Forged Absolution (Fates of the Bound Book 4) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Newsletter

  Titles

  About Wren

  Forged Absolution

  Fates of the Bound: Book 4

  Wren Weston

  Topsy-Turvy Publishing

  Topsy-Turvy Publishing

  512 West MLK Jr. Blvd, Suite 264

  Austin, Texas 78701

  Copyright © 2017 by Topsy-Turvy Publishing

  Cover Design by Deranged Doctor Design

  ISBN 978-1-68381-028-5 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-68381-029-2 (epub)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Visit Topsy-Turvy Publishing on the web at www.topsyturvypublishing.com.

  Visit Wren Weston at www.wrenweston.com.

  Contents

  Title Page ♦ Contents

  Chapter 1 ♦ Chapter 2 ♦ Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 ♦ Chapter 5 ♦ Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 ♦ Chapter 8 ♦ Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 ♦ Chapter 11 ♦ Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 ♦ Chapter 14 ♦ Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 ♦ Chapter 17 ♦ Chapter 18

  Chapter 19 ♦ Chapter 20 ♦ Chapter 21

  Chapter 22 ♦ Chapter 23 ♦ Chapter 24

  Chapter 25 ♦ Chapter 26 ♦ Chapter 27

  Chapter 28 ♦ Chapter 29 ♦ Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 ♦ Chapter 32 ♦ Chapter 33

  Newsletter ♦ Titles ♦ About Wren

  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 promised a Tuesday filled with damp and fog. A mid-December wind bit at her cheeks and ears and eyes, pawing at the skin underneath her sweater. Her boots and socks sat beside her in a pile. One scarred palm rested upon page twenty-five of a promising adventure novel.

  Lila ignored the novel.

  She couldn’t seem to care. Then again, 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 amid the brown grass, foggy lake, and faded, one-room cottage a hundred meters away.

  Lila turned her head back to the ink-filled sky.

  “What? No hello?”

  The woman sat next to her and removed her fur-lined boots before dipping a toe into the water. She hissed as it slipped below the surface. “You’re insane,” she muttered, pulling her foot back to the dock and drying it 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’m glad you decided to speak. I prefer conversations to monologues.”

  “How’d you find me?” Lila sat up. If the oracle had managed to track her, then perhaps she hadn’t hidden as well as she’d thought. The press and the Bullstow militia had spent the last few weeks searching for her. She’d rented the dilapidated cottage under an alias, paying cash after doctoring her face with rubber latex and makeup.

  Back then, a month by the lake had seemed like ages. She’d thought it would be plenty of time for her father, the prime minister, to straighten out the charges and the warrant against her. She’d earned them for hacking into BullNet, but it didn’t seem as though he’d intervened at all. Chief Shaw, the head of the Bullstow militia, had not dropped the charges against 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 more worried. Had things 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 brown weeds between them. She found no one waiting to arrest her, though. 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 might have been followed. She would have liked to spend one more night in a bed, even a lumpy one, but that would only postpone the inevitable. Her rent was due in the morning.

  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 from her secret account in Burgundy.

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

  Perhaps her mother had hired a hacker.

  How ironic.

  The oracle grasped her hand gently. “I know.”

  Lila pulled away and tugged on her socks. “What do you know?”

  Her stomach growled loudly, spoiling her annoyance. What a find time for her belly to weigh in. It had been growling a lot lately. As if she could just stumble into the cottage, open a few cupboards, and choose from the fare inside. Unfortunately, she’d only bought enough food for two weeks when she first hid out in the country, and she’d had to ration it after her credits disappeared.

  The last of h
er food had run out three days ago.

  “I know enough,” the oracle said.

  “I’m guessing you had a vision.”

  “Yes, thank the gods. You’re a hard person to find. I couldn’t risk sending him. I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

  “Him?”

  Had Tristan come?

  The oracle whistled sharply. The passenger door opened, and a man exited her car, dressed in a dark purple coat. Lila dimly remembered seeing him several months ago. His shoulders stretched so wide that he could barely fit in the small car, much less in his purplecoat and the gray uniform underneath, both indicative of the oracles’ militia. His arms and legs dwarfed several tree trunks near the cottage. Two guns rested on each hip, one not fit for tranqs. Purplecoats carried guns with bullets and, if the rumors were true, knives in their boots and poison in their rings. They were trained to kill, unapologetically keeping to the old ways.

