“No, I understand. You have a certain vision of it all in your mind. I am merely …” He turned back to the door and crouched beside the lock. “No, I will find a way in. It is only a matter of?—”
“No, you are right. Of course you are right.” She sniffed and took another breath. “I should—I should go downstairs and find something on tomorrow’s list and do that instead, and then tomorrow I shall have the whole morning for the bees—if the door is open by then—and that is a far more sensible use of the time. I do not know why I didn’t think of?—”
Click.
She stopped.
The door swung slowly open.
“Yes!” The word burst out of her, and she was already moving, the coat clutched against her, lunging forward as Kazrian stood and pushed the door open the rest of the way.
“Balthazar,” Kazrian said as Lucie hurried into the small space. “Stand just there, in the doorway. Whatever you do, do not let the door swing shut.”
The small faelight that was enchanted to illuminate when someone stepped into the room bloomed to life with a pale golden warmth—then flickered, sputtered, and died, because apparently it was too much to ask that any enchantment in this building remain functional once Kazrian had repaired it.
Lucie looked around, her eyes sliding over the spare pans and cake tins, the cushions and linen, a small upholstered stool of the kind meant to accompany a dressing table, all of it illuminated by the lights in the passageway.
And there they were. The molds. Not hidden, not buried, not lost. Sitting on a shelf in plain view, exactly where some past version of herself had setthem, and the relief of seeing them was really quite ridiculous considering what they were in the whole vast accounting of things that mattered.
She snatched them up and pressed them against her chest. “Oh, thank goodness. Thank?—”
Click.
The room plunged into near darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Luciespunto face the closed door. No Balthazar. Not even so much as ameow. Apparently the wordsWhatever you do, do not let the door swing shutmeant little to a cat. In the thin strip of light beneath the door, she caught the shadow of him moving away.
“No,” she whispered. Then she lunged past Kazrian, seized the door handle, and pulled. The door did not move. “No!” She slammed her free fist against the wood. “No, no, no,open, you?—”
Kazrian was beside her now, his hands on the frame, and she heard him exhale sharply through his nose. “This,” he said, his voice low and tight and profoundly unamused, “is absolutely, utterly—” He reached in front of her to try the handle. “Never in my life have I encountered such a darned stubborn, ridiculous,spectacularlyunreasonable?—”
He broke off and pressed both palms flat against the door. Lucie turned away. She could not watch him work at it again, could not stand still. She placed the folded coat and the molds on top of the dressing stool and paced across the small space toward the narrow high window where a thin, watery wash of light shone through from the street lamp on the lane below.
This is fine, she told herself.This is fine.
Rain streaked the glass in silver lines. Tree branches swayed and tossed.And there on the stone ledge outside, its dark purple-blue feathers beaded with water, sat a gossip bird.
Lucie and the bird regarded one another for a single, frozen moment.
Then it opened its beak, let out a piercing screech—“Scandalous!”—and launched itself from the ledge into the dark.
And in the space of that single word, Lucie saw the whole of it laid out before her, complete: She was here. Late at night. Behind a closed door, alone in a room with a man.
Never mind that she was human and he was fae. Never mind that they had not done anything, nor did they intend to. A woman shut alone in a room with a man at this hour was scandal enough on its own, ruinous enough, and the gossip bird knew it. It would carry that morsel out into the wet dark and lay it down on a dozen window ledges before the sun was up.
Everyone will know.
The thought arrived not as words but as a sickening physical sensation.
The launch. Lady Rivenna could not have her confectioner at the center of a scandal. She would have to let Lucie go—perhaps before the launch itself, so that The Honeycomb’s name was not tainted by association. And it would not stop there. It would reach her mother’s place of work. Her father’s. It would find Charlotte and Theo and lay itself down at their door too.
All of them. Tainted. Ruined. By her.
This was the exact thing she had been so careful about her whole life. The thing she had given up everything to avoid three years ago, when she had looked at the boy she loved and lied to him because she knew, sheknew, that a girl like her could not reach above her station without the reaching destroying everything around her.
She had been so careful.
