Page 17 of Her Blind Deception (The Dark Reflection #2)

Chapter Seventeen

I spent the rest of the afternoon holed up in my suite with a bottle of wine. Leela had taken the day to visit her family, and I dismissed my other attendants after they brought me my second bottle, so I sat sipping from my glass alone until the light drained from my surroundings and I was left in shadow. I had ordered that no one disturb me, so no one entered to light or warm the room, no one brought me food to soak up the wine in my belly. It was just me, the steadily emptying bottle, my elevated heart rate and a tangle of thoughts and memories.

It was well into the evening when a knock sounded at the door.

‘When I say I’m not to be disturbed, I mean it,’ I said, my words running into each other slightly on their way out of my mouth. The door opened despite my objection, and I was surprised to see Draven walk into the room. ‘You knocked,’ I observed.

He frowned as he took me in, his eyes catching on the wine glass. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘You never knock.’

He approached me slowly, like he was expecting me to bite. ‘You weren’t at dinner.’

‘I wasn’t hungry.’ As he sat in the chair opposite mine, I fixed on the cream-coloured box tucked under his arm, wondering what he would be carrying so delicately.

‘Mind if I join you?’

‘I don’t think you’re giving me much choice. But then, that’s your forte, isn’t it?’

He didn’t respond, eyeing me as I drained my wine glass. It was likely very good wine. Or at least, it was likely very expensive wine. But I hardly tasted it. It slipped over my tongue without leaving much of an impression behind except for the thick, sour flavour that lingers when you’re reaching the end of your second bottle.

I shook the bottle at him. ‘I’d offer you some, but I don’t want to.’

‘How about a trade?’ He held out the box, which I eyed suspiciously.

‘What’s in it?’

‘Open it and find out.’

After a few moments, my curiosity got the better of me and I snatched it out of his hand. ‘Just in case I haven’t been subjected to enough of your games for one day,’ I muttered under my breath, before the scent of rose hit me, heady and sugary, as I lifted the lid. I stared down at the twists of glossy pastry in the box for a long time before I looked up at his carefully blank face.

‘Whatever your heart desires,’ he said, his words soft, conjuring the image of a bed in the infirmary and the memory of how he’d once saved my life. He’d remembered which pastries I’d asked the king for that day. I hadn’t realised he’d been paying such close attention. ‘A fair trade?’

Wordlessly, I handed him the bottle and he placed it on the floor at his feet while I picked up one of the pastries and bit into it, trying to keep the satisfaction from showing on my face. I heard him shuffle in his chair and looked up to see that he’d picked up the book that had been lying on the side table and was looking over the cover. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Law?’

‘Just making sure I know every possible way you could get rid of me.’ I was only partially joking.

He snorted. ‘If I was going to get rid of you, I wouldn’t be worried about the legality of it.’ He flipped through it, squinting down at a page of notes wedged in the middle, before placing it back on the side table. The silence between us was loaded, but he waited while it teetered, until I finally toppled it.

‘I told you I didn’t want to find them.’

‘Why?’ He watched me steadily, and I dropped my gaze. Even though I knew I had hours left of my glamour, I thought I’d seen the memory of the scars in his eyes.

‘Because I want them as far away from me as possible.’ I fiddled with a loose thread on the arm of the chair.

‘I should have told you I was looking for them,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t sure I’d find them. I didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep.’

‘Why not? That’s what men do.’ I pressed my lips together after the comment, knowing how bitter and jaded I sounded.

‘Do we? ’

I studied him, waiting for him to drop the humility and begin to mock me and my weakness. But he remained sober-faced. Picking up a clean wine glass, I handed it to him.

He accepted it with a slight twitch of his mouth. ‘I’m not sure there’s enough left in that bottle for two glasses.’

‘You drink and I’ll eat. That was the deal, wasn’t it?’

He emptied the bottle into the glass and took a sip, scrunching up his nose as he did. ‘This is terrible.’

I reached for the glass. ‘Then give it back.’

He drew it away. ‘Eat your butter and sugar,’ he said, before taking another sip. I settled back into my chair with a roll of my eyes.

We lapsed into a silence I was sure he thought I would fill. But I had no interest in talking out our differences and letting him into my inner torment or whatever else people did in situations like this. My reaction to the men in the tower was private, and mine, and none of his business.

‘Not so long ago you told me love is for fools,’ he said.

My heart stuttered. ‘Yes.’

‘I think you’ve let it fool you before.’

‘I think everyone is allowed to be fooled by love once, aren’t they?’

‘Tell me about it.’

