Page 72 of The Thirteenth Count

One step. Then another.

Cassius moved with her from above, slow and graceful like a cat, his shadow sliding along the stone beside her. Fern kept her arms loose because he had told her to, kept her shoulders down because he had told her to, and hated every inch of herself that obeyed.

The wind hit again. Harder.

Her boot scraped against a seam in the terrace.

It was nothing, a small catch. A simple shift of weight. But her body reacted before her pride could stop it, one hand shooting toward the wall.

Cassius was down from the parapet before she touched it.

His hand closed around her elbow, steadying her without so much as a wobble from his knees.

Fern tore free the instant her balance returned. “I’m fine.”

“You weren’t.”

“I said I’m fine.”

“And I heard you, Miss Silverbell.” He looked over her face, down to her shaking hands. “Your body disagreed.”

Cassius released her, and Fern flexed her fingers once before forcing them loose at her sides. Her heart was still beating too hard for such a small misstep, thudding high in her throat as though she’d nearly gone over the parapet instead of catching her boot against stone.

“It was a misstep,” she said.

“It was fear.”

Fern looked at him, finding that careful, clean composure back on his face as though the laugh in her suite and the hands in her hair belonged to someone else entirely. He was all lesson again, all cold instruction, standing there with death beneath them as if it were a tool set out for his personal use. As if none of it was supposed to mean anything except whether her shoulders rose or her hands curled or if she was capable of not causing a scene.

“Fear makes the body careless,” Cassius said. “Carelessness makes you readable. And when you’re readable, court will use it before you have time to understand what you’ve given away.”

Court.

He was still talking about damn court.

A laugh pushed out of her, but there was no humor in it, no sharp edge she could use to protect herself. It came apart almost as soon as it left her mouth, dying from the sudden rush of memory: heat under stone, copper in the air, glass tanks glowing in the dark, tubes running from black arms into machines that pulsed like a heart.

“You think my fear is about court?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed slightly. “Isn’t it?”

All she could do was look at him. At his clean coat. His steady hands. His face trained into something almost beautiful by how little it gave away. Weeks of lessons crowded her chest until she could hardly breathe through them: ledgers, etiquette, posture, blood theory, balance, control. He’d spent his whole life learning how to stand inside this horror without shaking. She’d been given weeks and was expected to do the same.

Her hands curled again, and this time she didn’t bother uncurling them.

“I saw them,” she whispered.

Cassius seemed to stop breathing, which told her enough.

“I saw the tanks,” she continued, and once the words started she couldn’t stop them from coming. “The tubes. The chairs. The Deadwoods strapped into them like livestock. I saw what’s under this place, Cassius. I saw what your family feeds into the walls while you sit me in the library and make me copy numbers like they aren’t people. Like those entries aren’t bodies. Like the blood moving through this Keep doesn’t come from someone’s arm, someone’s father, someone’s neighbor.”

The wind dragged at her coat, but she barely felt the cold now. Her eyes burned. Her throat hurt. Sprout made a soft, anxious sound against her neck, and still she couldn’t stop looking at Cassius, couldn’t stop waiting for him to deny it, or correct her, to call what was happening some polished name that made it easier for him to live with it.

“Rowan Sheely was down there,” she said, and his name broke something in her voice. “He fixed my father’s boots. He kept peppermints in his pocket for children who came into the shop. He had a gap between his front teeth, and he laughed through it, and your family put tubes in him.”

Fern crossed the space between them.

Her hands hit the front of his coat, palms first, then fists when he didn’t step back. The impact jarred up her arms and did nothing to him. Nothing. He stood there like the mountain itself, steady beneath the wind, and some ugly part of her hated him more for that than anything he’d said.