The sort of rage which quite frankly scared the shit out of me rose up through my body. My dragon and wolf were straining with the need to kill, fight, maim.

“They won’t be free for long, Jessa babe,” Jacob said, the fey’s voice less musical than usual. “As soon as we deal with this dragon mark thing and the rise of the king, we will make it our mission to hunt them down.”