The Gender Game by Bella Forrest (historical books to read txt) 📗

no neutral witnesses—only she, the victim and his accomplice were present at the scene—she had no way to prove that she had been acting in self-defense. Viggo found her in the morning, stumbling back toward their home. After she told him what had happened, he tried to cover up her crime… obviously knowing what would ensue for her. He made an attempt to ship her back to Matrus, but failed. She was taken before the judge, and—given that she was already guilty of having left her husband and roaming the streets unsupervised at night—there was little sympathy for her in the trial. Long story short, she ended up being sentenced to hanging."

Hung for acting in self-defense. The sheer injustice caused the blood to drain from my face.

"Viggo was to serve four years in jail for his act of dishonesty. But, given his skill and the value he added to the city's security force, jail time was deemed a waste for him. He was made a special offer: resume his position as a palace warden and serve without pay for four years… He's in his second year now. His wife's death has obviously scarred him. He moved away from the city and set up in a cabin in the mountains a few weeks after the hanging. He's never been the most approachable of guys, but since he lost her, he's notorious for being tightly strung—as you may have noticed.”

Lee rose to his feet and paced in front of the window.

"So, in sum, we have a man with a clear grudge against the state, who has lost his wife, and is now leading a life that's been forced upon him… Men have snapped beneath lesser burdens." He caught my eye. "But just as important as all of this," he went on, "is that he was made chief coordinator. He has access to the lab… It would honestly be hard to think of a more suitable person to lay the blame on."

My stomach tensed. An innocent person. We would be framing an innocent man, who had obviously already been through hell and back. This didn't sit right with me. At all.

"There must be some other way we can pull this off," I breathed. "I can't believe that laying the blame on someone else is the only way. What if we didn't set this up as a terrorist attack but instead… I don't know, some other kind of explosion in the building? It's a laboratory, Lee. Surely there are other exploitable options?" Options that don't involve a beating heart.

Lee shook his head. "I've thought this through, Violet. I've thought this through for days. I understand your hesitation to frame an innocent person—of course I understand. I feel as uneasy as you about it. But this is the only way we can convincingly pull it off without laying the blame squarely on Matrus. Remember, Patrus stole the egg from Matrus in the first place. We are only retrieving what is ours."

‘What is ours’. You mean what is the queen's and her army of scientists’. An object whose contents I still had no damn idea about.

I pursed my lips, my stomach continuing to churn.

"So," Lee continued, his voice becoming more subdued. "The next question is, how exactly would we go about setting the man up as an anarchist? How would we make it convincing? How do we make sure that he's at the right place at the right time?"

I didn't feel like offering any more suggestions. Lee had apparently already thought all this through, anyway.

"The first issue," he said, "is that we need to be able to track his movements, and understand his day. We need to be aware of when he's doing his rounds by the Crescent, when he's at home, and when he's at the gym or in the cage."

"Cage?" I interrupted.

"He's a professional cage fighter. That's what he does for money these days. Takes as many fights as he can while off work."

"Oh. I see." I recalled the conversation Simon and Lee's other colleagues had regarding the sport's popularity here in Patrus. "How would we track him?"

"Come with me," Lee said, gesturing to the door. I rose and followed him to his bedroom where he sat down at his desk in front of a computer monitor before pulling open a drawer and lifting out a ball of metal foil. Within it was a semi-transparent gel-filled capsule that I almost didn't notice because of its minuscule size. In the center of it was a black dot. I leaned closer. Some kind of… square object? My eyes weren't sharp enough. I would need a microscope to be able to describe it better.

"What is it?" I asked.

"An ingestible tracking device."

My eyes shot up to meet Lee's.

"Are you serious?"

"Yup," Lee said. "Swallow it down with some water, and it will embed itself in the gut—staying there for up to three weeks."

Ugh. "Where did you get this thing?"

"It was developed in Matrus, actually," he said. "I picked it up from Alastair during my last visit to the queen's palace. It's so tiny, you wouldn't even notice it gliding down your throat when swallowed with a gulp of liquid. He'll never know it's inside him, and it'll pass through naturally on its expiry."

"H-How would you actually make him swallow this?"

Lee refolded the foil around the capsule and placed it in my hand. "The question is, how will you?"

14

"Slipping Viggo this tracker will be your first task," Lee explained. "And it needs to be done as soon as possible. He has a fight tomorrow night on the outskirts of town. I'll drop you off there, and you'll need to figure out how to do it."

Lee opened up his cupboard and pulled out a stiff shirt and an even stiffer gray suit. The shirt and jacket were padded around the shoulders. A man's outfit.

My lips parted.

"Try this on," he said.

As I pulled the costume on over my clothes, it was surprisingly lightweight and comfortable. I looked