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“Save it, Van. I know all this, and though I do love how well you’ve looked after me, I have no desire to…bed you.” To say the word sex with him… It felt icky even thinking it. I didn’t know what my mother was thinking even bringing up marriage with him again.
“Will you look through the binder?” I motioned toward it without actually looking at it. “You know more about the other courts than I do.”
Van was once considered a god among mortals and feared among all the fey, high and low, court or exiled. He was more powerful than I was, and I wasn’t sure why he’d ever agreed to be my guard. But my mother brought me to see him all those years ago, and he’d said yes without a second thought.
I later learned that he’d grown bored of life. He saw the scared child I was, and guarding my life gave him a purpose again. It seemed like we were exactly what each other needed at the time. I trusted him with my life, and that meant I could trust him to find someone in this awful binder that I wouldn’t hate.
“It would be my pleasure.” He grabbed the binder and started flipping through it. “I’ll show the other guards, too. They might have some insight into the other courts, and depending on who is in here, might have some knowledge of the specific suitors. How are you handling it?” He asked without looking at me.
“What?”
He closed the binder and set it back on the table. He reached forward, wrapping his hand around my ankle and looking straight in my eyes. “How are you handling letting Christopher go?”
Van might as well have punched my heart with that question. I pulled my ankle free and turned to sit correctly in the chair. My hair hid my face as I stared at the carpet. “I’m not handling it. My heart—”
I felt the magic before I saw the blade swinging toward me and jerked back. The sword split the air in front of my face.
An assassin. In my suite?
I dropped from my chair and kicked it back hard. The impact broke something in the chair and from the shout, broke something in the intruder, too.
Too close. Too close.
“Van!” But I didn’t really need to call out to him. He was already there. Sword out.
Van slashed at nothing, but whatever magic hid the assassin from view faded as he died. Blood splattered the floor, my clothes, my face, but I didn’t care.
My mind raced to catch up with how fast my heart was pounding, but all I could hear was my harsh breaths. All I could see was the severed head rolling toward me.
I put my foot out to stop it. His long blond hair obscured his face, and I moved onto my knees—needing to know who had almost killed me—and brushed the bloody strands away.
The blue eyes had lost their life, but were frozen wide. The mouth hung open. The fey’s nose had been broken a time or two, but he still had all his teeth. A few days scruff covered his face, but worse than the scent of his blood was the scent of his sweat.
But who was he? No recognition came as I stared at the face. I stood and stepped back from the body. I wished I felt something more, but this was so normal for me that all I felt was glad that I had lived and he had died. Now there was one less fey for me to worry about.
Except there was a bigger issue. More than just one single assassin. “How did he get in here? This is supposed to be my only safe space at court.”
Van muttered a spell, and magic ringed out around us, filling the room. “It’s only us now. Bronio was supposed to have cleared the room moments before we arrived. I apologize for not double—”
“Don’t. I don’t want your apology.” Being at court brought out a coldness in me that I didn’t like. The sooner I found a way out of here, the better. But first, I needed to know who was behind this particular attack and how he’d made it into my suite. “Who?”
“His name was Godrian. One of Tiarnan’s men.”
For a moment, the swish-swish of Van running his cleaning cloth along his sword was the only sound in the room.
One of Tiarnan’s men? My oldest half-brother? He was behind this attempt on my life?
I strode away from the body, unable to look at that face for one second longer.
This was worse than I’d thought. This wasn’t just power-hungry fey trying to reach for a higher rung. Killing me wouldn’t do anything for Tiarnan. He was older than me. Higher in rank. Closer to winning the throne, should something ever happen to my mother. This didn’t make sense. My brother had to know I wasn’t a threat to him.
I turned to Van, who was standing with his arms crossed as he watched me. “Please tell me this is about the news report. That he’s just mad at me for everything and wanted to get under my skin.”
“You know I can’t do that.” Van’s voice was tinged with an apology. He was going to say something I wasn’t going to like. “If this was about being forced into hiding, he’d have acted when it happened.”
I moved to sit in the farthest chair from the body. “Then what my mother said is true.”
Van inspected his sword for any lingering blood before sheathing it. “She wouldn’t lie.”
