Barren Vows (Fates of the Bound Book 3)

by Wren Weston

  “Who else—”

  “Everyone else will be suffering with you, including Senator Dubois,” the slave replied, rolling her eyes.

  “Well, in that case, the chairwoman will have many targets. Please tell Sutton to come up.”

  “Up here?”

  “Yes. Leave the door open.”

  Alex bowed. Her clicking heels retreated down the corridor.

  While Lila waited for Sutton, she scanned through the latest search results on the BullNet data. This time, she’d received a hit.

  She looked up as the new chief entered the room, her leather blackcoat duller than the polished ebony furniture. Lila’s heart stuttered at the uniform she’d never be allowed to wear again, at the position she’d worked so hard for, now slipping through her fingers. If she’d known two weeks ago that she’d never wear the uniform again, she might have tried to enjoy it more on her last day.

  Alex put down a kettle of hot chocolate and two mugs, then closed the door behind her.

  “I haven’t been here since you were a rookie.” Sutton smirked, running her finger over the silver coat of arms. “It looks exactly the same. It looks just like your office, actually, except for this on the wall.”

  “That was the point.”

  Sutton nodded and tucked her arms behind her back. “So when does your new position become official, madam? The militia looks at me like they already know.”

  “They might. Someone might have spotted me at the clinic yesterday.” Lila picked up a little pin molded into the shape of a star from her desk. She ushered Sutton to the couch, plopping down on one end while Sutton sat on the other. “It might come out tomorrow night at the Closing Ball, no matter what my mother has promised. She’s not always subtle in these matters.”

  “In that case, I suppose we should make plans to address the militia.”

  “You’re probably right. Sometime early next week, perhaps. And on that day, you’ll need another star for your collar.” Lila pressed the little pin into Sutton’s palm. “I thought you might like one of mine. I could get you a new one, if—”

  Her former mentor shook her head, squeezing the pin in her fist. “No, I’d be honored to wear Her Madam’s pin.” She opened her palm, her finger brushing the star as though it were a diamond.

  Lila nodded and poured them both a mug of hot chocolate. “We’ll hold a ceremony next week. Dress uniforms, speeches, toasts, champagne.” The commander’s face fell. “I know you don’t like to make a fuss, but it’s a necessary ritual, especially for the people under your command. I’m sure there’s some psychological term for it, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

  Sutton chuckled at that, still turning the silver pin over and over in her fingers. “I suspect so. You never make it easy on me, do you?”

  “I’m like a rose, always pricking.”

  Sutton carefully put the pin into her pocket. “Ms. Nancy Randolph from accounting has run into a bit of trouble. Her son Anthony was arrested last night for another bit of mischief.”

  Lila raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s why I came to talk to you. The kid was in the process of reprogramming his building’s security system. Instead of emitting a beep when someone entered the wrong code, it was rewired to give off a mild electric shock. He was in the process of changing the code when we arrived.”

  “The forced-entry program notified us?”

  “Yes, Chief—President Randolph. Your program worked perfectly.”

  Lila’s face fell with the change of her title, but she was getting more and more used to it as the days wore on. Forcing a smile, she leaned back into the couch, her mug of hot chocolate forgotten. “It only worked because Anthony didn’t know about it. I almost admire the kid. Most twelve-year-olds have trouble with algebra and basic programming. Meanwhile, he’s scrambling security systems.”

  “Nostalgia makes fools of us all. It was only a condo this time, but an internship with one of the R&D departments might put his energies to better use. It might also save us the trouble of dealing with him yet again.”

  “I should have done it sooner. Is he still at the security office?”

  “Yes, in a holding cell. He thinks he’s going to court next week and might lose his mark. Ms. Randolph is encouraging our playacting. She’s at her wits’ end. She’s willing to try anything at this point. When she visited this morning, she told him that if we pressed charges and sent him to Bullstow, then she wouldn’t get him a lawyer. She claimed that if he’s sent to auction, then she’ll pack his lunch and wave him off to live with whatever family buys him. It shut the boy up fast. He hasn’t eaten a thing since. Perhaps it’s made a dent this time.”

  “I’ll call around to the labs and find him a spot. He’ll be out of your hair before dinner.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Sutton countered.

  “Fine. You can offer the deal, then.”

  “A deal? How very film noir of you. I’ll tell him it’s only good if he keeps his nose clean from now on, or we’ll toss him in the lake. Is that the standard line?”

  “How would I know? I haven’t had time for a movie in years. Are you sure you still want the job?”

  Sutton straightened her shoulders instantly. “I’ve never cared much for the cinema, madam. I won’t miss it.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “I’ve never cared much for him either,” she said, her lips twitching. “I care a great deal about you, though. I hope that when I’m chief we can still talk as we have over the years. At least sometimes. I’ve always considered you something of a friend. I should have said that this morning instead of razzing you. It’s been bugging me all day.”

  Lila nodded quickly, her eyes beginning to water.

  Sutton knew her too well. She stood up quickly and clasped Lila’s injured hand, not spying its red hue.

