Page 18 of Lord of Ruin (The Age of Blood #2)

Chapter Eleven

Samuel

S han’s new proposal was going to be the death of him, and Samuel hadn’t even enacted it yet.

He had spent three days locked away in offices, either his own at the Parliament House or Shan’s at the Academy or with the Captain of the Guard at the largest Guard Station in Dameral.

The only moments he got to himself were in the blessed silence as the Aberforth carriage took him from one meeting to the next, and the cold, lonely nights he kept deliberately away from Shan, wrapped in his own self-inflicted misery.

Soon, he would face her alone, stripped of the titles and the duties that moved them, but for now—for the sake of his own soul—he couldn’t risk it.

She would whisper such reasonable arguments in his ear, would talk about practicality and the fragile tightrope of power that they walked, would convince him that a little blood on their hands now would be worth the stability of tomorrow.

But what she had done, the work that she had foisted on him with a pained expression, an untenable weight that dwarfed all the King’s little cruelties, was abhorrent. And he could not let himself forget that.

Especially now, facing down the Captain of the Guard.

Vaughn Dabney was a fortress of a man, with broad shoulders and a permanently grim expression, like he had just stepped out of a funeral.

He was older than Samuel by decades of hard work, and despite the resources at his disposal, Dabney refused to let the Blood Healers reset his nose, which had been broken at least twice, nor ease the long scar that bisected his cheek.

It gave him a fearsome appearance, but Samuel wouldn’t let himself be cowed.

Dabney was a relic of the past, ruling the Guard with an iron fist, and he had not taken kindly to Samuel’s appointment as Councillor of Law. They had butted heads time and time again, and this new plan was no exception.

“We need to have protections in place,” Samuel repeated, for what felt like the hundredth time, “to ensure our prisoners are not mistreated.”

Dabney scoffed. “I find your lack of faith in our people disheartening. The Guard of Aeravin is filled with good and honest folk, and I will not accept any insinuations to the contrary.”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Samuel held back the tirade that threatened.

Either Dabney was a fool or a liar—the Guard cared not about serving the good of their nation.

They only cared for the Blood Workers that filled their ranks and paid their wages.

Samuel had learned this the hard way, thrust into this position in the aftermath of the Eternal King’s sweeping laws.

The gleeful way the Guard took to enforcing the strictest curfew, the way they raided innocent people’s homes on the slightest suspicions.

The cells had never been more packed, and damn it all, Shan.

This plan would work far too well.

But the truth rarely brought success, and so Samuel tried a different route. “Then it wouldn’t hurt to have these details codified into law.”

“Those details can come later, my lord,” Dabney replied, with a usually hard emphasis on the honorific that made it sound like a slur.

Despite the way he wore his title like an ill-fitting coat, Samuel couldn’t help the way he bristled.

Dabney was not a lord himself, not an honored son of Aeravin.

No, Dabney was a Blood Worker of common background, crawling his way up to whatever position of power he could reach and clinging to it with a brutality that made Samuel sick.

Dabney should have known better, should have understood the consequences of what they dealt in.

“These details come now.” Samuel slammed his hand on the edge of the table, but Dabney didn’t even blink. “Or this project stops here.”

Dabney finally lifted his gaze, his eyes hard like flint. “Are you going against the Eternal King, my Lord Councillor? Because based on this—” he tapped the pile of papers before him “—this is happening, whether you like it or not.”

The blueprints stretched across the massive desk, gifted to them by the Eternal King himself, pages and pages of information detailing how the previous iteration of the Blood Factory had been run, along with a promise of limitless funds to expedite the process of building their own.

Perhaps it was a relief to the King, outsourcing this work to the Guard, freeing him and his Royal Blood Worker for other pursuits.

Perhaps he just needed to get it done as quickly as possible. Either way, Dabney was right.

There was no stopping this, no matter how wretched it made Samuel feel.

“If that’s how you see it,” Samuel ground out, “then perhaps I should leave you to handle the logistics.”

“Perhaps you should, lordling.” Dabney rose to his full height, a good head taller than Samuel, crossing his arms over his chest so that his breadth suddenly seemed so impressive. “Leave the hard work to the men who can handle it.”

Samuel didn’t flinch away from the insult, even though he wanted to.

Dabney didn’t understand—none of them understood.

It wasn’t the work that he objected to. But there was no way to convince these people that the Unblooded were anything more than walking sources of power, there to exploit as they saw fit.

And damn him as a fool for even trying. There was no chance of reaching him, man to man, so Samuel pulled the only trick he had left. He donned the mask of Lord Aberforth. If he could not convince Dabney to be an ally, then he would not give the man a choice.

There were other gambits in play, and it wouldn’t take much to shift his focus.

“You’re right,” he said, and Dabney narrowed his eyes at the simple acquiescence. “There is little that I can offer with this sort of planning. My expertise is needed elsewhere, crafting new laws, and since you have nothing to add…”

“Just you wait, Aberforth—”

Samuel cut him off by inclining his head, not quite a bow, but enough of a proper acknowledgment to startle Dabney.

