Page 24 of Wicked Endeavors

“Wouldn’t that be better as a private conversation? Maybe we should have breakfast in the morning.”

“Why not both? Although I’m busy tomorrow, so expect that breakfast invitation in the next week.”

“Too busy for a friend already? How sad.”

“Trust me, you’ll be happy for the time to change your mind. I’m quite irritating.”

Charmed despite herself, Marisol laughed. Then her skin prickled with warning, and she stopped in her tracks. Bas was staring at her from his bench, had been silently assessing her for who knew how long. Even though her budding friendship with Noelia was a means to an end, Marisol felt judged, and she was already tired of Bas Arroyo thinking he had the right to pick her apart.

“Hey,” Noelia said, lightly tugging at her arm. “Everything all right?”

“Grab us some drinks. I’ll join you shortly.”

Noelia’s eyebrows furrowed, but she didn’t ask any questions. Bas made no effort to hide that he was studying Marisol as she approached him, which made her almost as angry as the fact that he was doing it in the first place. She wanted to know what he saw when he looked at her. She wanted her false appearance to enrapture him the way she was enraptured by his real one, but she also paradoxically wanted him to long for the girl he remembered. Her thicker curls and her heart-shaped face and her dark eyes, things that wouldn’t have changed with age.

She shouldn’t have wanted him to be thinking of her at all.

But she did.

“Shouldn’t you be keeping my betrothed alive?” Marisol asked with a smile that was more of a baring of teeth.

“He was with you,” Bas said blandly. “I thought you were the best choice to keep him safe right now, considering how much you love royalty, Leya.”

“That,” she snapped, “is not my name.”

There was no one close enough to have heard them, but her shoulders tensed anyway. One wrong move, noose, noose, noose. Bas looked embarrassed by his own slip, but she couldn’t trust that, and she couldn’t trust him. He probably wanted her to get caught in her lies. It would spare him the trouble of having to solve the mystery of her reappearance in his life.

“Marisol,” he started again, “this plan… what we’re doing… it just doesn’t feel like you. What did Lord Ruiz promise you?”

Marisol hated his gentle tone, the way he pretended to care about her at all, let alone more than Gaspar did. Did he think that she would let Gaspar use her without getting anything in return? He must have been mistaking her for the same naive child who had never seen his betrayal coming, confused and alone, sobbing and holding on to him for dear life.

Or, worse, he had observed her physical conflict and had mistaken it for an emotional one. As though she couldn’t want him and want him dead.

Caustic words danced on the tip of her tongue, arrows waiting to be aimed. But then Marisol remembered that she was trying to get him to trust her again, to like her enough to let his guard down. To let her close to the person he loved most. She couldn’t stop him from seeing her as a threat, but she could stop herself from acting like one.

She softened her gaze, thinking of that night and of Yoselin until she felt her eyes begin to glisten with unshed tears. “I told you before that you don’t know me. I’m just trying to fix what you broke. That makes us partners right now, but if this is how you’re going to be… I don’t know if we can ever be friends again.”

“Marisol—”

She turned away without another word, but she made sure to dab at her eyes while he could still see her. Noelia and Teo waited in the pavilion, and she didn’t look back even once.

If she had, he might have caught her smiling.

NOELIA’S INVITATION ARRIVED THE NEXT WEEK. EVEN though she had been promised breakfast, Marisol was still surprised by the delivery. The two weeks between each Coronet event were usually time House witches spent with unmarked witches, giving them tours and answering their questions. The crafters of House Vida were hosting the first event—a hunt, if Marisol recalled correctly—but Noelia would have been forgiven for being too busy to make time for a girl she’d just met. And yet her note had been handwritten, with the address of House Muerte, as if Marisol didn’t know it, and a request to include any foods she couldn’t eat in her reply.

She hadn’t answered, Why don’t you ask Bas? though she’d certainly thought about it. Instead, she took advantage of the chance to see the inner workings of the House she would soon rob.

Noelia met her on the front steps of the fortress the reapers called home, wearing a dress of silver and gold. The skirts and bodice were silver, the neckline collared with gold beads and lace. The sleeves were slashed, silver fabric billowing around tight gold. Her blond hair was woven into a crown around her head, from which loose curls threatened to escape, and a red flame hairpin decorated one side. She beamed as Marisol exited her carriage, hurrying forward as though Marisol might change her mind.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Noelia breathed, taking her arm to pull her inside. Marisol barely had time to grab her bag, its sparse contents—her mirror, her dolphin pendant for luck, a blank parchment, and a quill pen—clinking together with every jerking movement. “They’ve had me doing the tours, and I’m sick of it.”

House Muerte was as grand inside as it had looked from the outside. Windows were open, letting the curtains shiver in the salt-scented breeze. The floors were marble, the rooms brightly lit. There were witches everywhere, many of them so young that it felt more like boarding school than a palace. People around her age rested on their stomachs in what looked like a living room, books open on the floor in front of them. A mixed-age group was in what she guessed was a gymnasium, watching two witches send blasts of reaper red toward each other’s crumbling shields. Up the staircase, Marisol caught a peek of someone fast asleep in a bedroom, nothing but a single foot visible from beneath the sheets.

She and Noelia ended up on a balcony where a table had already been set with freshly baked bread and a platter of jams, several fruit pastries and sliced cheeses, browned sausages and scrambled egg yolks. A jug of what looked like orange juice was in the center with a small vase of light vermillion poppy flowers, and there was a goblet for each of them on either side. Fuchsia bougainvillea dangled down toward the sprawling green lawn. Birds chirped from the underbrush, their song intertwining with the soft hiss of hidden fountains.

It was gorgeous and soothing. Not enough for her to lower her guard, but enough for her to want to commit this to memory.

Noelia took the seat farthest from the door. “Thank you again for coming. I was really looking forward to this.”