Chapter 4

Here is what nobody in that room knew. Silverleaf poisoning is a crime under Council law. Not a scandal. A crime. Punishable by stripping of rank, territory, and bloodline claim. And Rowena Blackwood had been serving it to me in a china cup for one thousand eight hundred nights. Every cup was evidence. Every cup was a rope. And I had just spent five years collecting them—the receipts, the tin from her pantry, the blood panels I paid for in cash three states away. I looked at the man I’d...