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“Yes,” I said. “Speak quickly so I can leave this tower and decide if both youandyour heads will be coming with me.”
Ren would have been proud of that threat, I was sure. Utterly impracticable and decidedly dramatic, just the way he liked them.
“You always seem to…we feared you hated your husband.”
I blew out a breath. Mine and Ren’s playfully antagonistic relationship was none of their business.
“With His Majesty having no heir, as his consort you stood to gain the most from the king’s disappearance if you wished to seize the throne for yourself, as you’d be permitted to rule as regent until he was officially declared dead,” Morales pointed out. “And when you insisted on taking the citizen appearances?”
“Because I wanted tohelp,” I protested. “Not steal Ren’s crown from him!”
“You have never expressed interest in those events before.”
“Because I do a shit job at it,” I reminded her, startled when she merely responded with a dismissive scoff.
“You did not. I’ve certainly heard you claim as such before, but what I saw today was far from it, Your Highness.”
“Truth,” Dima groaned before I could utter the words to ask him to verify, and it was my turn to scoff. Clearly, she was delusional.
“So that’s why you stayed with me and Xio in the throne room?” I demanded. “Because what, you thought I was conspiring with him against Ren, and wanted to listen in?”
Her expression was incredulous. “No, king consort. I stayed because you were putting your life at risk for our people. How could I not do the same?”
I ran a hand over my eyes. “I am so Blessed confused right now. You protect me in one breath and accuse me of selling Ren out in the next?”
“Our king is always so...protective of you. We could not be sure if his faith in his consort was misplaced,” said Vidrio.
“As you said yourself, Your Highness,” Morales murmured. “We do not condemn someone as a traitor without proof.”
“And Dima was the only one capable of giving us that proof,” Vidrio added, sounding almost apologetic as he glanced over at the man. “As a Hearken cannot lie, we now know you to be innocent of the king’s disappearance. We apologise for ever doubting otherwise.”
“Your doubts being based on the extremely suspicious act of doing my fucking job in taking citizen appearances?”
“You also wanted to go into the tunnels,” he reminded me. “And resisted our request to take on an extra guard.”
Resisted their request to send a spy in the form of Aitor with me everywhere I went, they meant, so that the northerner king consort and his equally foreign guard Parvan couldn’t plot andconspire without them knowing all about it. Fuck, how stupid had I been?
“The tunnels were…” I trailed off with a long, exhausted exhale. “The concept of ‘offering help’ means nothing to either of you, does it?”
“And then there was your reaction to the Letter of Last Instruction,” Morales pointed out. “A letter from the king that you wouldn’t let anyone else read. We found that…concerning.”
I instinctively pressed my hand to my pocket, patting down on the parchment to reassure myself it was still there and that neither councillor had lifted it from me in our scuffle. So perhaps scowling at the letter, scrunching it up, and declaring it wholly irrelevant could, objectively and with the clarity of hindsight of being accused oftreason, be viewed as a tad suspicious.
“You know Ren well,” I said to them both, not bothering to hide my exasperation. “Do you really think that given the chance to write a letter exclusively for me, without consequences to him in turn, he would include in it anything actuallyuseful?”
“But...there were six sheets of parchment!”
I flushed. “Yes,” was all I said, and perhaps my expression or reddening face clued Morales in, for she snapped her mouth closed and didn’t question me further. Something I was grateful for, because Dima’s proximity already had one too many people knowing exactly what was written in that damn letter.
His dog raised its head from its paws and growled warningly.
Dima grunted. “Out, Nat, now. I indulged you all while you were discussing serious matters, but I refuse to let you contaminate my head –again– with such thoughts of you and your husband.”
Then he groaned. “Urgh. We’re about to havemorecompany.”
I bit my lip, knowing we should leave him alone but needing more answers.
“No, they didn’t have anything to do with Ren’s disappearance either,” Dima said before I could voice the question about Morales and Vidrio’s own guilt. “They lured you up here to determine your involvement, Mathias, knowing that if they were forced to kill a consort, even a traitorous one, they’d be subjecting themselves to weeks of torture and a drawn-out death in return.”
