Chapter 17 Scarlett
CHAPTER 17
SCARLETT
S carlett’s head rested on Callan’s chest while he lazily stroked his fingers up and down her arm. He held her close and tight to him, as if she would slip between his fingers into the night. Indeed, she would, but not until this conversation was had first. She knew whenever she returned to the manor, she would find Nuri waiting for her and wanting to know everything she’d found out.
“Callan,” she started, swallowing hard.
“Shh,” he murmured into her hair, kissing the top of her head. “Two more minutes. Two more minutes of pretending the last year never happened.” She kissed his chest where her head rested and sighed. His arm only tightened around her.
She savored it. The heaviness of his arm wrapped around her. The feel of her legs intertwined with his under the blankets. The rise and fall of his chest. The smell of him. The taste of him. She let herself pretend that nothing had changed. She let herself pretend that he wasn’t a prince, and she wasn’t a weapon of death often wielded by his father.
After not two but four minutes, she swallowed again. “Callan.”
She felt him sigh underneath her, and she lifted her head to look into his eyes. The flecks of green seemed to be brighter amongst the hazel color. He leaned up and pressed a kiss to her lips. “As much as I would like to believe you came here tonight for me, I know better.” Scarlett dropped her eyes from his. She was such trash. His fingers gently brushed her cheek, and he whispered, “Tell me what you need from me, my Wraith.”
Scarlett sat up, wrapping the sheet around her shoulders. Callan drank in the bare parts of her that he could see, his hand resting on her knee. She pursed her lips, not wanting to ruin everything.
“Say it, Scarlett,” he said softly.
“There are children disappearing again. It’s been over a year, but we had four go missing in four days. Nuri has been casing other Districts and no other place is losing children. The Black Syndicate is being targeted again, and we’re desperate, Callan.” She spoke so quickly she felt as if she were vomiting words out.
“Desperate enough that you finally came back to see me, to ask if I know anything about it,” Callan replied quietly.
Piece of shit. She was a piece of shit for how this had played out tonight. “I… I don’t know what you want me to say, Callan.”
He sat up now, too, pulling the blankets over his waist with him. He twirled a piece of her hair between his fingers. “I will see what I can find out for you under two conditions.” Scarlett brought her eyes to his, a wary expression coming across her face.
“You must come back to get the answers, and—”
“Callan, you have no idea what I risked coming here tonight,” Scarlett interrupted quietly. “Coming back will be nearly impossible.”
“Tell me,” he argued. “Tell me what is keeping you from me. I know you did not just stop coming of your own accord.”
“You don’t know that,” Scarlett snapped back, her tone harsh.
“Tell me that then,” he replied. “Tell me you suddenly decided that being my friend, being more than that, was no longer something you desired.”
“I told you,” she cried. “I told you tonight would change nothing. I told you this is not what I came for.”
“And I told you I did not care.” He took her face in his hands. “Tell me what happened a year ago, Scarlett. Tell me, and I will take care of it.”
Scarlett closed her eyes, making herself breathe in and out. In and out. She hadn’t realized tears were slipping down her cheeks until she felt him kissing them away. Then he pressed those salty lips to her own.
My safety is not your priority . She could hear Nuri’s words rolling over and over in her mind, like waves crashing onto the shore. She took a deep breath. “You will have to come to me,” she sighed. “Until we…take care of some things. I cannot risk being at the castle again anytime soon.”
“You did not let me finish my conditions,” he answered with a sly grin.
“There’s more?” Scarlett asked, raising her brows.
“You must spend the rest of tonight here, right beside me, and when you leave in the morning, do not slip out in the shadows. Say goodbye like a proper person.”
“I must go take my tonic, Callan. You know this,” she answered.
Callan pulled her onto his lap and began kissing up her neck, nibbling at her ear. “I also know,” he breathed into her ear, “that you brought your tonic with you.”
He was right. She had known this was a very real possibility and had come prepared. She’d even had Sybil mix a contraceptive tonic in with her regular one. “It can’t be like last time, Callan,” she said, pulling back from his kisses. “You can’t bring it up at council meetings. That approach, how we tried last time, that’s what set this whole mess into motion. No one can know you’re looking into it.”
“How am I supposed to learn anything then?” he asked, confusion on his face.
She gently pushed him back onto his pillows and hovered over him. “You’re clever, Prince. I’m sure you’ll think of something.” She brought her lips to his chest and began kissing her own way up to his neck.
He groaned low in his throat as her hands roamed down, and she continued to kiss up. “You really are quite persuasive,” he ground out.
“Oh, I know, your Highness,” she murmured, her lips finally finding his again. In a heartbeat, Callan had rolled and flipped her underneath him, and she pushed that self-hatred for what she was doing to him down, down, down as she let herself out of that cage she’d been shoved into.
Scarlett was dressed and standing before an open window, surveying the guards patrolling below. Maximus would be waiting for her with a horse around the corner. She just had to get there. She’d stayed as long as she could, but she was quickly losing darkness as dawn approached. She heard blankets and sheets rustling as Callan slipped into a pair of loose pants and came up behind her.
“We had a deal, you know,” he said, kissing her just below her ear.
“I wasn’t leaving quite yet,” she replied, elbowing him playfully in the ribs. “Just…getting the layout. It’s been a while.”