I let out a breath and went back to picking at the thread, reeling my mind back from the path it had been careening down. I had thought he’d been about to… but no, of course not. ‘I was sixteen. He promised to marry me. I even told Madam Luzel I was leaving the Nymph.’

‘What did she say to that?’

I snorted. ‘ She told me not to pack too quickly. She was right, of course. He met a pretty seamstress who his family loved and who didn’t make his friends snigger. I was a na?ve little idiot.’

‘Why would that make you an idiot?’

‘Because women like me don’t get happy endings.’ The wine was heavy in my head, and I could feel the pain, the loneliness, rising in me, reaching my face, settling into my expression. ‘We get thrown from towers, or blinded, or forced to dance in iron shoes until we die. Were I sweet, or perhaps allowed the luxury of innocence, it might be different. But I’m not, so here we are.’

My hand stilled as he caught it and when I looked up, I found that he’d leaned in, consuming the space between us.

‘There will be no towers or iron shoes for you, my dear,’ he said. ‘And I won’t let anyone hurt you again.’ I stared at him, left momentarily frozen by the strange intensity of his expression, the gleam of his eyes.

‘Why do you care what happens to me?’

‘You’re my wife,’ he replied simply. For a moment, it seemed as though he was going to say more. But he must have changed his mind, swallowed the words back down, for all he did was run his thumb over the back of my hand.

‘I’m not afraid of them.’ The words burst out of me. Small. Defensive. False.

‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But I think you need more than just the absence of fear to get free of what they did to you. You need to find your rage.’

‘You shouldn’t be so eager for that. I do despise you, remember.’

‘So you keep reminding me.’

‘I have plenty of reasons to despise you.’ This was firmer ground, something well-worn and familiar. My resentment of the way he played puppet master to my marionette. ‘Do you want to know what I found out from talking to your brother?’

He dropped my hand with a sigh. ‘Not really.’

‘We had a good old chat, Lester and I,’ I continued as though he hadn’t spoken, the wine smoothing the way forwards. I hadn’t planned on revealing what I’d learned to him. But there was an instinct telling me that doing so right now, while he was trying to convince me that he cared about me in some way, might finally get the results I wanted. ‘Imagine my delight to discover I’m not just your puppet, but I’m strung up by a whole host of faceless others. You have a network. Soldiers in the palace guard, definitely. People in the Guild I’d wager, too, from how unconcerned you are about Dovegni’s scheming. Where else? The Sanctum? The council?’

‘Both. And more.’

I was momentarily startled back into silence. If he had people in the Guild, did he know about the offer Dovegni had made me?

‘What’s wrong, my dear?’ he asked with a hint of his usual mocking smirk. ‘Do you usually hurl accusations without expecting to be right?’

‘I suppose I didn’t expect you’d confirm it.’

‘It was only a matter of time before you realised you aren’t my only piece on the board.’

‘Why would you need more than me? You gave me the apples, I distributed them, now you’re king. It doesn’t seem like there needed to be anyone else involved.’ I thought back to that council meeting where I had announced our marriage. What had he said? About the beginning of a new era? ‘Who makes up this network of yours?’

‘An alliance of outcasts,’ he replied, sipping his wine like we were talking about something as simple and benign as dinner plans. ‘That’s what happens when a regime prospers on the backs of the suffering and subjugated. Those backs eventually grow tired of being lashed.’

‘How many?’

‘Many.’

‘And you, what, lead them?’

‘Something like that.’

I took a breath. ‘Are you from the split in the Yawn? Like Dovegni said?’

‘No.’

‘Then who are you?’

‘I was actually born in Yaakandale.’

That drew me up short for a second. If he had been born then he had once been a baby and that was hard to fathom. And from Yaakandale? What a mundane, anticlimactic way for him to have come into being.

‘I promise you’re not going to get hurt,’ he added softly.

‘And you say you don’t make promises you can’t keep.’ I studied him in the low light, trying to decide how much I could trust him, my mind reeling. ‘What’s your grand plan here?’ I finally asked. ‘What are you working towards if it’s not just about being king?’

‘Stick around and you’ll find you.’

I shook my head, which made me feel woozy. I shouldn’t have drunk that second bottle. I wanted to pick apart what he’d said, wanted to unspool the threads and peer into the stitching and understand it all. But my head was swimming, and it seemed like his rare question-answering mood had come to an end, anyway. I stood. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I announced. I licked my lips. ‘You can stay if you’d like. Or you can go. I don’t much care either way.’

He rose alongside me, his hand brushing mine. ‘I’ll stay.’