House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas

Later. She’d think it over tonight, because—she glanced at the clock. Shit.

She had another client coming in forty-five minutes, which meant she should get through the tsunami of paperwork for the Svadgard wood carving purchased yesterday.

Or maybe she should work on that job application she’d kept in a secret, deceptively named file on her computer: Paper Vendor Spreadsheets.

Jesiba, who left her in charge of everything from restocking toilet paper to ordering printer paper, would never open the file. She’d never see that among the actual documents Bryce had thrown in there, there was one folder—March Office Supply Invoices—that didn’t contain a spreadsheet. It held a cover letter, a résumé, and half-completed applications for positions at about ten different places.

Some were long shots. Crescent City Art Museum Associate Curator. As if she’d ever get that job, when she had neither an art nor a history degree. And when most museums believed places like Griffin Antiquities should be illegal.

Other positions—Personal Assistant to Miss Fancypants Lawyer—would be more of the same. Different setting and boss, but same old bullshit.

But they were a way out. Yeah, she’d have to find some kind of arrangement with Jesiba regarding her debts, and avoid finding out if just mentioning she wanted to leave would get her turned into some slithering animal, but dicking around with the applications, endlessly tweaking her résumé—it made her feel better, at least. Some days.

But if Danika’s murderer had resurfaced, if being in this dead-end job could help … Those résumés were a waste of time.

Her phone’s dark screen barely reflected the lights high, high above.

Sighing again, Bryce punched in her security code, and opened the message thread.

You won’t regret this. I’ve had a long while to figure out all the ways I’m going to spoil you. All the fun we’re going to have.

She could have recited Connor’s messages from memory, but it hurt more to see them. Hurt enough to feel through every part of her body, the dark remnants of her soul. So she always looked.

Go enjoy yourself. I’ll see you in a few days.

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.





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.

Patterns was all his father said.

The Autumn King sat at one of the four massive worktables, each littered with books and an array of glass and metal devices. Experiments for whatever the fuck his father did with those patterns. Ruhn passed one of the tables, where iridescent liquid bubbled within a glass orb set over a burner—the flame likely of his father’s making—puffs of violet smoke curling from it.