“What you did or did not feel …” he repeated slowly.
“Do not do that.”
His frown pulled even lower. “Do what?”
“You are trying to put the pieces together—I can see you doing it—and you will—” She cut herself off with a huff, then pressed one hand over her eyes and let out a shaky breath. “This is my fault,” she whispered. “I did not think … but of course you would come to this conclusion. What else could you possibly think after I told you—” Another shake of her head.
Then she lowered her hands, pushed her shoulders back, and focused somewhere to the left of him.
“Lucie—”
“This is all in the past. None of it matters now. There is the launch, there are the honeybee chocolates that will not stay in the air, there is the framework you have not finished building, there is the … the … moonglow essence you need to pick up this afternoon, and there is the fact that you are still a fae lord and I am still human, and that is the end of the story. Now.” She took a deep breath and walked past him. “I will write out the order for you. For the essence. And we will continue as we were.”
Chapter Nineteen
The door shut behind Kazrian,the order for Mr Clave folded in his coat, and Lucie counted to four before she abandoned all pretense of composure, crossed the kitchen in a few swift steps, and shut herself in the pantry.
It was near dark in here but for the thin gold line beneath the door and the single fae light above, dimmed to a glow no brighter than an ember. It smelled of ground cinnamon and stored sugar and candied peel and a dozen other ingredients destined to become something delicious. Lucie put her back to the closed door and slid down it until she was sitting on the cold flagstones with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them.
A faint scratching at the door. She shifted forward, reached up behind her for the handle, and pulled the door inward just enough. Balthazar slipped through the gap and Lucie shut the door again before leaning back against it.
Balthazar sat. He regarded her. In the near darkness, his eyes were two pale coins and his markings held the faintest residual shimmer.
“Do not look at me like that.”
He looked at her like that.
“I am perfectly well. I am simply—” She gestured vaguely at the wholeof the pantry, the kitchen beyond it, the day, the year, the entirety of her circumstances. “I am organizing my thoughts.”
Balthazar’s tail moved slowly across the flagstones.
“I am.” She leaned her head back against the door. Somewhere in the pantry, a jar of something rattled in sympathy. Or in threat; with this building one could never be sure.
She reached for Balthazar, and after a pause, he permitted it. He came forward and let her gather him up and settle him across her lap, his weight warm and solid and entirely disgruntled, every line of him communicating that he was doing her an enormous favor and expected it to be noted in the record. He arranged his paws, sitting on her like a small affronted monarch consenting to be carried in a litter, and waited.
“He thinks,” she whispered, “that he forced me.” She pressed her lips against the tremor in her voice and had to take a steadying breath before she could continue. “That is what he believes, Balthazar. All this time. He stood there in the kitchen and apologized to me—apologized—for a thing that never—he thinks that I—” She stopped. Started again, lower. “He thinks I only ever looked at him the way I did because I was frightened of losing my position. That I let him believe I cared because I dared not displease the grandson of my employer.” A breath. “It is just … it is all sowrong.”
Balthazar blinked, slow and grave.
“I know,” she said. “I know.I did this. I lied to him, and I made it convincing enough to—” Her throat closed on the rest. She had made it convincing enough to wound, because she had known nothing less would work. And ithadworked. Too well. She had wanted him to step back. To let her go. To find some elegant fae lady with the right family and the right place in the world, and to forget the human girl in the tea house kitchen.
Instead he had taken the wound and turned it inward, and built from it a version of events far worse than anything she had intended. Not simplyI misread you. But rather:I misread you, and therefore I must have been the one forcing you to pretend. I made you afraid to refuse me.
“And the terrible part,” she went on, because she had begun now and could not seem to stop, “is that I cannot let him keep believing it, because it is awful and unfair and he isgood, Balthazar, he is so unbearably good thathe has spent three years thinking himself the worst sort of man—and yet I cannot tell him the truth either, because the truth is?—”
She shut her mouth.
Beyond the pantry door, something small clattered against the worktable—a wooden spoon set down with too much force, or a tiny copper bowl displaced by a pixie in the middle of some industrious errand.
“The truth is not relevant,” she said, with enormous dignity. “The truth changes nothing.”
Balthazar’s left ear flattened. The right stayed up.
“I am not being evasive.”
The right ear came down to join the left.
“Fine.” She let her head fall back against the door again and shut her eyes, and into the dark behind her eyelids came the whole of the morning unbidden: Henry’s finger tracing down her arm, the way the touch had crawled along her skin like something with too many legs, the lurch of her own body away from it, flour clutched to her chest, the smile she had pinned on because a smile was what one wore.