  Lila didn’t say a word. The throbbing returned as Sutton crushed it affectionately, and Lila had to stop herself from crying out in an altogether different manner.

  But at least she hadn’t started blubbering in front of the woman.

  After Sutton left, Lila snatched up her palm. It took only a few moments to call one of the R&D labs about Anthony. After a brief conversation, she managed to find the boy a place with a take-no-shit lab director who didn’t seem too put off by having the boy in her lab. Lila sent the details to Sutton and plopped down at her desk, finally able to pull up her search results.

  Smiling, she scanned the data. Her search had found several cruder versions of the same trap from the BIRD. The least sophisticated had been melded into the state’s mental health registry almost four years before.

  Reaper hadn’t even lived in New Bristol back then.

  Her hunch had been correct, then. Reaper and Zephyr were not the same person. Reaper had likely been a pawn, just another hacker her blackmailer had turned.

  More to the point, Zephyr had chosen a difficult database to infect for a first attempt.

  The hacker was either impatient or arrogant, or both.

  Lila dug into the trap, pulling back each strand of the web until she located the hacker’s ID. It did not belong to Zephyr. It was someone called the Baron.

  Lila snorted at the obviously fake ID, an ID predicated on aristocratic German nobility. What was the hacker trying to say with that? It couldn’t be a German who’d infected BullNet. It wasn’t the empire’s style. The empire was a loaded gun, pointed at your head. Zephyr and the Baron, on the other hand, led you with a plume of perfume, tempting you to fall obliviously onto a pile of spikes.

  No, the ID didn’t belong to an enemy merc.

  Lila set up an exhaustive search for the Baron’s ID and let it run, wondering where else the hacker’s sticky little fingers might have been, but she had no idea if the search was pointless or not. Reaper, Zephyr, and now the Baron? How many more
IDs might she find?

  Would they lead to her blackmailer or to more questions?

  Her eyes lit onto the scrap of paper with Sergeant Davies’s palm ID. While she waited for the search to run, she hacked into Davies’s account data at Bullstow Financial and cycled through his current statement.

  She found no new transactions.

  Unconvinced that he’d suddenly become a good boy, Lila hacked deeper. The Park family owned a chain of banks, a chain that Lila had hacked into on the previous case with her father. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that Davies had set up an alternate account.

  It took less than half an hour to prove her instinct right. Davies had opened an account only three weeks before. Nothing had graced it but one deposit that very morning. One payment from a Liberté bank account that she’d never seen. One payment for the exact amount he’d received the month before.

  Whoever had been pulling Davies’s strings had found another way to pull them.

  What was the purpose of the payment? To stir up trouble by asking for the family’s logins? To pay for the assassination of a prime who had gotten far too close for comfort?

  The amount was too high for a few calls, but it damn sure seemed too low for an assassination attempt.

  Then again, perhaps she valued her own neck more than the account holder did.

  Lila pushed the implications out of her mind and turned the investigation back to her assassination. She poked into WolfNet and pulled up the garage’s security footage from the night before, syncing each camera perfectly and setting them to run simultaneously on her screen. They played in reverse from the moment she picked up her motorcycle that morning.

  It didn’t take too long to find it. There were no cuts in the footage. The cameras hadn’t been damaged, nor had they gone out or been sprayed over. They hadn’t been looped or hacked, either.

  Whoever had done the job was too smart for that, likely knowing that someone always watched the cameras in the security office. Usually several someones, not to mention Lila’s programs. The latter would detect many anomalies too subtle for a pair of bored militia eyes.

  The break-in had occurred at four o’clock that morning while she slept off the effects of her surgery. A figure clothed in a short black coat had crept into the garage and wheeled Lila’s Firefly into the back of the garage behind her silver Adessi roadster. Five minutes later, the motorcycle had been wheeled back into place.

  She could hardly blame her people for not spotting the intruder. The footage was so dark that you could barely make anything out. The snoop had used night-vision goggles and deactivated the motion sensors in the garage, for the lights should have turned on the moment anyone walked inside or stepped near the building. The change in brightness would have triggered her programs to increase the camera’s priority, demanding that someone in the security office look immediately.

  The snoop had bested Lila’s system by going low tech, rather than high.

  Instead of stopping the cameras, Lila let them run back further, watching every view, waiting to see the intruder loiter in the garage during the daytime. Judging by the form’s shape and size, it had to have been a teenage boy or a petite woman.

  It didn’t take long to find the figure again. At around eight o’clock, a figure in the same black coat darted into the garage behind Jewel and Senator Dubois, crawling along the perimeter while the couple laughed and stole a kiss, their bodies pressing against one another and the chairwoman’s Blanc roadster.

  Lila reversed the footage and squinted at her monitor. The intruder had added something on the motion sensor’s plugs. If she had to guess, it was some sort of switch that turned them on and off remotely.

  The snoop then slinked around the wall, waiting to dart out once more as soon as Jewel and Senator Dubois left the garage in a sedan.

  It had only taken five minutes to get the job done, and Jewel and Senator Dubois had never even realized they’d been accomplices.

