The white screen burned her eyes. Message me when you’re home safe.

She shut that window. And didn’t dare open up her audiomail. She usually had to be in one of her monthly emotional death-spirals to do that. To hear Danika’s laughing voice again.

Bryce loosed a long breath, then another, then another.

She’d find the person behind this. For Danika, for the Pack of Devils, she’d do it. Do anything.

She opened up her phone again and began typing out a group message to Juniper and Fury. Not that Fury ever replied—no, the thread was a two-way conversation between Bryce and June. She’d written out half of her message: Philip Briggs didn’t kill Danika. The murders are starting again and I’m— when she deleted it. Micah had given an order to keep this quiet, and if her phone was hacked … She wouldn’t jeopardize being taken off the case.

Fury had to know about it already. That her so-called friend hadn’t contacted her … Bryce shoved the thought away. She’d tell Juniper face-to-face. If Micah was right and there was somehow a connection between Bryce and how the victims were chosen, she couldn’t risk leaving Juniper unaware. Wouldn’t lose anyone else.

Bryce glanced at the sealed iron door. Rubbed the deep ache in her leg once before standing.

Silence walked beside her during the entire trip downstairs.

Chapter Fourteen

14

Ruhn Danaan stood before the towering oak doors to his father’s study and took a bracing, cooling breath.

It had nothing to do with the thirty-block run he’d made from his unofficial office above a dive bar in the Old Square over to his father’s sprawling marble villa in the heart of FiRo. Ruhn let out a breath and knocked.

He knew better than to barge in.

“Enter.” The cold male voice leached through the doors, through Ruhn. But he shoved aside any indication of his thundering heart and slid into the room, shutting the door behind him.

The Autumn King’s personal study was larger than most single-family houses. Bookshelves rose two stories on every wall, crammed with tomes and artifacts both old and new, magic and ordinary. A golden balcony bisected the rectangular space, accessible by either of the spiral staircases at the front and back, and heavy black velvet curtains currently blocked the morning light from the tall windows overlooking the interior courtyard of the villa.

The orrery in the far back of the space drew Ruhn’s eye: a working model of their seven planets, moons, and sun. Made from solid gold. Ruhn had been mesmerized by it as a boy, back when he’d been stupid enough to believe his father actually gave a shit about him, spending hours in here watching the male make whatever observations and calculations he jotted down in his black leather notebooks. He’d asked only once about what his father was looking for, exactly.