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Anger, confusion, and something else, more cloying and urgent, run through my veins, but I am careful to keep my features neutral. There is no reason to make the guards panic, not until I have a better picture of what happened.
Thinking quickly, I drop my hand to my side and step in front of the petals to block them from view.
“Sten, Gorm, wake Leif and tell him I need to see him immediately.”
“Are you sure? Where is the Lady Zaina? Is--” Sten begins to ask, his feline whiskers twitching as I cut him off.
“Now.”
The men give me a quick nod before darting down the hallway, obeying without another word.
But his question lingers in my mind. WhereisZaina?
Khijhana was here. If they were together, then no one could have taken Zaina against her will.
Concern for her wars with something more potent. Something I don’t want to admit, but feels impossibly obvious...
I wait another moment before gently picking up the scarlet petals with the sharp edges, so very like the ones that belong to my rose.
But my rose only has two petals left.
I quickly make my way back to my room, gingerly placing the petals in a vial on my desk to protect them.
Khijhana has beaten me here, and she paces the room, her keening starting up again when she catches sight of me.
Damn.
The pieces click reluctantly into place, and my clenched fist nearly shatters the delicate glass vial.
My eyes rove over the bed. The less logical part of me wants to search the blankets for the chain, to see if it fell off while I slept. I want it all to be a coincidence, something that will make sense when Zaina walks through the door just as confused as I am.
But the reasonable part of me whispers that I am a fool.
I let my guard down. Trusted a woman I barely knew. And just like the last time, that woman has brought destruction to my people.
Chapter Four
Zaina
The entrance to the cavern looks entirely different bathed in the shimmering sky lights than it did in the glow of dawn, but I manage to locate it all the same.
“How do you know about these caves?” He may not know exactly what I have planned, but Damian is no one’s fool. He is piecing together that I have set this up.
Only a few more minutes, and it won’t matter,I tell myself.This will all be over soon.
“The king showed them to me himself.” I swallow back the memory of my body pressed against his in the water, how he had been a gentleman until I insisted on more. Even the confused mix of relief and anger at Gunnar for interrupting us.
Please don’t make me watch you die,Einar had pleaded with me.
At least I was granting him that. My body would be cold by the time he found it. If he found it. If there was anything left to find.
“I’m sure that’s not the only thing he showed you.” Damian’s crass comment comes from much closer this time, his longer strides finally having caught up to mine.
I ignore him. I will not spend my last moments in this world arguing with a man who will soon be dead anyway.
Walking toward my own demise reminds me of Rose’s, the day Madame made me watch her die. After she dragged me from the corpse of one of the only people left in the world that I loved, she asked me a single, calm question.
"Do you know why I let you live?"
