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Stavros kicks the door shut behind us and gives me one of those inscrutable looks as if I’ve both amused and pissed him off. “Assistants who are also students live in the student dorms. Assistants who go through the standard official process to get hired on by the college administration share two-bedroom apartments on the staff floor. Assistants we don’t want anyone looking too closely at get the sofa.”
I wrinkle my nose at his dry tone. “And no one’s going to findthatsuspicious?”
“I’m allowed a few whims. I’ll just tell them I sodesperatelyneeded someone of your talents as my assistant that I required your presence from daybreak onward.”
One corner of his mouth crooks up in a grin, which annoyingly makes him even more imposingly attractive than before. “That means I’ll need to put you to work shortly. Around students and other staff, you’ll need to remember to refer to me by my proper professorial title—Ster. Stavros.”
“Because you’re obviously a paragon of wisdom,” I say cooperatively. Although maybe it suits him—it is pretty arrogant of professors to call themselves by a shorter form of Estera, the godlen of learning and knowledge, as if they’re lesser divinities themselves.
Stavros ignores my understated sarcasm. He sweeps his gaze over me, making my skin itch in awareness of his assessment. “And I’d better find some training clothes so you won’t look totally ridiculous.”
He spins on his heel and reaches for the gleaming doorknob. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Try not to steal anything in the meantime.”
“I wouldn’t—” I start to protest, but he’s gone before I can make an effective retort.
That’s just Stav for you, Julita says in mild consolation.You don’t have to worry about staying here. He can be both a brute and an ass, but when it comes to anything more intimate, he’ll behave like the gentleman he is.
Does she think I was worried about him coming on to me?
“I’m used to having my own space,” I say. “I don’t love that he could barge into the room at any moment.”
Ivy, your previous bedroom was a dust-choked attic you had to flee every morning before the legitimate inhabitants caught you.
“I know. But it was just me at night.”
I think you’ll find a way to survive.
Nowshe’staking on that dry tone with me, as if I’m being absurd to have standards of privacy.
I can’t say what I’m really worried about, which is basically that he’ll kill me. Or rather, drag me off so the king can have me killed.
It amounts to the same thing.
Although with the way this situation is going, the greatest risk might be that at some point he’s going to irritate me so much that I killhim—which’ll put me up for execution anyway, so there’s no point in debating the details.
I venture a little farther into the room. With each inhalalation, the smell of the place seeps deeper into my lungs: the polished wood, a faint lingering tang of fancy alcohol, a more acrid note that I think might be the oil nobles use to protect their swords.
Lovely.
And there’s also, when I step closer to the door left ajar that I assume leads to Stavros’s bedroom, a whiff of the smoky pepper scent that comes from the man himself.
I’m going to besteepingin him. I’ll take the dusty books any day.
Julita gathers herself in a way I can sense before she speaks.Ivy… What’s really going on with the pain you feel? You were obviously in significant physical distress after Stavros grabbed you in the archives room, and it wasn’t anything he did directly. I’ve felt it a little bit here and there before, but that was… unnerving.
Oh, it’s unnerving forher?
I bite back a snarky reply, my stomach knotting as I consider my answer. Even if I control everything she can tell the outside world, I don’t really want her knowing exactly who—and what—she’s ended up tied to.
She could definitely make my life more difficult.
“I’ve got a bit of a nervous condition,” I improvise. “Chronic pain. It acts up the most when something particularly jarring and threatening happens, that’s all. Most things don’t faze me like that.”
No, I suppose not.
My uninvited guest doesn’t sound totally convinced. I decide a change in subject is in order.
“How did you end up roping the man who was recently the most exalted general in all of Silana into helping you?” I ask, pausing by the built-in bookshelves. My fingers skim over the spines of historical treatises, military philosophy and strategy, and a few on equestrianism that I itch to pull out and flip through.
