Page 13

Snakes in the Grass

Delores

The guys have me surrounded as we walk through the corridor towards the dining car.

That was voted the best place to poke around first, and though I don’t think I’d be comfortable eating anything there, I agree it will be full of preds and prey chatting freely.

I’m not sure exactly what the outside world is saying about the attack a few weeks ago, because Fitz is certain the Prednet at l’Academie was being throttled by some program he claims is damn near impossible to thwart.

He said we could deal with it if we got on site access to their servers, but no one seems to know where that is.

Yet another fucking item to add to our boards full of baddies and problems that keep piling up.

But being in the middle of a crowd of ‘normal’ shifters, despite the potential dangers, may help us find out what they were told.

Apex and Cappie’s disasters were billed as attacks and explosions, but no one actually blocked our ability to really check what the world knew.

The Council, and by extension the mysterious Society, seems to be escalating their tight-fisted control over anyone who has witnessed the events that suggest we’re headed for a war.

“What are you thinking so hard about, Baby Girl?” Fitz asks as he bumps my shoulder. His expression is worried and I can’t help smiling fondly.

“The rest of our… people… or whatever? They don’t know that this rebellion is gearing up for an all-out war.

Fae are still a long-forgotten story from the past to them, not a present danger.

Even if they find out—which they will when something big enough happens—it will be spun that they’re evil and deserve to be cast out for eternity. ”

“Your sense of fairness and justice is one of the many reasons we love you, Angel.” Chess says as he grabs my hand to lace our fingers together.

“However, I don’t believe that most preds are even aware of how terrible the Council is.

They’ve been handed the top rungs of the ladder in the shifter hierarchy for centuries, and that means they don’t care if prey or Fae or anyone else is being oppressed—not really. ”

Blinking as Felix guides us to a fancy table in the back, I consider what my knight just told me.

I know that I’ve lived a very privileged life because of my parents, but…

How can people know others are suffering and just ignore it because they’re comfortable?

Sure, I was young and na?ve for a long time.

I didn’t understand because Lucille and Bruno made sure I knew almost nothing about the ‘real’ world.

But the bullshit going on around me since I first stepped foot on the Apex campus for the tour lifted that veil.

Working for Luc and seeing how lovely the relationship between him and the pangolins was changed everything for me.

And when I got to Apex, not being a fucking bigoted asshole saved my life .

I can’t fathom others going about their days without once questioning how our stupid leaders are the actual bad guys.

That definitely includes Lucille, the Khans, and anyone else who is helping to uphold this bullshit.

I press my lips together, feeling an unexpected amount of rage from my bunny that floods my veins and heats my skin. “I hate this.”

Fitz tugs me over to a chair, pulling it out for me and sitting down to look me in the eye. “You hate what, Baby Girl? What’s wrong?”

Looking around, I lean forward and whisper, “I hate that people are complacent. I hate that prey suffer and so do lesser preds. I hate that our new… enemies… were unjustly exiled. This entire system is horrific, and I’m probably the wrong person to be outraged because of how I grew up.

But that doesn’t matter ; my bunny is so damn angry .

If I didn’t have rich parents or this whatever inside of me, I would definitely have been killed when I emerged.

How many shifters are killed for much less because of the laws put in place by our ancestors and upheld by our current families? ”

I duck my head, fighting the emotions threatening to come out through my tear ducts. A body takes the chair on my other side and I know by the scent that it’s Felix. His hand reaches over, grasping my face to get me to look up at him. Soft eyes meet mine and he smiles softly as he stares at me.

“Princess, I know how you feel. I grew up at the feet of a vicious dictator, as did Chess and Fitz. My dream was to pretend as well as I could until it was time to take over for my father, then make genuine changes to free our people. The choices I made about love prevented me from doing that, and as a result, I was removed from the very thing that I could use to free everyone on Bloodstone. Abused as we were, my brothers and I were still privileged, but it didn’t mean we couldn’t do anything possible to make the world better. ”

“And being exiled doesn’t mean that it still isn’t the goal,” Fitz adds, as his hand drops to my knee.

“Meeting you, getting embroiled in the bigger picture by proxy? That means we now can help more people if we do this right. We’re not perfect and we’re definitely not where people expect the resistance to come from, Dolly, but we are in a position to facilitate change. ”

Chess leans over Fitz’s shoulders with a lop-sided grin. “The fact that they came out of their holes and want to is all because of you, Angel. So anyone who gives you shit about not being their idea of a rebel, can catch me outside. Got it?”

Be still, my heart. The Khan boys are really taking a page out of the stony poet’s book today.

Our recon mission to the dining car was more useful than I could have expected.