  Lila followed the figure through the compound’s security footage, watching as the snoop dodged a militia patrol after leaving the garage, nearly getting caught in the process. Long red hair peeked from a skull cap, but the intruder managed to avoid the cameras well enough to stay hidden. The trail ended ten blocks away when the snoop ducked into an alley on the north side of the complex and did not come out again.

  Whoever wanted to kill Lila knew the positions of the security cameras, or at least knew them enough to get away.

  That seemed to rule out Sergeant Davies, and increased the likelihood that someone in her own family was trying to kill her.

  Lila snatched up her palm, ready to order an extra patrol near the garage. The only thing that stopped her was Sutton. The new chief would want to know why she’d ordered the change.

  Not only that, but there was a reason why patrols didn’t pass by the garage so often.

  Lila liked slipping out of the compound with as few eyes upon her as possible.

  She sent Sutton and McKinley a message anyway, attaching the camera footage and asking for a discreet investigation. Between the pair of them, they had plenty of knowledge and experience to ferret out the culprit.

  Unfortunately, she had a compromised doctor to investigate.

  Logging onto Randolph General’s network with her own ID, she searched for copies of Rubio’s pay history. The hospital would have the doctor’s bank account information, which would make hacking into her accounts much more straightforward. She’d dig into Rubio’s financials and her personal accounts, finding out exactly what relationship the doctor had with the chairwoman in the process.

  Lila sucked in her breath when Rubio’s pay history came up. Somehow, the young doctor received a bonus paycheck every month, marked as overtime in the system. After reviewing the clinic’s schedule, the hours billed for each doctor, and the budget, Lila could not locate the reason or the source for her overtime pay. When she looked further at the payment itself, she found that it was paid out of the Randolph family’s discretionary account.

  Lila paced around the room, her boots stamping on the floor as she turned, her sore fingers thumping against her thigh. She spent several weeks wrangling donations every year from the highborn for that money. She used the extra cash for equipment or supplies that department budgets couldn’t quite cover. Occasionally, she even treated departments by stocking their lounge with free food and other gifts as a reward for exceptional service.

  Someone had diverted a precious chunk of that money for the last ten months. Not only had Rubio been paid off since her very first day at the hospital, but someone had used the hospital’s own funds to do it.

  What had Rubio been doing in the clinic for that extra money, and why had the chairwoman been particularly generous this year with her donation?

  Lila returned to her desk, her toe tapping against her chair. She’d always known everything that went on at Randolph General and on every family estate. How could something like this escape her attention? Sure, she’d been stretched thin lately, especially in the last month, but that was no excuse. Very few people even knew about the discretionary account. Only a handful had access to it.

  Her mother was at the top of the list.

  Lila dismissed that thought immediately. Her mother wouldn’t have bribed Rubio with money, especially from the hospital’s account. Money left a trail that could be traced by other spies. It was sloppy. She would have traded opportunity for favors, especially opportunities that could be taken away on a whim. The chairwoman would have offered Rubio the job, not added bonus payments to it.

  So what had happened ten months ago to start the payments? Why would the doctor keep receiving them month after month?

  An unpleasant thought struck Lila.

  Had Rubio blackmailed her mother?

  That was silly, wasn’t it? The chairwoman would not allow herself to be blackmailed, not by a work
born. She’d consider it an insult. She would have summoned her chief the second she received a blackmailer’s demand.

  On the other hand, Rubio could be doing something useful for the chairwoman.

  Lila squinted at the screen, her mind pinwheeling. Perhaps the reason did not matter much in the short term. What did matter was that her mother had hired Rubio as a spy, and not just a few days ago, either. With such a history, the doctor would certainly tell the chairwoman that she’d asked about Dubois’s medical records. Lila should never have attempted to gain information from someone she had not thoroughly vetted beforehand.

  What had she been thinking?

  “Wine, anesthesia, pain medication.” Lila ticked off the reasons on her fingers. Clearly, thought had not entered into her decision-making at all.

  Following her last lead, Lila sat back at her desk and pulled up the most current list of businesses for the Randolph family, as well as the records for her R&D departments. She knew what she’d find, though. The family did not operate or partner with any agriculture enterprises, nor had the family been pursuing research into NAT or other fertilizers.

  Lila turned off her monitor and left her computer searching for the Baron’s ID, the hum of the tower quiet in the room. Wandering over to the closet, she checked the time, which glowed back on the apathetic display, signaling she was already late for dinner.

  Lila didn’t care. Her fingers strayed over her beloved militia uniforms and settled on her blackcoat. She brushed the silver stars on her collar and the tiny pinprick hole where one had gone astray. It would now live in Sutton’s pocket, waiting for the day when it would be reattached to a new uniform, for the day that Sutton would take command of the militia.

  Her militia.

  Lila stamped her foot against the floor, like a spoiled child. It wasn’t fair. She’d worked so hard and given up so much, and now it was all being taken away.

  Even Tristan.

  She’d never even gotten a chance to say goodbye to her old life properly. All her blackcoats and uniforms would be destroyed in a matter of days, all to make room for the dresses and whitecoats of a prime.