Nila climbed to her feet and was running toward the house before she could think. Her palm throbbed, her dress bloody, but she didn’t care about that. Jakob was still inside, up on the second floor. His nursery faced the other street, and even at this angle she could tell that if he was inside, he’d been crushed. But maybe he was lucky. Maybe he’d been under the bed, or protected by the door frame, or…
The back wall of the manor suddenly blew outward, sending plaster, furniture, and bits of what looked to have once been a human out into the street.
A man stood in the wreckage. He was of medium height, with ruddy muttonchops on an otherwise clean-shaven face and loose pants and matching jacket that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a street in the bankers’ quarter. He wasn’t particularly handsome, nor was he ugly, but Nila felt a jolt when she first saw him.
He held his hands high, fingers poised in white Privileged’s gloves as he looked down on the mess he’d just made all over the thoroughfare. The gathering crowd pulled back in fear. A woman fainted when she realized what the juicy red meat scattered in the street was. A man vomited.
The Privileged surveyed the gathered crowd and lowered his hands. He turned and disappeared inside the wreckage of the house. Before he did, however, Nila caught sight of something on his gloves: the symbol of the Adran Mountains with the teardrop of the Adsea beneath them.
This wasn’t just any Privileged. This was a member of the Adran royal cabal.
Something told Nila that Dourford hadn’t stood a chance.
Nila picked her way through the wreckage and ducked beneath a beam, entering the house as close as she could get to the servants’ stairs.
The sitting room was completely crushed. She could hear a man calling for help, and another moaning. A body lay in the mangled timber, covered in plaster dust, unmoving. She heard someone speaking from the other room. It sounded like Lord Vetas.
Nila moved slowly into the kitchen. It remained almost completely untouched by the collapse, but it seemed that the servants’ stairs had taken the worst of it. She wouldn’t be climbing up to the second floor that way.
She stepped over to the door to the dining room and listened. Silence, but she could hear someone moving. She looked through a crack in the door. She heard herself gasp at the sight of a woman, body hanging limply from dripping shards of ice, nailed to the back wall of the dining room. She wore Privileged’s gloves. Vetas’s other Privileged?
Someone spoke. A man’s voice. He was saying…
Lord Vetas slammed into the back wall of the dining room hard enough to rattle the remains of the house. Something shifted in the wreckage, and Nila heard someone scream. Lord Vetas, though, didn’t make a sound. The Adran Privileged stepped into view. He spoke quietly, his face angry. He grabbed Lord Vetas by the chin and forced him to look at the dead Privileged.
The Adran Privileged stepped back suddenly. His voice was suddenly calm and collected. Nila heard him say, “I bet you were the type of child who tortured animals for fun. Tell me, did you ever pull the wings off of insects? Answer me!”
Nila had some satisfaction in seeing Vetas pull back in fear. His mouth moved, the word too low to hear.
“That’s what I thought. How does it feel?”
Nila pulled away from the door. Vetas’s scream drowned out the calls of the wounded and dying in the rest of the house. She turned toward the kitchen, looking for another way to get through the wreckage. Panic set in. She had to find Jakob. She had to get away from the house. Even as she began to breathe harder, the adrenaline setting in, a wave of relief swept over her. Vetas was gone. If he wasn’t dead yet, he would be. That bastard had finally found someone stronger and crueler.
She put him from her mind. He wasn’t worth another thought. Jakob, though…
“Nila?”
Nila’s gaze darted around the kitchen. A child’s voice. Where had it come from?
“Nila, quick, hide in here.”
She found Jakob in the bottom of the pantry, tucked behind a sack of flour. She glanced at the door to the dining room. “There’s no room for me in there,” she said, helping him out of the pantry.
“What about Faye?” Jakob asked. “And Uncle Vetas.”
A moan emanated from the dining room. Nila took Jakob by the shoulder and pushed him out through the broken wall the same way she’d come in.
The crowd outside had retreated to what they deemed a safe distance from the house, seemingly content to wait for the police and fire brigades to arrive. Someone grabbed Nila by the arm as she pushed her way through the throng. She shoved them off without a comment, not bothering to look back, and kept her grip on Jakob’s shoulder.
Her mind was already racing. She still had her buried silver outside the city. She had no money, no clothes but the ones on her back. They’d have to walk all the way to the city limits, find the silver, and then tomorrow they could come back into the city and find a place to sell it.
