I couldn’t help myself. I threw the book. Kyven ducked away, laughing.
Goddess, I hated him. Yet as the weeks passed, some part of medidgrow accustomed to his presence. I never forgot I was sharing my bedchamber with a monster—one who, by his own admission, was keeping secrets. But that didn’t stop me from sometimes, just sometimes, appreciating the way the day’s heat dusted him with gold, how he looked as though someone had painted him from light and fire. Not to mention the way my heart beat dull and drunk in response.
A shame, really. All that gorgeousness, wasted on a villain.
The days passed. Each evening, I read until Kyven wore himself down. Then I called on the dagger’s enchantment, ensuring he wouldn’t wake until I did.
Then I rolled away and ignored him. Or tried. But the heat-drenched silence had a maddening habit of amplifying each sound. There was the cadence of his breath. His sleepy murmurs. The startling frequency with which he dreamed.
All of which prevented me from finding proper rest.
Still, I would’ve endured a thousand of those unsettled nights in order to see the changes in Amryssa. Without the threat of marriage hanging over her head, she smiled more. Her musical laugh graced my ears with increasing frequency.
Only now did I realize how painfully somber she’d become after Olivian had announced his intentions to marry her off.And if she still spent long hours staring out the window, if she somehow looked frailer than ever, at least the wait for the annulment had given her room to breathe.
All too soon, it would be over.
Soon enough, everything would fall apart, just as Amryssa had said.
Vick was up to something.
I couldn’t say exactly when I’d realized. Maybe when Kyven tried, for the third time, to distract me when his orange-haired attendant emerged from a room that hadn’t been used in almost a decade. Or maybe when I caught Vick sitting in the library, sketching walls and stairwells in the air.
“What’re you doing?” I said.
He took my measure, his gaze acute, like he could calculate my innermost secrets if he viewed me from a certain angle. “Making a blueprint.”
“Of?”
“The house.”
I paused. Vick sat in an overstuffed armchair, his shortsword leaned against the side, but his hands were empty—not a scrap of parchment in sight. “What, inside your head?”
“Where else?”
I blinked. I’d lived here nine years and still struggled to navigate the manor’s sprawl, at least when roaming the lesser-used wings. The idea of someone charting this labyrinth in less than a month...
“There’s a locked room,” he said, unmoved by my astonishment. “On the third floor. If you take two rights fromthe stairs, then a left, it’s the last one on the right. That door’s barred. What’s in there?”
I frowned. Kyven was off in the corner, entertaining himself by spinning a standing globe, then plunking down a forefinger at random. Absorbed as he was, he didn’t look up.
“Does the seneschal keep something in there?” Vick’s green eyes bored into mine. “Something important?”
My throat worked. Goddess, Kyven had said Vick didn’t do small talk, but this was...intense.
“What business is it of yours?” I managed.
“This is my home, now. Shouldn’t I learn the ins and outs?”
I wanted to say no, but...ugh. Maybe he had a point. And my relentless sparring with Kyven had drained me of the will to argue.
So I pondered the question. It took me three tries to mentally conjure the correct hallway, but?—
Ah. A locked room.Thelocked room.
Right.
“It’s the Lady Marche’s bedchamber,” I said. “Or it was. Olivian sealed it up when she died. No one’s been in there in years. Well, except...”
