I froze, realizing that I’d just jinxed myself. Curses rose in my throat, but I swallowed them down.

A key scraped in the lock. Victor was here, and he’d brought someone along with him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Time to leave.

Since I couldn’t get back out through the main entrance, I hurried over to the only other exit—a door set in the middle of the fourth and final office wall, one made entirely out of glass.

I unlocked the door, slipped through to the other side, and rushed over to the edge of the balcony, looking for a drainpipe or a trellis I could climb down. It was full dark now, and spotlights glimmered in the lawn, highlighting the guards patrolling the area, including one right below the balcony. My sneaker kicked a loose bit of stone, which plink-plink-plinked across the balcony. The guard’s head snapped up, and I barely managed to lurch back out of his line of sight—

Creak.

My head snapped around, and I realized that I hadn’t shut the patio door all the way behind me. It swung open a treacherous inch, then another one, but I didn’t dare dart forward to try to close it. Not when I could see the office doors opening, and Victor striding inside.

So I scuttled over to the far side of the balcony, where the glass gave way to the stone of the mansion, and sandwiched myself in between the stone wall and a wooden trellis filled with red roses. Now, I just had to hope my hiding spot was good enough to keep me safe from Victor in his office and the guard patrolling the grounds below.

“Please,” Victor’s voice drifted outside to me. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

I scooted forward just far enough so that I could peer in through the glass wall. Victor was in the office, along with Nikolai and Carl Volkov. I didn’t see Katia, though. Maybe she was hanging out with Blake, while the adults talked. Poor girl, if that was the case.

Nikolai settled himself in a chair in front of Victor’s desk. Carl sat down in another chair there, although he slouched to one side, obviously drunk. Carl was too out of it to look around the office, but Nikolai wasn’t, and his dark eyes scanned everything, lingering on the dragon crest carved into the wall behind the desk. Eventually, his gaze turned toward the glass wall, and I was able to look into his eyes long enough for my soulsight to kick in—and let me feel his sharp, pinching jealousy.

Nikolai desperately wanted all the gold and other fine things that Victor had. Maybe that was why he’d agreed to an alliance with the Draconis. Maybe Victor was paying the Volkovs for whatever reason.

Instead of sitting down behind his desk, Victor moved off to a wet bar in one corner of the office and started pouring them all glasses of scotch.

“I hope you’ve been considering my proposal, Nikolai,” Victor said. “I think that merging our Families into one unit would be most beneficial to us both.”

Shock rippled through me. So that’s what Victor was up to—or at least part of it.

Victor’s back was to him, so he didn’t see Nikolai smirk. Perhaps their alliance wasn’t a done deal after all—or perhaps Nikolai was already thinking about how he could betray Victor. That would be a dangerous game to play.

“It is an interesting proposal,” Nikolai replied in a neutral tone. “One that I have given a great deal of thought. But, as you know, there are serious obstacles to any such merger. The other Families would never allow it.”

“Because our combined forces would be too big a threat to them,” Victor finished. “I’m well aware of that. But think of it this way. If we were to combine, then none of the other Families would be able to stand against us, including Claudia Sinclair.”

“True,” Nikolai murmured. “Very true.”

They didn’t say anything else. Carl kept staring off into space, sliding down and then hoisting himself upright in his chair over and over again.

Victor had just poured the last glass of scotch when he stopped, frowned, and looked over at his desk. A breeze was gusting in through the open door and ruffling the papers there, something that his sharp, narrowed eyes had picked up. He would have to have a Talent for sight, or maybe one for hearing, to notice something like that, given that he was on the opposite side of the office.

Victor realized that the breeze was coming in from the balcony door, and his frown deepened as he headed in my direction.

I silently cursed and slid even farther back behind the white trellis in the corner of the balcony, trying not to rustle the roses any more than necessary. The thorns slid off my spidersilk coat, since they couldn’t penetrate the smooth fabric, but several scratched my hands and neck and one particularly troublesome thorn tangled in my hair. I gritted my teeth, ripped free of the thorns, and pressed myself as flat as I could against the stone wall behind the trellis.

Victor pushed open the glass door and stepped out onto the balcony. I froze, staying absolutely, completely still, barely even daring to breathe and desperately pretending that I was just another part of the wall.

Because if Victor spotted me, then I was dead.

He’d yell for the guards, or worse, come after me himself. I held back a shudder. I’d seen what he’d done to my mom, how he’d carved her up like she was a slab of meat before he’d finally killed her. He hadn’t cut her so many times just to murder her. He’d done it because he’d wanted to, which made him a special kind of cruel.

White stars flashed on and off in front of my face in warning, but I ruthlessly blinked them away. I couldn’t afford to let my soulsight throw me back into the past to relive my mom’s murder. Not now, when my own future was so very much in doubt.

“Something wrong?” Nikolai asked.

Victor waited several seconds before answering. “Seems I forgot to shut the door when I was admiring the view earlier.”

He went back into the office and closed and locked the door behind him.

As much as I wanted to bolt from my hiding place and get out of here as fast as possible, I made myself stand absolutely still, in case he decided to look out the door again.

Sure enough, a second later, Victor stepped in front of the glass again, peering out into the night. He knew—or at least suspected—that someone had been in his office. All I could do now was hope that he thought it was Blake or some other Draconi.

After several long, tense seconds, Victor moved away from the glass, took the drinks he’d fixed over to Nikolai and Carl, and sat down behind his desk. They started talking, but the glass muffled their words, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Besides, I’d been here long enough, and I’d pushed my luck as much as I dared to.