So far, we’ve been able to find out that the Council passed the attack at the stadium off as a gas leak in the boilers that slowly spread into the air.

All the injuries and casualties were written off as unavoidable because of the location of the school and the response time of the Parisian medical teams. People aren’t in the slightest bit curious about what gas or why it happened—we just heard off-hand comments about seeing it in the paper or on the news.

Pretty good cover-up they pulled off, despite the main governing body being in the US.

“I’m not surprised,” Renard says as he pretends to scroll on his phone.

“The European council is very subservient to their United States counterparts. It’s a balance shift that happened not long after the human revolutions over there; a lot of preds and prey emigrated to the new world because the opportunity was so great.

Of course, the families running it grabbed hold after the Treaty and now… ”

“Yeah, now they’re the top dogs,” I sigh as I fiddle with the linen-wrapped flatware in front of me. “My mother rules the roost, and her cronies helped our family dominate the whole damn thing centuries ago.”

“I’m not so sure about that, snack size.

” We all look at Aubrey, and he shrugs casually as he leans back in his chair.

He’s making sure his words are softer than many species can hear and his lips are barely moving.

“Yes, I think the families all conspired. But I think your mother’s family is the one who has been pulling a lot of the strings.

The bigger names were probably in on the mini-coup: Eriksons, Barrington, Khan, Charles, Hopewell, and a few more.

But many of their lines are from Europe originally, and taking over from across the pond was a strategic move to expand their power and wealth base. ”

I lean forward on the table, putting my face in my hands as his words sink in. “Every time I think we’ve delved deeply enough that we can possibly start eliminating pieces from our overcrowded board…”

“We’re working on some of them, ma petite .” Renard’s rumbling voice is comforting, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re being overwhelmed.

“No matter how many allies we find, it’s still not enough,” I mumble into my palms. “Look at how far their reach goes. There were like… a zillion preds at that match. They saw what happened. But not a word of that has reached the regular people walking around doing their day-to-day shit.”

“That’s true, lunchable. They control the media, and a lot of other things that would make getting support easier.

” Aubrey pauses, and I know he’s gathering his thoughts as the table falls silent.

When he speaks again, his tone is confident.

“But you are an icon—or you’re becoming one.

The tigers are icons. Zhenga is an icon.

All that fame and infamy from your families and activities will help us curry favor.

Plus, as much as I hate to admit it, the Fae will do their own campaign to reveal the corruption of the Council. ”

I pick my words carefully as I respond. “You think the small group—the one we can’t find the information about—is made up of the prior suggestions, don’t you?”

The dragon’s smoke rings heat the air as they cross the table; I can feel it. “I do. I may not have identified all the parties exactly, but I believe the ones we discussed are part of the founders. Farther back, obviously, and spanning the globe.”

He means the elusive grandfather Lucille has always praised like some hero of the old country.

“Do you think… Bruno?” I ask hesitantly. “Is his family…”

“No way,” Fitz says with a snort. “We saw how your mother treated him, even in public. The accident was the most obvious thing in the entire universe and no one has questioned it. All that coverage we saw defined it as a crash from the second it happened with no investigation.”

“He’s right.” Chess looks at me seriously, his beautiful eyes wide.

“You didn’t hear a peep out of your grandmother on that side, and your mother has mostly left you alone since it happened.

She arranged it when he was no longer necessary for the agenda she and her ‘papa’ are pursuing.

Their marriage was likely a gambit as well. ”

I never thought Lucille and Bruno loved one another; they could barely stand to be near one another sober.

Truthfully, I couldn’t picture them drunk enough to have conceived me without killing one another.

The ‘blue magic, maybe not his kid’ discovery was rattling at first, but this?

It makes perfect sense. If Lucille was pushed to marry Bruno to solidify their control of the more powerful American council…

Yeah, that fits like a glove and explains why neither of them have ever liked me, even as a baby.

“Do you think…” I lick my lips, keeping my mouth covered as I dart my eyes between my men before I continue. “Do you think maybe Lucille went outside of their arranged thing because Bruno couldn’t… make an heir happen? Maybe she purposefully sought something different on purpose?”

They all look shocked for a second and not one of my chatty mates seems capable of replying.

Aubrey and Rennie turn to look at one another, doing their eyebrow thing.

Fitz and Felix gape like cartoon characters, and Chess just stares blankly.

I may have broken them with my leap of intuition, but I read a lot of romance and, well…

Lucille is definitely a scheming villain who would try to goose her power and status by breaking the laws everyone else would be executed for violating.

She’d do it even harder if she thought the result of her criminal behavior would give her the advantage.

I don’t know how to be the keystone to some evil plan that started before I was conceived; the pressure is too much.