It was a trick he’d learned from Shan—showing respect, just a hair of it, dripped in sarcasm, that threw people off their game.

Treating them like they weren’t even worth his time, as unimpressive and unimportant as an ant beneath his boot.

It worked like a charm every time, especially given his damned title, the blood that tied him to the Eternal King. Dabney might never respect him as a person, but he would respect the title he held and the power of the name he had been gifted.

“I will allow you to get back to your work, Dabney,” Samuel said, stepping back from the table, taking a moment to carefully smooth the planes of his suit jacket. “Please have your secretary send daily reports to mine. If I have any need of you, I’ll send for you.”

He saw himself out before Dabney could get another word in, past the startled guard that waited just outside Dabney’s office.

His second-in-command always lingered nearby, a shadow that lurked around the edges of their conversations.

She was a woman near Samuel’s own age, plain and mousy in appearance, but Dabney was grooming her to follow in his footsteps.

She eyed him with distrust as he brushed past, and any hopes of a different alliance burst as soon they bloomed, the woman’s name fading on his lips.

Lorraine Strickland would be no ally. There would be no allies here, no matter how desperately he hoped.

He swallowed the disappointment down, strolling through the headquarters of the Guard like he owned the place—which, as Councillor of Law, wasn’t far from the truth.

Though his work pulled him to the Parliament House more often than not, this was the realm he supposedly ruled, if not for men like Dabney undercutting him at every opportunity.

But he couldn’t let his frustration show, not if he wanted to be respected.

So, he kept his head held high as he walked through the narrow hallway between rows of offices, where captains and detectives worked their cases.

Samuel took a moment to brace himself at the top of the stairs, knowing what waited between him and the way out.

The holding cells and the interrogation rooms, where they held the criminals brought in for processing.

Dabney had said the design was ancient, a safety precaution as they stacked Blood Workers both above and below, a deterrent against jailbreak.

Once, it seemed safe enough. What Unblooded was foolish enough to stand up to so many Blood Workers?

But in the aftermath of Isaac’s escape, a new tension loomed, strung through the building like a held breath right before a battle.

Guards paced the hallways in an endless rotation, flashing their steel-tipped claws in warning as the Unblooded crowded towards the backs of their cells.

The floor was frigid, the early winter chill seeping in through the brick.

There were no fires in the winter or open windows in the summer—a security precaution, Samuel was told—leaving the Unblooded to suffer in whatever conditions the unfeeling weather had for them.

Samuel slipped past them, sinking his teeth into his own tongue to hold back any ill-thought-out words, any lashing of rage that threatened to burn its way up his throat.

He did not stop to look upon what he could not change, but he saw it anyway.

People who had once been just like him, poor and exhausted, pulled from the streets to be stuffed into cells like cattle, nearly overflowing.

With the new restrictions, as vaguely defined as they were, the Guard had every excuse to drag Unblooded back to the Guardhouses, to hold them with little reason besides the casual violence that they could.

And that was before Shan’s ingenious plan, and now Samuel ignored the way that he had seen the same souls here, day in and day out, waiting for processing and trials that never seemed to come.

He understood what it was for, the deliberate halt of progress as Dabney waited for the new Blood Factories to be built, ready to retroactively apply new punishments to the so-called crimes that came before it had ever been dreamt up.

More blood to drain from those who could barely afford it, not with the recently doubled Blood Taxes.

Samuel saw its effects all around him, the pallid skin and the exhaustion writ into their very skin.

It was unmissable, once one learned to look for it—he saw it here in these hells, in the servants that staffed the Parliament House, even in his own home, his secretary Jacobs moving with a stiffness and a fragility that came out of seemingly nowhere.

It was so obvious to him, but he did not believe any of the other Blood Workers around him even noticed. Not even Shan, for all her talk of helping the Unblooded.

There was nothing that Samuel could do about it. Not here. Not like this, not while Dabney still ruled this roost. No, if he was to make any change, if he was to make any headway at all, it would be through his role in the Parliament.

He gave one last, long look back at the cells, catching the eye of a young woman who glared at him with the most vicious expression.

She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, dressed in an old dress that was far too thin for this chill, but she held her head high, undaunted by the Blood Workers who sneered as they passed.

Samuel didn’t know if she recognized him for who he was—the Aberforth pulled from the slums, the greatest traitor to their suffering—or if she was just reacting to the richness of his clothes and the healthy shine to his skin.

It did not matter, for even without saying a word, Samuel saw the truth.

She hated him, and she had every right to.

Though he could do nothing to reassure her, he made a solemn vow that he would fix this, one way or another. That he would stop it before the cost grew too high to be unforgivable.

But first, he needed to learn the right way to play the game, and for that, he had a bill to draft.