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Chapter17
Imarched past the guards, not stopping for even a moment while I silently prayed they’d just assumed I had a spat with the queen and hadn’t heard more than that.
I didn’t stop moving until I made it safely to my room and locked the door behind me.
I collapsed onto the floor. Tears of frustration stung my eyes. Angry tears. Ones of pure hatred for Vanessa and the stupid spell she’d weaved over Noah and the queen herself.
If she would only read this letter, if she would only put the obvious pieces together, she’d see something was afoot.
But who was I to point out those things? A biased party. That’s all she’d ever see me as. The human who wanted Noah and would stop at nothing to get him.
It was as though nothing I’d done since arriving here had made me trustworthy. Maybe the queen was biased against humans. Maybe she hated that the king looked at me as a daughter. Maybe her own demons kept her from ever seeing me as more than a threat of some kind.
But did that mean that my entire life in the Unseelie castle would be doomed? Even if I got Noah to believe Vanessa’s betrayal and the queen eventually saw it, what would she do to me next?
Would it ever stop?
I dropped my head into my hands. The tears stopped and a numbness replaced it. One that felt like hopelessness. An emotion that was an old companion, one I hadn’t felt since being in Faerie.
The soft knocking on my door sank my heart lower and I groaned, whimpering slightly.
If Vanessa was requesting my presence right now, I might make myself vomit just to fake being sick enough not to have to see her face. Her lying, conniving face.
I rolled over onto my knees and slapped my hand against the ground, remaining there for just a moment longer.
Rising slowly, I opened the door.
But it wasn’t Vanessa.
It was Noah.
My sunken, defeated heart was comforted by the sight of him, while at the same time feeling as though a knife was driving through me. The secret I withheld was aching to come out. But I knew it wasn’t the right time. Judging by the look on his face—one that seemed defeated as well.
“Did we have plans for a feeding?”
Noah cleared his throat. “Vanessa said she’d dismissed you for the day, or at least for now, I think.”
Instead of pausing and waiting to be invited farther inside my room, Noah walked over to my nightstand where I kept the cards we’d so often played before Vanessa’s arrival and jumped up onto the bed.
What is he doing?
Minus the pensive look on his face with the small crease deepening between his eyes as he shuffled the deck, it was almost like old times.
I moved cautiously toward the bed, staring him down. Noah wasn’t giving me even a small glance at first, but finally, he relented.
“Worried you’ll lose?” he asked. His lips twitched like they wanted to smile, even though he didn’t.
I tried to return the gesture but was met with a sort of wall inside of me, where the smile couldn’t quite escape. “I don’t think you’ll remember how to play. Slapjack, by the way. My room, my choice.”
“Fair enough.” This time the smile did hit his face, and my chest constricted. Had it really been so long since I’d spent time with him like this? So long since I’d seen that faint smile? That it would cause me to feel so much at such a mundane thing?
As Noah dealt the cards silently, I watched him. In training, we were working on learning our opponents. Searching for weaknesses, searching for changes in their battle rhythm so that we could see if they were injured, favoring a side, etc.
But one thing that it was teaching me to do was read Noah. I may have missed the last few training sessions, but in the months leading up to Vanessa’s arrival, we’d been inseparable. And in that time, I’d learned some of his tells.
Stressed and tired was standard until we’d start talking. But this was so much more than that. Something I hadn’t ever seen in him before.
When he dealt the final card, I reached forward before I chickened out, grabbing his hand so that it rested on my pile on the bed between us.
