“But,” said Obralle, “My lady sent me to—”
“Never mind that,” Lord D’Luc snapped. “Here’s a new order. Go back to your room.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
There was a strained silence as Obralle departed. Ru’s breathing began to steady as the professor disappeared from view.
Gwyneth’s fingers were still curled around hers in a death grip. “Don’t make her do another demonstration,” said Gwyneth.
“I had no intention of it,” replied the lord, an edge to his voice. “Delara, look at me.”
Ru looked away, unable to meet his gaze. The artifact’s rage was subsiding with hers, and along with it, the uncontrolled terror. But he was not the comfort she needed.
“Delara.”
At last, she turned to face him, and his hard blue gaze swept over her. Almost as if he were worried. As if he cared.
“Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, YourGrace,” Archie’s words were sharp as glass, the color high in his freckled cheeks, “but what the devil are you playing at?”
Hugon glanced at Archie. “Professor Obralle was confused. She and the others have only just begun to recover from their ailment. A brain fever.” He turned back to Ru. “A miscommunication, perhaps.”
“A brain fever?” Gwyneth echoed, eyes wide with anger and shock. “Miscommunication?”
Archie, too, was heaving with incredulity. “The professors have recovered? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” said Lord D’Luc, smiling without mirth. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re late for breakfast. Delara, shall we?”
Gwyneth opened her mouth to speak, but Ru held up a hand to stop her. She was tired of it. Tired of her friends feeling the need to protect her, to speak for her, tired of being a constant burden to them. She was a grown woman, wasn’t she? An archaeologist, an academic, and so many other things that were not this unrelenting fear.
“Yes, we shall,” Ru said. “Gwyn, Arch…” She gave each of them a hard stare, trying to show that she meant what she said, that Lord D’Luc didn’t fully have her in his clutches. She hoped they understood that he never would. “I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will,” said Lord D’Luc, and she took his elbow with cold fingers.
They left Archie and Gwyneth standing in the corridor together, watching Ru with such dire expressions she might as well have been lying in a coffin.
“I’d prefer it if,in the future, you refrain from wearing a dressing gown to breakfast.” Lord D’Luc’s tone was light, but hispretty mouth curled in distaste as he spoke, pouring himself a steaming cup of coffee.
Ru sat across from him at the small table laden with breakfast food, bouquets of fresh autumn flowers, and a large jug of coffee. They were in Lord D’Luc’s private apartments, a suite of rooms reserved for visiting royalty or dignitaries that he had taken as his own. Tall rectangular windows let in the morning sun behind her, warming her back and illuminating Hugon in a way she was sure he had intended — he glowed in his white silks, rings glinting on elegant hands, hair framing his ethereal face.
She ignored the comment.
“Tell me,” he said, one finger circling the rim of his coffee cup, “what were Hill and Tenoria doing with you in the corridor this morning? Having a slumber party, were you?”
Ru stared at her eggs, fighting a wave of nausea as the smell of all that food, hot and waiting, overwhelmed her. “We weren’t plotting to kill you, if that’s what you were worried about.”
He laughed. “So waspish when you haven’t slept.”
“Tell me what you did to Professor Obralle.” She couldn’t stop herself. The words had been hovering at the edge of her lips since she’d taken his arm, since two Children had laid out breakfast, since the lord had pulled Ru’s chair out for her and poured her coffee.
“Was I not clear downstairs?” His finger froze in its circular journey around the cup’s rim.
She caught his gaze and held it despite the rotting ache that sprung in her belly, despite the fear that coated her tongue when his full attention was on her. “Let’s stop lying to each other, Hugon.”
He grinned slowly. “I am the picture of honesty, Delara. You’re the intellectual between us. Theorize for me.”
Ru sighed. There was no fighting him; there never had been. “It’s obvious you made the professors sick somehow. I’d thought you poisoned them to get them out of the way while you established control here at the Tower, maybe a wasting disease, but… your aim was never to kill them.”
He sat back, pulling at his neckcloth to loosen it. “Go on.”