  This one seemed too beautiful to be deadly, but a warning had been written into every muscle.

  A second man disembarked from the car’s back seat and closed the door gently, his head shaved close to the scalp. He wore no hat to stop the wind. A purple scarf wrapped around his neck, and his brown coat caught the wind, whipping it about his legs. His blood-red boots crunched across the weeds toward the dock.

  The oracle had not called upon Tristan, then. She’d sent for his half-brother instead.

  Lila slipped on her boots. “I have to go.”

  “Tristan isn’t with us.”

  “Tristan isn’t the problem. How do I know you didn’t bring Bullstow along?”

  “You know me.”

  “No, I don’t, and you didn’t answer the question.”

  “You don’t trust me. I suspect I wouldn’t trust anyone if I were in your shoes, either.” The oracle cocked her head. “Chef Ana came to see me. She told me everything she knew.”

  “I didn’t take her for a traitor.”

  “A traitor? You disappeared. She was worried.”

  “So worried that she hasn’t tried to get in touch with me?”

  “What do you call this? A candygram?”

  “Did you bring chocolate?”

  “No.”

  “Then this is a crap Candygram,” Lila said, snatching up her novel. “Bullstow might have followed you. I have to go.”

  “I wasn’t followed. Give me more credit than that.” The oracle turned and jutted her chin toward the massive purplecoat. “That’s Connell. He’s the chief of my militia. He’s—”

  “Sloppy. Or at least he could be. I don’t know him well enough to trust that he’s competent.”

  “You know that I am. I think I’ve proven it. If you challenge me again, then I’ll have Connell toss you into the lake. Do you want to go for a swim?”

  “I have tranqs.”

  “Fine. I’ll push you in myself. I enjoy getting my hands dirty from time to time.”

  “You think I won’t shoot an oracle?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you,” she said. “Chef Ana isn’t the only one who’s worried, you know. Dixon and Tristan are worried too, though Tristan has too much pride to say so. You two broke up, I see.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Lila stood up and tucked her novel into her coat pocket.

  “Maybe we should.”

  “Why? There’s nothing to tell. Don’t let the newspapers fool you.” Lila’s throat closed at the truth of it. When she’d left her mother’s compound, she’d intended on confessing her feelings to Tristan, to beg for his forgiveness, to admit that she loved him even though she’d realized it too late.

  She’d been ready to lay out her feelings and have a real conversation, rather than push him away. She’d even been ready to succumb to his terms, to vow that she’d never take another lover if that was what he wished.

  Unfortunately, she’d never had the chance. The day after the New Bristol Times broke her story online, they’d published two more in the print version. One story gave an in-depth account of how she’d pilfered information from BullNet, located on page two. But on the first page, Heartbroken Heir Runs Away from Home had been written in bold font. A picture of the grinning Senator La Roux lay underneath. The gossip columnists had kept up the romance angle all month until her arrest warrant had become a side story. They claimed that she’d fled because of La Roux’s death and her sorrow over it, rather than the charges against her and her arrest warrant. The daily barrage must have slapped Tristan every time he opened the paper.

  Her father had likely planted the stories while he parlayed with the senate disciplinary committee, trying to get her sentence reduced or lifted.

  “The heartbroken heir,” the oracle said, standing. “I like it better than the hanged heir, don’t you?”

  “Heartbroken? I hardly knew Senator La Roux.”

  “That’s not what I read. You’d been friends for years, and he died the night after you finally consummated your relationship. How tragic.”

  Lila stuffed her hands into her pockets.

  “Of course, I also read that you and Senator La Roux had been secret lovers for years, which is why he rarely took other partners. You were a rare love match among the highborn. Another said you’d both had plans to elope. It’s a tragedy that Senator La Roux died so suddenly, but you’ve become quite the sympathetic figure.”

  “Yes, my father’s been hard at work.”

  “Your father?”

