ALDRIC
The rooster announces the dawn, and Clara announces her intention to murder the rooster.
“One day,” she mumbles into my shoulder. “One day I’m going to introduce him to your frying pan, and there won’t be a jury in Germany that convicts me.”
“He has served this keep faithfully for two years,” I intone solemnly.
She burrows deeper against my side, her leg thrown over mine, her silver hair spilling across my chest, and I stroke her spine and wait.
Because she’s been awake for twenty minutes, and she has not yet said a single word about yesterday.
About the town. About whatever chased the color from her face and sent her into my garden hunting oblivion.
Schmetterling occupies her legs like a furred paperweight, purring at a volume that suggests he intends to be part of any conversation held in this bed.
“Question,” Clara says.
“Mm.”
“Do you dream? Like, actual dreams, or is it more of a screensaver situation?”
Deflection. I know the tactic well—I have used cavalry the same way. “I do not know what a screensaver is, but I dream. Rarely. Mostly of things that no longer exist.”
“Huh.” Her finger traces the wolf on my ribs. “Question. What’s the worst meal you ever ate?”
“Boot leather,” I reply immediately. “The second month of a siege.”
She makes a thoughtful noise. “Worse than McDonald’s?”
“The boot had fewer ingredients I couldn’t identify,” I drawl.
She snorts against my collarbone, and I feel her gathering the next question like an archer reaching for another arrow. Whatever she is circling, she intends to approach it from every direction except directly.
“Question.”
“Clara. Is this an interrogation? Should I be strapped to a chair?”
“Later, if you’re good.” Her hand wanders up to my ear, the mangled one, and her fingertip touches the rings threaded through the ruined cartilage, gentle as a breath. “These. Are they decoration or are they, like… load-bearing?”
“Both.” I turn my head to give her better access, because her touch on any part of my body is something I would trade provinces for. “Those hold the ear together. A mace took most of it, and my wounds ceased healing two years later, so the piercings serve as permanent stitching. Functional.”
She clicks her tongue in sympathy. “And the lip ones?”
“Decorative. The nipple as well. And the tongue.” I pause. “And the ladder.”
Her cheeks flush pink. Another victory for Lord Blackthorn.
“So you just… what, woke up one century and thought, you know what this corpse needs? More metal?”
“I was bored, Clara. Do you comprehend the boredom of several hundred years in this castle? I had read every book a hundred times. I had counted the stones in the great hall. Twice, because I lost count at four thousand the first time. A needle and a steady hand were entertainment.” I shrug, jostling her head.
“The pain was a novelty. Feeling anything was a novelty.”
She’s quiet a moment, her thumb resting on the lip rings.
“And the tattoos?”
“Lukas did most of them, though some I brought from before my curse, and he refreshed them. The man was an artist, not a groundskeeper’s son.
He taught me before he died, and I continued the work myself.
Some of the newer ones are mine entirely.
” I catch her hand and press it flat over the inked script below my collarbone.
“Left-handed work is sloppier. You can tell which decade I did while drinking.”
“Lukas.” She lifts her head, chin propped on my sternum, eyes narrowing. “Wait. The Lukas who signed the portrait? The 1817 guy?”
“The very same. He painted it in secret, from the doorway of the solar, because I refused to sit for one. I only learned of it after his death.” I let my smirk build slowly.
“The portrait you stood beneath your first night here. The one you whistled at. The one that made you fall in love with me at first sight, before you had exchanged a single word with—”
She slaps my chest.
It’s not a hard slap. It’s barely a slap at all, more an indignant pat delivered by a woman with no leverage. But the motion travels down her body, and her legs shift, and Schmetterling is launched from his throne like a man overboard.
He lands, of course, on his feet. He turns. He looks at us both with three hundred years of accumulated disappointment, tail lashing once, and stalks to the door, where he pauses to cast a final glare over his shoulder before flouncing into the hallway.
“Great,” Clara says. “Now the cat hates us.”
