Page 125 of Fallacies

“What are you doing?” The boy asks me, exchanging a disgusted look with the girl.

“Um,” I gesture to the pile in front of me, “folding napkins?”

“Wrinkled?” the girl snorts, her tone incredulous.

Gods, these people really have nothing better to do than worry about a wrinkled fucking napkin. At least a hundred Sol are suffering beneath us—hundreds more hiding out in Pirn—and godsdamn skeletons hanging from the gates outside, but how dare I fold wrinkled napkins.

While I search for patience I don’t have, I mindlessly reinforce my illusion, fingers curled tight around the napkin I hold.

The girl laughs with her brother, pointing a pale finger at my pile. “The Countess would die if we served our guest breakfast on those.”

Good, I think. The Countess has to die anyway.

Ignoring them and their laughter, I plop down in a chair and flatten out the wrinkled napkin as best as I’m able. “We have a guest?” I ask, an attempt to shift the subject.

The girl giggles, and the boy rolls his eyes, reaching for another glass to polish. “Yes,” he answers, glaring at his sister.

“What’s so funny?”

For a moment, he looks like he’d rather die than talk to me a second longer. Perks of walking around as the most hated Rogue in this Estate, it seems. But then he sighs, busying himself with another glass. “None of the girls will shut up about him.”

“You’re just jealous,” she accuses.

“Of the King’s pet?” he fires back. “Yeah, right.”

He looks at me then, like I’m someone to confide in, and for a moment I think I’ve finally broken the collective shunning of Alesi. Until he says, “Being someone’s pet is nothing to be jealous of, isn’t that right, Alesi?”

The girl is silent for a moment.

And then she bursts out laughing. The boy begins to laugh with her, drawing the attention of the others moving about the table.

I feel my control slipping, anger eating away at my tether to sanity, so I stand, throwing the napkin I’d been folding back onto the pile. I don’t have time for this. People are dying below our feet, and there’s a permanent storm cloud over a city that doesn’t even belong to these people.

The last—and I mean the very last thing—I care about right now is being the butt of someone’s fucking joke.

“Where are you going?” the girl taunts through her laughter, but I don’t give her a response, slipping out of the dining room before my handle on my emotions falters and I slaughter them all.

As Lucina.

No one notices me step into the corridor off the dining room, and it’s early enough that the halls I move through are fairly empty, save for a few guards and other servants passing on their way to breakfast. I only pass one Rogue that wasn’t in a servant smock or a guard’s armor. I took in every detail as they passed by, searching for any kind of marking that might tell me what bloodline they belonged to, but he wasn’t wearing any kind of necklace—as the Sol do—and there was no inked crown over his forehead like the Countess has.

I’m trying not to feel defeated, but I’m not sure how else to find the sources? I could…kill them all?

Actually, that isn’t my worst idea.

I put a pin in it, deciding that getting back into the dungeons is likely my best bet. Surely someone down there knows something that could help me. At this point, I’ll take anything I can get.

Finding my way down to the bottom level of the Estate, I skid to a stop when the entrance to the dungeons comes into view. This hallway isn’t empty—it’s full of guards. At least fifteen surrounding the small black door I’d crept through last night.

Fuck.

The dead guard. With everything that happened after, I forgot all about him—the crack, the twist of his head around his shoulders, the dull thud as his body hit the floor.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. This isn’t good.

Silently inching forward, I try to get close enough to hear what they’re saying, but their conversations are too hushed for me to gather anything worth a damn. I need to get closer.

A quick glance around the hall confirms a lack of anywhere decent to hide. There’s a whole lot of nothing. Drapery, runners, outrageously large paintings…a bench?