Chapter 51: Spy [1]

He patted his own chest with his free hand, arrogant as a peacock.

"Meanwhile, I happen to be Cane Valerian. Heir to a vault so disgustingly deep my family uses silver ingots to prop open drafty cellar doors. I’ve never been shy about tossing coins around when a problem requires solving. I offered her a pouch heavy enough to pay her tuition for the next three terms, and she, being a pragmatic woman with a working brain, said yes."

While the words were pouring smoothly from his lips, Cane let the fingers of his left hand drift slowly south.

He slid his palm down from her waist, slipped past the hem of her jacket, and boldly palmed the generous, muscular swell of Raven’s ass through the regulation fabric of her skirt.

It was an incredible handful—dense, powerful muscle wrapped in a layer of firm, yielding feminine flesh. He gathered a thick pinch of her backside between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a sharp, insolent squeeze.

"Nnh!"

The sound caught in Raven’s throat, a tiny, helpless, breathy moan that escaped her lips before she could clamp her teeth down on it. Her entire body stiffened against him, her spine locking into a rigid arch, a sudden tremor of heat radiating from her hips straight into his flank.

It took her half a beat to recover, but the woman had been forged in the fires of an underground terror cell; she adapted with terrifying speed. She forced her chin up, cleared her throat with an icy rasp, and looked across the clearing at Yelena with eyes as bored and flat as stagnant pond water.

"It’s true," Raven said, her voice smooth, level, and entirely devoid of emotion. "The Valerian heir has deep pockets. And I have very little patience for starvation."

She turned her head slightly, looking up at Cane through her dark, messy bangs. Her eyes held a promise of agonizing, slow-motion dismemberment for later, but her tone remained perfectly measured.

"Are you certain it’s wise to share our arrangement with her, Cane? Operational security requires discretion."

Cane had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud. She was playing the part so brilliantly he wanted to give her a standing ovation.

"It’s fine, Rave," Cane said smoothly, his hand lingering shamelessly on the tight curve of her buttock. "Yelena is our leader. She’s someone I trust implicitly. Isn’t that right, Yelena?"

The words hit their mark like a tailored spell. A faint, telltale bloom of pink swept across Yelena’s high cheekbones, her fingers loosening their death grip on her torn blouse. Being called trustworthy by the man who had just had his tongue down her throat clearly did strange, conflicting things to her noble pride.

She swallowed, lifting her chin to reclaim some semblance of her commander’s authority, though her gaze remained deeply wary.

"If this is real," Yelena demanded, crossing her bare legs as she shifted her weight against the oak tree, "then what’s the plan? What has she actually brought us?"

Cane didn’t hesitate. He pulled his hand back from Raven’s skirt, wound up, and brought his open palm down with a loud, resounding CRACK against the meat of her ass.

"Ah!"

Raven jumped an inch off the ground, her teeth snapping together as the sharp sting blossomed into a throbbing wave of heat across her backside.

"Go on, partner," Cane drawled, unhurried, utterly unapologetic. "Tell the lady what you told me. Give her the intelligence we paid for."

Raven’s left eye twitched with pure, unadulterated homicide. Her fingers clenched so hard into the fabric of her uniform skirt that the seams groaned. She had no idea what specific intelligence he was referring to. Not a clue.

But Raven Harbringer had spent three bloody years navigating the internal paranoia of the Ashen Talons, where the ability to assess battlefield geography and trade in scraps of lethal information was the only difference between waking up in a bed or floating face-down in a drainage ditch. She didn’t need a briefing to figure out what mattered in a wilderness skirmish.

She took a slow, deep breath through her nose, letting the humiliation settle into cold, tactical calculation, and stepped out from under Cane’s arm.

She faced Yelena, her posture shifting from that of an outraged girl to a hardened scout in the blink of an eye.

"I’ve been mapping this bracket for forty-eight hours," Raven stated, her voice dropping into the clipped, rhythmic cadence of an operational debrief. "Not just my own team’s assigned boundaries, but the surrounding three miles. And Dragon Group has spent the entire time sitting beside that muddy pond like an injured cow waiting for the wolves, never once bothering to look up and see who holds the ridges."

Yelena’s eyes flashed, her spine stiffening against the bark. "That sounds like an insult."

"It’s an assessment," Raven countered flatly, without a shred of deference. "And I’m about to make it a useful one. There are two other teams operating in your immediate sector, and neither of them is positioned where your pathetic excuse for sentries thinks they are."

Yelena crossed her arms over her chest, digging her heels into the dirt, though the skepticism in her eyes was beginning to war with desperate curiosity. "You could be feeding me fantasies. Why should I believe a single word coming out of your mouth?"

Raven shrugged, her dark eyes dull with indifference. "What have your own scouts actually reported since yesterday morning?"

Yelena hesitated. Her gaze flicked toward the ground, her lower lip pressing between her teeth before she reluctantly answered. "There was smoke. To the far east, near the pine ridge. A thin gray pillar rising above the canopy."

Raven gave a single, dismissive nod, as if confirming the simplest math problem in the world.

"That’s Team Dorrian," Raven said, the name rolling off her tongue with complete familiarity. "And the smoke isn’t a cooking fire. It’s a deliberate signal lure. Dorrian has had two of his earth mages feeding wet pine branches into a pit every four hours on the dot. He’s baiting anyone stupid enough to go investigate the ’vulnerable camp.’"