Chapter 32: Felt [1]

The scout’s back hit the tree trunk with a wet thud. Raven had him pinned before his feet found their footing, her knife a flat, cold promise against the underside of his jaw. The boy swallowed, a slow, painful motion that cost him something.

"Start talking," she said, her voice low and even, a sound that carried no heat and a world of consequence. "Who sent you. What the target actually is. How many more of you are scattered through this forest right now."

The boy just glared back at her, his jaw set, his mouth a thin, stubborn line. Fear radiated from him anyway, a palpable stink. It was in the hitch of his chest, the frantic darting of his eyes toward Cane, as if trying to calculate which one of them was the more immediate path to a shallow grave. But whatever loyalty—or terror—kept his mouth shut was winning. For now.

Cane leaned back against the nearest trunk, his arms crossed. He was content to let her run the opening. It was somewhere in that tense, drawn-out silence that his attention drifted, unhelpfully, to the state of Raven’s top. It was still torn half open from the scuffle back in the clearing, hanging loose enough off one shoulder that every slight shift of her weight gave him a clean, repeated look at the plain dark fabric of her bra, pulled tight over breasts that were modest but, in his professional opinion, absolutely not underselling themselves.

Her hip cocked at an angle that wasn’t a performance, just the natural stance of someone used to holding a blade steady, but the sway of it still caught his eye. It dragged his gaze down over the solid curve of her hips and the way her thighs shifted under the pleated fabric when she leaned her weight forward to loom over the kid a little harder. Her skirt rode up just enough to remind him he still didn’t actually know what colour her panties were today.

He caught himself doing it. Cataloguing a woman’s tits mid-interrogation was possibly the worst timing he’d managed yet. He dragged his focus back to the actual problem currently pinned against a tree.

He sighed, a long, put-upon sound, as if this were somehow inconveniencing his afternoon more than the boy’s. "Is Alexander the one who sent you out here?" he asked, his voice mild as anything.

The kid’s eyes went wide, real shock punching through the fear. "How—how do you know that name?" he blurted out before he could stop himself.

Raven’s head snapped toward Cane so fast her hair whipped with the motion. "What the hell do you think you’re doing?"

Cane didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes locked on the boy, his expression patient. "I know how Alexander recruits. He doesn’t build an army out of true believers. Not when a true believer is so much harder to control than someone with something to lose." He softened his voice, a gentle, probing sound. "Did he threaten your family? Is that how this started?"

The kid’s face twisted, a messy knot of anger and fear and the specific horror of being caught. "No," he stammered, too fast, too defensive.

Raven looked genuinely thrown, watching Cane like she was trying to work out where he was pulling any of this from. The boy himself looked more rattled than she did. Cane pressed on without giving either of them room to interrupt.

"This is his method. It has been for years. Find a family drowning in debt, offer to make it disappear. Suddenly, you’ve got a foot soldier who isn’t fighting for a cause at all. He’s just fighting because the alternative is watching his parents lose everything." Cane looked at him, his expression flat. "I happen to be a noble. With actual money behind the name, whether I earned it or not. Paying off one family’s debt is nothing to me. All you’d need to do in exchange is feed us information instead of him. Be a double agent. Simple. Clean. Survivable."

The boy didn’t buy a word of it. "You’re lying!" he yelled, his voice cracking with the effort. "There’s nothing anyone can do against Alexander! He’s too powerful, too connected, too far beyond the reach of some noble brat playing hero in the woods!"

Raven’s grip on the knife tightened at that, her jaw setting harder. For a second, Cane genuinely couldn’t tell if she was more offended on Alexander’s behalf or her own. He just sighed again, unbothered by the outburst.

"What’s your name?"

The boy stuttered through something that barely qualified as an answer.

"Listen to me," Cane said, his voice calm. "Actually listen. We already know about the attack. We already know Alexander is running it. What we want isn’t a body count. It isn’t revenge. It’s not even punishment for whatever you’ve already done under his orders. We want to stop it, cleanly, with as few people dead as possible. For that, we need real information. Accurate information. Nothing more complicated than that. If you can give us that, the money is genuinely nothing I can’t cover."

That’s when the tears started. They welled up fast in the kid’s eyes, hot and helpless. "Are you... are you telling the truth?" his voice went small, uncertain.

Cane held his gaze, steady. "I swear it on my family name." A name that, whatever else people thought of it, still meant something when put on the line like that.

The boy was still visibly distrustful, braced for the knife or the betrayal or both, but his shoulders started to shake. Decline, and there was a real chance Alexander would find out he’d hesitated, that he’d be turned in as a liability. Accept, and there was an equally real chance Alexander would find out anyway and kill him for the betrayal outright.

Raven had gone quiet, the knife still held steady but no longer pressed quite so hard against his throat.

The boy was still quivering, but it looked like he was ready to say something now.