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Zaina shakes her head, the color returning gradually to her cheeks. “More like ensuring his usefulness. With Aika and me both gone, she needs someone who can get around undetected. His scars made him too memorable.”
She says the words evenly, but her voice is hollow.
Einar approaches with a decanter and four glasses, pouring us each a drink. I take mine from him, nodding my thanks as I ease into the spot next to my wife.
“Which means he can get around the palace now,” Aika fills in, taking her whiskey as well. “You need to be more careful.”
“I’m fine,” Zaina says dismissively, but the tension in her shoulders belies her tone. “You’re the one he wants to eliminate.”
Aika scoffs. “He might risk her wrath and he might not, but she already believes you’re dead. And we both know that what Damian would do if he found you would make Madame look downright merciful.”
Zaina pales further, and Einar looks sharply at her as he takes the seat beside her. Something like guilt flickers across her features.
“He was quite disappointed when I was given to you rather than him,” she explains quietly to her husband.
Einar’s eyes flash with fury, more intense than I would have believed the king capable of. Aika lets out a sarcastic huff of air.
“Disappointed? That’s an interesting way to say, ‘my sadistic rapist of abrotherhas been obsessed with me our entire lives and would love nothing more than to make me his plaything for a while in a world where Madame would never have to know.’”
I freeze, the air catching in my lungs. I had gathered Damian’s intentions from Zaina’s story, but this…the way Aika refers to him so casually. How does she know what he is? From stories, or personal experience?
Zaina glares at her sister, placing a placating hand on Einar’s forearm. “It hardly matters, because he won’t find out I’m alive.”
“You don’t know that,” Aika argues.
“If Madame hasn’t by now—”
“But Remy did,” Einar cuts in suddenly, like this thought has just occurred to him. His gaze snaps to me, burning with the intensity of the rage he’s trying to suppress. “Howdidyou know?”
Three sets of eyes are suddenly trained on me. Five, if I’m counting the oddly intuitive animals. I try to shake off questions that I know Aika will never answer and focus on what Einar wants to know.
“I didn’t, for certain,” I say distractedly, taking a sip of my whiskey. “I took a gamble, and it paid off.”
“You just took the chance that my dead wife might be in the room with me?” Einar asks with disbelief.
The wordsdead wifestrike a painful chord. This is the actual last thing in the world I want to talk about right now. Recalling the panic I felt when I thought Aika might die. Seeing her bruised body and ripped dress in the dungeons. Arguing with my mother to see reason. Lying through my teeth to convince her.
The way I wracked my brain for anything that could save her, coming up with a haphazard plan that relied mostly on hunches and scattered observations.
A king who hadn’t left his kingdom in two decades, traveling all the way here just to speak to the aunt of a woman he was married to for fewer than six months.
Aika’s secrets. The warning in her eyes when she danced with him.
But I can see I’m not getting away without explaining something, so I do my best to put it into words.
“I didn’t suspect Lady Zaina was still alive until I got to your room. I only thought that you might have cause to help Aika out of her predicament. That was the first gamble, that you would give more loyalty to your departed wife’s cousin than an old friend,” I explain. “Then I got here and there were two glasses out, a spot on the sofa that hadn’t fully settled.”
I gesture toward them and the spot Zaina is currently occupying.
“I might have been entertaining any number of women who were known to be alive, and merely wished to keep it private,” Einar offers.
Zaina’s jaw clenches, and her chalyx lets out a soft growl. I don’t have to wonder why Einar never even bothered with the pretense of entertaining the proposals so obviously thrown his way.
“You might have,” I allow. “Except that you had openly dissuaded those attentions. And that might have been for show, but then there was Khijhana.”
The feline perks up at the sound of her name, turning her navy-striped head to face me.
“She stood between you and the door,” Einar mutters to Zaina.
