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There was no forgetting the purpose of the bone knife in Clare’s hand. For a moment she simply stood there, staring at the rise and fall of Moretz’s chest and thinking how very easy it would be to end him. She had no doubt of precisely what he had come to her room for.
But the cold calculations always running behind her eyes reminded her that he would bleed straight through the mattress, and while she might manage to hide a body, she didn’t know how she could hide that.
Get her guitar, get out the window, hide until morning. It would have to be enough. Her hand curled into a tighter fist around the bone. It wasn’t enough.
But someday it would be. Someday her life wouldn’t be…this. She clung to the thought, even as a part of her whispered that maybe it never changed. Maybe, no matter how high she climbed, the situation would always be the same. She culled that whisper of doubt almost the second it appeared.
Things would be different. She would make them be different.
She crept across the floor on silent feet. Her guitar case was already packed out of habit. All she had to do was grab it and she could be gone.
Moretz let out a loud snore and jerked in his sleep. The wine bottle slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a loud thunk. He jolted upright, his eyes snapping open.
He didn’t notice the wine bottle, or the quick movement as she slipped the hand holding the bone knife behind her back. His gaze went to her face, as if he hadn’t even realized he’d fallen asleep, and thought he’d been vigilantly waiting for her all this time.
“We-ell,” he slurred, “look who decided to wander in.” He lifted his hand to his mouth and he did notice the wine bottle was gone then.
“What are you doing in here?” It wasn’t that she didn’t know. It was that part of her wanted him to say it. Because now that he was awake, there was only one way this was ending, the consequences be damned to Ferrian’s hells.
Never again. I said never again.
Moretz’s eyes narrowed in that way particular to men when they didn’t like a woman’s tone. “You’re a smart-mouthed little bitch.” He reached for the wine bottle on the floor and hurled it at her. It was a calm sort of violence with which Clare was well-acquainted.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. The drunken toss sent the bottle wide of her and it broke open against the wall, shards of glass and red droplets raining down. But even if the toss hadn’t gone wide, even if the bottle had flown straight at her face, she wouldn’t have flinched then, either. Because there was a power in stillness, too, in refusing to bend.
Men like Moretz thrived on forcing reactions, on feeling people like her cringe, or struggle, or fight. So she stared him down calmly, knowing her eyes were dead and empty to him, lacking the fear he craved, and that that lack would frustrate him beyond reason. He wanted a reaction. And while she would give him one, it was one he wouldn’t see until it was too late.
He rose from the bed, taking shuffling steps until he was close enough she could scent the sour mix of wine and ale on his breath.
“You got a pretty voice for all those songs.” His words slurred together at the end, a nearly unintelligible stream. “An’ as holdings whores go, you ain’t bad to look at.”
Clare adjusted her grip on the bone shard. It was more difficult than most people realized to stab a man in the heart. To do it effectively, the angle had to be just right, slipping between ribs and up into the muscle. She knew just where to strike, but satisfying as it would be, the bone shard in her hand wasn’t long enough to handle the matter. She was better off going for a gut wound. That, or the carotid. Less satisfying, but more…dead.
She settled on the carotid while his drunken ramblings devolved into a string of syllables she didn’t think formed actual words. When he tired of talking and made a lunge for her, she struck.
Chapter Five
The Lords Arrendon
Clare’s blade never reached its target. The door to her room flew open, wood splintering as the lock gave, and Moretz was jerked back. Clare herself stumbled, as there was suddenly no body to absorb the force of her thrust, the bone knife cleaving only empty air.
It took her a moment longer than it should have to accept the scene before her, because it made so very little sense. A tall, lean man with pale skin and a waterfall of straight blond hair loomed over Moretz.
“Verol?” She had never had occasion to sound so incredulous in her life, but she couldn’t fathom how one of the men she’d traveled to Veralna City with had come to bust down her door.
“Are you all right?” Verol didn’t take his eyes off Moretz as he directed the question at her, and there was an edge to his voice that said he was on the verge of violence. He had not struck her as a violent man.
She nodded in response, her eyes catching on fresh movement in the doorway as a man with dark skin, his frame wide and corded with muscle, stepped into the room. He carried a black staff with a glowing red stone clutched by silver tendrils at its apex, and he stopped in between her and Verol.
“I think,” Marquin said, his voice a deep rumble, “it would be helpful if you could tell him that you are all right.”
It seemed an unnecessary request, until she understood that something was not quite right with Verol. The air around him felt heavy and charged, like the air just before a storm hit, and that was when she realized that not only was Verol’s boot pressing down on Moretz’s throat, it was doing so forcefully enough the man couldn’t breathe.
Clare didn’t particularly give a damn whether he could breathe, given the situation, but if Verol killed him…hiding a body and pretending nothing had happened would be a great deal more difficult now that her door was broken and the crack of it happening had likely woken the entire hall.
How in Ferrian’s hells were they going to get out of this mess?
Moretz tried to cough and couldn’t, his hands flailing ineffectually at Verol’s boot. It irked her to have to intercede on his behalf, even if it was, in the end, really on her behalf. She sighed and told Verol, “I am fine.”