“Too damn long,” he said, his voice cold, and she stiffened against him.
“When you learn something, send word, and we will figure out a way for you to come to me undetected,” she said, closing her eyes as she leaned her head back against his chest. “Don’t tell anyone. Don’t involve anyone else, not even Finn or Sloan. We don’t know who to trust.”
She felt his hands on her hips, gently rotating her to face him. His hair was rumpled from their activities of the night and from the sleep they did get after she’d taken her tonic. “Stay,” he whispered, those hazel eyes imploring her. “Stay with me. We will figure the rest out.”
“Callan, I can’t. You know I can’t,” she answered sadly, bringing her hand to his cheek. “This. Us—”
“Do not say it,” he said, interrupting her and shaking his head. “Do not finish what you are about to say.”
“Callan—”
But then he was kissing her with an urgency that said he knew it could very well be the last time he did so.
She pulled back. She had to go. Now. Pulling her hood up over her re-braided hair, she whispered, “Goodbye, Callan.”
She was out the window faster than an alley cat, but not fast enough to escape the words that came from his lips.
I love you.
Not fast enough to escape the crushing ache that exploded in her chest at those three syllables.
She was across the castle grounds in less than five minutes. Two minutes later, she was rounding the corner where Maximus was indeed waiting for her. No words were exchanged as he hoisted her up onto the horse and set off through the streets. By horseback, the manor was only a five-minute ride when the streets were deserted. He stopped a block away, and she slid down, sneaking back into the manor the way she had come. But when she crept into the hall from that unused study, it wasn’t her room she went to. She stopped one door before hers and slipped in without even a knock.
The room was dark, the windows wide, letting in the morning breeze. She leaned her head against the door, closing her eyes and breathing deep but an abundance of scents bombarded her.
“See, you Fae ass,” Nuri drawled from the darkness. “She’s home and fine.”
“Can you not see from underneath that hood?” came Sorin’s voice, full of annoyance. “She is clearly not fine.”
Scarlett didn’t even have the energy to ask what he was doing here. And when Cassius’s voice came quietly from her left, “Seastar?,” she didn’t care who was in the room. She dropped to her knees and let the tears come. Cassius was instantly before her, his arms encircling her, stroking her hair.
“Everything went as planned then?” Nuri said grimly from across the room.
“Get. Out,” Scarlett seethed, nearly choking on a sob. She shivered as the temperature in the room seemed to plummet. “I don’t want to see your face or hear your voice. I will find you in two days’ time. Do not send for me.”
“We needed to do this, Scarlett,” she said quietly, but there was no remorse in her tone.
“Get the fuck out.” It took all of Scarlett’s shredded self-control not to scream the words at her.
She must not have made any movement to leave because Cassius growled, “I cannot believe you let her go do this.”
“How long are you going to coddle her, Cassius? We need her.”
“Do you know what she has done for you? What she has sacrificed for you?” Cassius snapped, his own voice rising.
“No one asked her to,” Nuri retorted. “I can look after myself. They can’t.”
“You are a bitch,” Cassius said, his voice dropping low. “Go. She’ll come to you when she’s ready.”
After a few moments, when her sobs had lessened, she lifted her eyes to Cassius’s. Worry and fear and sadness filled them as he searched her face. “Do you think they suspect anything?”
“No. They were in the banquet room all night, and I watched them both leave in their carriage. Maximus trailed them home and watched them both enter the house,” Cassius answered gently.
“I… We—”
“I know, Seastar,” he said soothingly. “You don’t need to say it.”
“He is going to hate me,” she choked out. Saying those words was like trying to swallow poison. Then she saw Sorin lingering by the window she assumed Nuri had left out of. She glared at him. “I told you to stay away tonight. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Death’s Shadow and I did not see eye-to-eye on things,” Sorin said with a shrug. “When it was clear that neither of us was going to win and neither of us was going to give in, she agreed to bring me here so I could see for myself when you returned…unharmed.”
“I told you that I can handle myself,” Scarlett said, rising to her feet.
“Easy, Seastar,” Cassius said under his breath. “The manor still sleeps.”
Ignoring him, Scarlett stalked across the room until she was directly in front of Sorin. “I am back. I am unharmed. You can leave.”
“You are back. You are anything but unharmed,” he replied, his golden eyes scanning hers.
“Who is the woman, Sorin?” she demanded, her voice lethal.
“Not the same one from your dream.”
“Then my wellbeing is still none of your concern. Get the hell out.”
She flung off her hood and began unbuckling weapons, Cassius catching them before they could clatter to the ground and wake up the house. She removed her jacket and kicked off her boots and socks. She pulled her tunic from over her head, leaving just the band around her breasts, and crossed the room, crawling into Cassius’s still made bed without another word.
She felt the bed shift as Cassius climbed onto the bed, and her whole body relaxed when he began stroking her hair. Tears slid down her cheeks as she tried to hold in the new round of sobs threatening to wrack her body.
“Her history is complicated,” she heard Cassius say. When there was no reply, he said, “It would be in your best interest to be gone before the house wakes.”
If Sorin said anything in response, Scarlett didn’t know. She did not care as she felt a familiar hollowness settle into her soul.