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I staredat the empty room before me, my brain searching frantically for an answer.
“Where is he?” I asked over and over, my voice rising to a cry before I sank to my knees.
Cait crouched beside me and tentatively touched my back. “I’m sorry.”
I pressed my hands over my eyes, trying to process the reality that my father truly wasn’t here.
I could pivot. I could make another plan. But right now, everything seemed overwhelming, and part of me had been sure that once I found my father, I could let him take the lead, find the solutions, and figure this mess out.
I guess I’d believed he could save me as much as I could save him.
Maybe that’s why I’d felt so driven to find him. Maybe it had been for myself all along. And now that he wasn’t here, I was even more lost.
Cait rubbed her hand over my back. “You’ll find him, Mara.”
“You don’t know that,” I said softly.
She paused. “I just don’t know what to tell you.”
“You can tell me to look on the bright side,” I said.
“That doesn’t seem like something you’d appreciate,” she said with a laugh.
“I wouldn’t normally,” I said, “but it turns out there is one, so I’ll tell you instead.”
Cait rested her hand on my back. “Yeah? What is it?”
“We have an entire house to ourselves.” I tried to smile. “Plenty of beds. Food and wine in the cellars.”
Cait smiled. “Ohh, that does sound pretty bright side-ish.”
I pushed myself up. My fears remained, but I couldn’t bear to feel so helpless, and I wanted Cait to have faith in me, even if I didn’t deserve it.
We left the weapon room, claiming beds in the servants’ rooms where we could use lanterns without fear of the light being seen through the windows.
The moment I could, I removed my Enforcer clothing and tore off the binder around my chest, breathing deeply for the first time all day.
Breathing had never felt so good.
I threw on a nice loose shirt—one that belonged to my father and still smelled like him—and we headed for the portion of the cellar where jars of food were stored. There was nothing fresh and it wouldn’t taste amazing, but we were hungry and it would do the job.
As we ate from jars of pickled fish and root vegetables on the stone floor, I tried to keep looking on the bright side.
We were safe. Graham was back. So was Lachlan.
But I couldn’t quite feel comforted. If they’d moved my father from house arrest to prison, that didn’t bode well. His punishment would be harsh if he was charged for Graham’s abduction, even if he was protected from execution.
However, I remembered something I’d told Graham that I never should have revealed—the fact that my father was not truly an Immovable but an islander.
He’d taken on a false name over twenty years ago in order to marry my mother, Isla Stroud, heir to the Third House. Evander Stroud was in fact Orrin Yarrow, a man from Tramore who’d fallen in love with a noblewoman and now bore the name of the House he’d married into.
What would happen to him if Graham told the Academy that my father was an impostor with everything from a stolen name to a stolen rank?
There would be nothing to protect him from execution.
We finished our meal and headed back to the servant’s bedroom we’d be sleeping in. Cait took the bed on one side, and I took the other.
Dark, anxious thoughts haunted me as I lay in bed.
