I sigh. “Yes. Thank you for trailing her earlier. You didn’t happen to notice how she managed to ditch her bodyguard?”
Bryce shakes his head. “No. She just kind of came out of nowhereand dashed across the front driveway so fast I had to run to catch up.” His gaze darts past me. “Where is she?”
I nod to Harlow. She’s leaning an arm on the bar, looking at me and my friends. She lifts a hand and waves.
“Fuck me! That’s her?” Bryce seems a second from drooling as he watches her lean across the bar. “I didn’t get a good look at her in the cloak. That’s quite a dress.”
I scrub my hands over my face. “That dress looks like it belongs in a brothel.”
“Looks like it belongs on my bedroom floor, more like,” Bryce says.
“Will you shut up?” I snap. “We’re trying to get information out of her, not worship her.”
“I don’t know,” Bryce says. “I can think of a lot of ways I’d worship her if she let me.”
A strange prickle of something akin to jealousy twists in my chest. I blow out an exasperated breath. “Can you stop drooling over her long enough to get information out of her?”
Bryce frowns, chastened, as he takes a long gulp from his mug.
“I can’t tell if you’re mad at her for being gorgeous or mad at yourself for noticing,” Carter says.
I scowl at him.
“Am I supposed to pretend she’s not?” Carter presses.
“You were supposed to be a good companion and friend.”
“And honesty makes me neither?” he asks.
“Honesty makes you tedious,” I grumble.
Carter laughs and throws back the rest of his ale. “Look at it this way—you’ll certainly enjoy taking her to bed.”
I’d been trying to put the thought of it out of my head, but watching her bend suggestively over the bar to speak with the bartender brings to mind the image of her bent over like that for me.
“What’s she like?” Carter asks.
“Vicious. Angry for no reason I can comprehend. The woman has had everything handed to her?—”
“I thought you, of all people, would be the first to be a little more discerning. You know well that privilege is not always what it seems,” Carter says.
“Are you sympathetic to our enemy?” I ask.
“Of course not, but it would be foolish and show a lack of training and temperance for you to presume to know her when you’ve only just met. Do you know why she’s looking for men to kill?”
Carter is so pragmatic—so calm in the face of chaos. I’ve admired that quality as much as I resent it at times like this, when I just want him to agree with me.
“No,” I say.
“Then you know nothing,” Carter says. “What could be a more important thing to know about her than the answer to that question?”
He has a point. The entire purpose of this arranged marriage is to get close to her and figure out how to tear her family apart. Her nightly activities are obviously a thing she doesn’t want them to know about, as evidenced by her lack of bodyguard and her oblivious city watch brother.
“How am I supposed to get anything out of her at all? While she might not hate me specifically, it’s clear she hates that she’s being married off.”
Before we arrived in Lunameade, this task seemed easy, but Harlow is right. I’m not nearly as good at reading people as she is. Mountain Haven is vast now, built up from nothing, but it’s not the city. She’s seen more of men than I could ever hope or want to. So what makes her so violent when she could live a cushy life of comfort?
Curious people die quickly around here, and I already know Harlow has no issue with murder, but I need to figure out why she’d take such a risk.