  Lila shrugged uncertainly. “Or my mother. She had to explain my absence somehow. Matrons don’t look too kindly upon those who steal from Bullstow. They look even less kindly on those who run from a warrant. Luckily, she returned my mark before I ran. It looks good for her. It makes it look like she figured out what I’d done and kicked me out of the family, just as a matron should.”

  “Your parents didn’t place those stories, and you know it. I have many contacts, Ms. Randolph, and I’ve used those contacts to good advantage. I needed time to find you, and I didn’t want competition. No one wants to cash in a bounty on a tragic figure. They’d be in the papers for all the wrong reasons.”

  “You don’t get into that line of work because you care about things like that.”

  “I thinned the competition, then.”

  “Spoken like a matron. Why bother helping me?”

  “I told you before that you’re important to us. Your upcoming trial hasn’t changed that.”

  “That upcoming trial begins tomorrow,” Lila reminded her as Dixon and the purplecoat joined them. A scar ran across the purplecoat’s throat. He hadn’t gotten it by digging out a slave’s chip before his sentence ended, like Dixon. Dixon’s scar was tidy and medical and rested on the side of his throat. The purplecoat’s scar was messy and full of intention.

  Lila wondered how he’d earned it.

  “Yes, and those stories have muffled a great deal of the outrage against you,” the oracle said. “If you attend your trial—”

  “If I attend? I’m a highborn. We don’t run from our duty, no matter how unpleasant it might be. Neither does the disciplinary committee. Put away your childish ideas, oracle. Public perception does not sway the will of Bullstow. Senators aren’t so preoccupied with romance and love matches. Only the poorer classes can afford such whimsy.”

  Dixon hugged Lila, squeezing her tightly. His cold leather coat sucked the heat from her chin.

  She wondered if he and Tristan believed the stories in the news. The pictures would have dug under his skin, regardless of whether or not she’d had had some torrid romance with Senator La Roux. She’d told Tristan that her family needed an heir, which was the only reason why she and La Roux had spent a night together in the first place. It hadn’t mattered to Tristan, though. It wouldn’t matter that she’d called out Tristan’s name the entire time. It wouldn’t matter that she’d not realized her true fe
elings about him until that night.

  It wouldn’t matter to Tristan that La Roux had turned violent, punching her in the ribs and stomach, strangling her so fiercely that she could not breathe. It wouldn’t matter to him that La Roux had been the source of the Great Purge, a source who had destroyed her life.

  Tristan would probably think she deserved it.

  Perhaps she did.

  “Intervening in my affairs must have cost you,” Lila said after she and Dixon broke apart. “What exactly do you want?”

  “I want you to live. The oracles need you to live. Ten hackers have earned the hangman’s noose so far, and fifteen highborn have earned a lifetime of slavery for hiring them. No one has escaped with a day of freedom. The source of the Great Purge had quite the file on each of them.”

  “I know. I’ve kept up with the trials.”

  “Good, then you know they have a file on you, too. I don’t have to tell you what is plain. No one knows how the committee will rule on your case, but neither punishment works for me and mine. Nor will it work for you. We need you alive, Lila, and we need you free.”

  Lila shuffled her boots on the dock. The oracle had never used her first name before. It was a bit presumptuous, but perhaps after Lila’s help six weeks ago, formality had flown out the window. “I think you need my assistance for something now, not for some opaque task in the future.”

  “And you’ll need a place to stay, a place where Bullstow can’t touch you.”

  “You want to hide a criminal?”

  “I want to shelter a friend. A friend who can help us. A friend who, I’m guessing, has done nothing to warrant the trouble she finds herself in.”

  “You want to strike a bargain, is that it? I help you, and you’ll help me?”

  “No, I’ll help you regardless, and I hope you’ll be bored enough to help me.”

  Lila licked her lips. The simple path seemed so easy.

  Too easy.

  It wasn’t just duty that kept her from running from her trial. If she didn’t go, the committee would condemn her anyway. They’d sentence her to hang, and her father and Chief Shaw would confess their role in her activities, all to save her life. Their testimony would probably reduce the charges against her, but their necks would most likely be forfeit for granting a highborn full access to BullNet. Two would die to protect one. The math didn’t add up.