“He hates you.” I grin unrepentantly. “I was stationary.”
“I did not fall in love with you because of a painting.” She jabs a finger into my chest, just south of the exposed ribs.
“I fell in love with you because of fish and warm socks and your unhinged devotion to breakfast. The painting made me think, ‘huh, hot dead guy,’ and that is a completely different emotion.”
“Hot dead guy,” I repeat slowly. “I have held seventeen titles. That one is my favorite.”
She laughs, though it dies too quickly, and I feel the change in her body before she speaks. Her muscles draw tight. Her fingers curl against my ribs. The questions have run out, and whatever she has been marching around all morning now stands directly in her path.
“Aldric.”
“I’m here.”
“Yesterday. In town.” She doesn’t lift her head. She speaks into my chest, to the crystal, as though it’s easier to confess to the heart than the face. “I saw Marco. At the farmers market. With two of his men.”
My body locks up. I’m a general once more, receiving news from the battlefront.
My first thought is she does not leave the keep again. I will bar the gate. I will walk the walls. I will find this Marco and introduce him to my great sword, and the forest will keep the secret as it always has, and Clara will be safe inside these walls where nothing can…
I bite my tongue.
Because I know this woman. I know that if I say you are confined to the castle, she will be in the Porsche by noon, driving to town out of pure spite, purchasing fruit directly in front of the man hunting her while maintaining eye contact.
Her defiance is not a flaw to be managed.
It is the very thing that broke a seven-hundred-year curse.
But by all the saints, it makes strategy delicate.
“Tell me everything,” I say instead of imprisoning her outright, and my voice comes out level. Mostly level.
She tells me what happened. Her hiding behind a statue. Marco seemingly searching for her for weeks. Two ruffians by his side.
“He’s not looking for me because he misses me,” she finishes. “He’s looking because I embarrassed him. I walked off the shelf, and now he has a reputation problem.”
“Then he is more dangerous than a man in love,” I say. “A man in love can be reasoned with, bought, or broken. A man defending his pride will work himself into ruin first.”
“Comforting,” my little intruder deadpans. “Thank you. Great pillow talk.”
I choose my next words carefully.
“Clara. I am going to say something, and I want you to hear all of it before your spine straightens.” Her spine straightens.
I press on. “I am not commanding you. I am asking you, as a man who has studied siege craft longer than most nations have existed, to consider the tactical picture. He does not know where you are. He will not come here. The keep is on no map yet, and the road is new. The one place he can find you is out there. Every trip to town is a throw of the dice. I am asking you to let the dice rest for a while. Stay on the grounds. Let him exhaust himself hunting a ghost.”
Silence. I count her breaths. Four. Five.
“That was really hard for you, wasn’t it?” she says. “I could hear the gears grinding. You wanted to say ‘I forbid it’ so bad.”
“The word forbid did present itself. I declined its services.”
“Look at you. Growth.” She props herself up and studies my face, and whatever she finds there softens her expression. “Okay.”
I blink. “Okay?”
“Don’t look so shocked. It’s insulting. I’m stubborn, not stupid.
I saw his face, Aldric. I hid behind a bronze mustache man and shook.
” She settles back against me, tucking her head beneath my chin.
“Staying home for a few weeks is fine. It’s not even a hardship anymore. I’ll just use Prime for everything.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I say. In fact, I feel like I’ve been saying that daily for weeks now.
“You’ll find out.” I feel her grin against my throat. It is almost as unsettling as Marco’s presence. “Once the packages start piling up, you’ll know exactly what it is. Fair warning, I have your treasury and unresolved trauma, and those two things should never share a shopping cart.”
“How many packages, Clara?”
“You have a whole barn, you’ll be fine.”
“Clara. How many packages?”
She’s already pretending to be asleep, the fraud, her breathing now theatrically deep while her mouth fights a smile. I pull her closer, press my lips to her hair, and stare at the vaulted ceiling while I think about the threat of man and package.