The rain filled the silence between them for a while, and Lucie sat and wondered whether it could truly be as simple as that. Gossip birds were not known for their dedication to accuracy. It was entirely possible that by morning, the bird’s version of events would involve her and some other young man entirely.
Still, Kazrian’s quiet certainty was a steadier thing to hold than her own spiraling dread, and she chose it. She would put the gossip bird out of her mind. There were other things to think about. The bees. She still had to make the bees. And the honeycomb beehive needed assembling, and the marzipan flowers and leaves had to be attached one by one to the framework, and there were dozens of them, and?—
She felt her pulse climbing again, that telltale flutter at the base of her throat.
All right. Do not think of the launch either. Think of nothing. Think of?—
“Lucie,” Kazrian said eventually. Gently, carefully. “You do not have to do any of this if you do not actually want to. The over-the-top launch, the extravagant showpiece. If it is only about feeling indebted to my grandmother and not wanting to let her down, if you do not actually enjoy?—”
“No, I do!” She had said it a little loud perhaps, leaning forward abruptly, hands tightening on the ring and the pocket watch. “I do. I love it. It is just that … I do not want to put a single foot wrong. I need everything to be perfect.”
“Why?”
“Because … everything will fall apart if it is not.”
Another pause, and she wondered if she had come across a little too dramatic.
“I do not think everything will fall apart,” Kazrian said eventually.
She shook her head. “You do not know what it is to move through the world as someone human. I must constantly be careful because carelessness has consequences. I … I must beexcellentbecause that is the only true protection I have. And everything I do reflects not only on me, but on my family. My mother’s work, my father’s. So yes, I love what I am doing here, and I want to keep doing it, but the only way to keep doing it is to be perfect.”
“I think,” Kazrian said slowly, “you can be excellent without being perfect.”
She took a moment to think those words through, turning them over the way he had no doubt turned them over in his mind before speaking them. “Perhaps …” she allowed.
“What if,” he said, “when we are in the kitchen tomorrow, we sit down together and walk through every step of the demonstration. And for each step, we ask ourselves: what is the worst that could go wrong? And then we determine what you would do if it did. That way you will arrive at the launch not with a single path that must be flawless from start to finish, but with a dozen paths. Fallback upon fallback. So that if one thing goes wrong, you simply step sideways into the next plan, and the next, and no single failure can undo you.”
She considered that. “You are assuming we will have escaped this room by tomorrow.”
“Oh, I have no doubt.” She could just make out his smile. “Tomorrow is Thursday, after all. Even if the door refuses to budge tonight, I am fairly certain it will unlock itself tomorrow.”
The implications of that settled into her slowly. If the door did not open until tomorrow, that meant an entire night in this room. With Kazrian. Which was … well. It was many things, and she was not going to think about any of them, except to note that the window would need to be blocked with something before any more gossip birds decided to brave the rain and peer through it.
Kazrian rose from the floor and returned to the door. She heard his murmured coaxing—patient, methodical, as though speaking to a creature that might yet be reasoned with—and the soft sounds of his hands moving across the wood, pressing here, listening there, trying the handle with a careful turn that yielded nothing. He tried again. And again. Lucie sat with his signet ring pressed between her thumb and forefinger and listened to him work.
After a while, when it became clear that the door had no intention of cooperating, she set the ring and the pocket watch carefully on the floor beside her, pulled herself upright on legs that still felt a little wobbly, and crossed to the pile of linen Lady Rivenna had stored in here. She found a sheet and carried both it and the dressing stool to the window, where sheclimbed up and reached for the top of the frame to drape the sheet across.
“Oh—” Kazrian’s voice came from behind her. “You should have asked. I could easily have done that.”
“Do not flaunt your tallness, please.” She tucked the sheet into place. “Continue with the door. I am still hoping you shall free us before the night is out.”
“I see you are quite recovered, if you have resumed making observations about my height.”
She lowered herself down, one hand bracing against the wall, but her legs were not as steady as she had pretended and the stool wobbled beneath her, tilting sharply to one side?—
Kazrian was there before she could so much as gasp. His hands closed firm around her waist and he caught her, then lifted her down and set her on the floor.
“Lucie!” His brow was furrowed, his hands still at her waist, his face very close in the dim light. “You might have hurt yourself!”
For a moment, neither of them moved.
“Well,” she said, “now you know a fraction of what I felt when a great big iron oven almost flattened you.”
The words were out before she could catch them. She watched something shift behind his eyes and realized with a flooding heat that she may have just revealed what she had so firmly told Balthazar she would not allow Kazrian to discover. Part of it, at least. That she cared more than she wanted him to know.
His hands were still at her waist.
He seemed to realize this in the same instant she did, because he stepped back as though the fabric of her dress had burned him. “I—forgive me. I should not have—that was?—”
