42

Asher

Is it too reckless to burn a whole city to the ground?

That’s what I’m wondering as I flip through my piles of paperwork in the library. My eyes scrape over the notes I’ve kept for the last few months. Plans upon plans exist in my esoteric scribbles. Some are in code, others meaningless drivel to the untrained eye.

But for people like me—a man neck-deep in a bloody war—it’s an instruction manual. Except it didn’t work, I remind myself furiously. Meticulous planning, yet nothing has come to fucking fruition! None of my men have reported movement by Yannick in the last week. Other than sending someone to shoot up the studio, he seems to have vanished from the face of this earth.

I have to dig him out of his hole. My fingertips crimp the edges of my notes. I imagine the paper is his throat and start crushing it into a ball. It’s not like I need these documents anymore. They haven’t done me any good.

There’s a light knock on the frame of the library door. My head jerks up. Camila is