Page 44 of Wicked Endeavors

“You took everything from me.” The blade punctured his neck. Flecks of blood welled up, too little to satisfy her. “I should kill you where you stand.”

“You can kill me right now, if you need to avenge them.” He leaned forward, allowing her dagger to cut deeper. Crimson stained her blade, his skin, in light lines, but he didn’t even seem to feel it. “I won’t stop you. I won’t even fight back if that’s what you want.”

“You don’t know anything about me or what I want.” Her hand shook around the handle. She should end it, slice through his trachea and watch him bleed out on the ground, but she couldn’t make herself move. Not while he was acting as if she’d be doing him a favor. Not when he refused to suffer the way he’d made her suffer. “I’m not that little girl anymore.”

“And I’m not that little boy. So where does that leave us?”

Marisol waited just long enough to give him pause, and then she withdrew her dagger. Her cut had barely broken the skin, but she hoped that it would scar. She hoped that every time he looked in a mirror from now on, he thought of how easily she’d had him at her mercy.

“I don’t know.” She turned her back on him so she could slide the dagger back into its holster. The heat from his body was equal only to the fires of her anger. It felt as if every part of her were burning, and he had lit the match. But if she caught fire, she would make sure he died with her. “And, honestly, I don’t care.”

MARISOL SHOULD HAVE GONE BACK TO WILDRIDGE Hall, but her emotions were volatile. She stuck to the darkest parts of the streets, worried that her magic would choose then to fail her, and every step carried her further into the past that she had been trying to make peace with.

How optimistic that girl on the beach had been.

Once, when she was six years old, she and Bas were playing tag in the castle corridors. She skidded around a corner in time to see a group of councilmen exiting the audience chamber, still in deep discussion over whatever boring law or issue they’d been called to vote on. Behind them was King Oberon, a tall and jovial man who smiled down at Marisol as though she wasn’t standing in his way.

“There she is,” he said brightly, “like water in the desert.”

Marisol had read about deserts, but she’d never seen one. She knew enough to understand that this was a compliment, though, and she dipped into her most playful curtsy. “Are you done working? Do you want to play tag with us?”

“Who is us? Yoselin?”

Oberon glanced over her head, searching the corridor for a second person, but he didn’t see what Marisol saw: Bas hiding behind one of the tapestries in the corner, as if they’d started a new game and he was already bad at it. The king laughed, as if her invisible playmate were a joke she was telling, and he promised that he would have time to play later. Bas didn’t come out from the tapestry until Oberon was long gone.

At the time, Marisol had chastised him for confusing tag with hide-and-seek. But now she saw the interaction for what it was: Bas had feared the king’s attention.

On another occasion, Marisol, Yoselin, and Bas were playing in the courtyard, kicking a ball back and forth. Marisol, then seven, kicked the ball too hard, and it went spinning into one of the stone fountains that decorated the space. Yoselin and Bas dived in without a second thought, reaching the ball at the same time over the scandalized squawking of Yoselin’s maid, and Marisol remembered thinking that they were too similar. She would have paused to pick up a stick and then pull the ball toward the rim of the fountain. They’d both been too impulsive to think at all, and it had been both silly and hilarious.

That night, Yoselin was given a long, warm bath, her hair freshly washed and oiled. Bas, on the other hand, went missing from the kitchens for a week, with what the head cook claimed was a flu. Now, Marisol wasn’t so sure.

The signs had all been there. The difference in their treatment, even though they were both technically servants. The way Bas spent time with Yoselin only if Marisol was there, too. The downward curve of the king’s mouth when he caught Marisol sneaking out of the kitchens, something she’d attributed to an interest in her health and diet.

She had been too young to see the truth then, but she had no excuse now.

Bas was right.

Marisol’s soul rebelled against the revelation. Her eyes burned with unwelcome tears. Her anger was a lump in her throat, making it hard to breathe. Because if Bas was right about the Seawards, if he had been justified in overthrowing them, then the worst night of her life hadn’t just been a wound he had carved into her childhood. It had been an inevitability. If his allies hadn’t killed them, then the commoners, the servants, the tortured magic users would have.

You’re acting like a child, Leya, unable to see beyond your own feelings.

She didn’t want to forgive him. She wasn’t capable of forgetting her grief. Now it was just compounded by mourning a family she’d never really had. She had lived a life of sunlit memories, loved and wanted by people she’d miscast as saints, while Bas smiled at her from the shadows, knowing that one wrong word would get him killed.

Marisol pressed the meat of her palms against her closed eyelids. She couldn’t deal with this right now.

She walked until her legs began to burn, and then she flagged down a carriage the rest of the way—not to Wildridge Hall, but to her gifted house. It had been a year since she’d been here, give or take a month, and it was like seeing it again for the first time, these gorgeous apartments in this wealthy neighborhood that had her name on the deed. The gate was closed, and the yard was dark. It was after midnight by this point, and Ofelia was probably asleep. Luckily, Marisol still had her own set of keys, which she used to let herself in as loudly as possible.

Her shoulders drooped, releasing the weight of Lady Marisol Vinyet and her conflicted feelings about the boys she wanted to kill. She didn’t go as far as to change her appearance, but she padded barefoot to the kitchen and turned on the lights as if it were the early days of her adoption and she was feeling the freedom that home ownership afforded her. There was a time when she’d been starving and terrified. Now she was a lady, and her worst problem was whether to commit a crime her rich patron could get her out of.

Perspective was important.

“My lady, it’s late,” said a voice from the doorway. Ofelia stood there in a white nightgown, looking healthier than she had the last time Marisol had seen her. Her cheeks were round, and her eyes were clear. The caution there didn’t come from fear—at least, not the same kind she’d felt on the streets. “And you didn’t send word that you needed the house.”

“I don’t,” Marisol said, forcing polite distance into her voice. Ofelia still didn’t know who she was or why she’d given her the job, after all. “I was just in the neighborhood, and I wanted to see how things were going.”

“Everyone is asleep upstairs.”

According to the letters she’d received from her servant, Ofelia had been lending what little space she had to any orphans from Kindred who had aged out of their beds. Rodrigo was not among them, likely due to the place he’d found with the Criterion, but there were at least four other children sharing the upstairs bedroom with Ofelia. They all had to look for work and help with the upkeep of the house, but they didn’t have to worry about sharing her previous fate.