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Chapter 1

Lila stretched on a private dock several kilometers from the Masson vineyard Her brown curls and stiff back rested against the warped boards, and her bare toes skated across the surface of the swollen, frigid lake below The overcast sky pro Aat the skin underneath her sweater Her boots and socks sat beside her in a pile One scarred pal adventure novel

Lila ignored the novel

She couldn’t seeain, she couldn’t care about much these days

Soft footfalls padded across the opposite end of the dock, interrupting the grating call of the grackles nearby Lila slid her hand toward her holster, cradled the tranq gun at her hip, and tilted her neck backward

A dark-haired woman approached, early thirties, clad in thick lilac robes and a black fur coat, both reaching her ankles The color was out of place ae a hundred meters away

Lila turned her head back to the ink-filled sky

“What? No hello?”

The woman sat next to her and re a toe into the water She hissed as it slipped below the surface “You’re insane,” sheit with a corner of her robe “If I asked you to put on your boots, would you listen?”

Lila shrugged

“Not speaking? Not even to an old woman?”

“You’re not old” Lila cringed at her hoarse voice Though her throat had healed since her fight with Senator La Roux, she hadn’t spoken to anyone since fleeing from New Bristol several weeks before

There were consequences to everything

Lila was quite tired of feeling the brunt of them

“It’s not cold enough for fur,” Lila said

“So? It’s tradition,” the oracle replied “I’ues”

“How’d you find ed to track her, then perhaps she hadn’t hidden as well as she’d thought The press and the Bullstowfor her She’d rented the dilapidated cottage under an alias, paying cash after doctoring her face with rubber latex and makeup

Back then, a ht it would be plenty of tihten out the charges and the warrant against her She’d earned theh he’d intervened at all Chief Shaw, the head of the Bullstow ainst her either And that annoyed her, since both men had asked her to break into BullNet in the first place

Perhaps she should have been s deteriorated so much that she could not even trust her own father?

Could she trust the oracle?

Lila scanned the dock, the worn cottage, and the tufts of knee-high broeeds between theh Beside her black Cruz sedan, she saw the oracle’s gray electric car

Two dark shadows sat inside She couldn’t make out their faces

“I can always find you, Ms Randolph I do have a direct line to the gods As I’ve told you before, you are important to us” The oracle stared out over the choppy, muddy lake “I will admit that it would have been nice if they’d shown me your location a bit sooner”

Lila reached for her rolled-up socks

She had to leave The oracle ht have been followed She would have liked to spend one ht in a bed, even a lumpy one, but that would only postpone the inevitable Her rent was due in the

But Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph—once prime of the Randolph family, once one of the richest heirs in all of Saxony, once chief to one of the largest private militias in the country—had no money to pay it Her mother had raided her accounts and taken every credit, even pilfering froundy

Lila wasn’t sure how the chairwoed that The little country had always been notoriously deaf to the whims of the Allied matrons and the Roman emperor