Chapter 27
“They must have a man on the inside,” I thought out loud, watching the flames in the fireplace lick the walls.
“What makes you say that?” Stefano asked from the center of my room.
Ever since we’d returned a few hours ago, he’d refused to stray from the defensive position, ready for any attack. Although I doubted that anyone would manage a successful offensive now, considering the sun had risen and the entire Citadel was on guard.
“It’s obvious. They were able to enter the Citadel’s gates, they knew exactly where my room was, and they took out every guard who could have witnessed their attack.”
“It is obvious,” he agreed. “And I don’t like it. We’ve never had a rat before,” he replied in a grave tone.
“Harthon has spies in Koerlyn’s circle. It doesn’t seem so odd for him to have one in ours.”
“Harthon and Koerlyn are very different people. Koerlyn rules through fear, and so people hate him. Sometimes, that hatred overpowers their fear. Harthon rules through respect, fairness, and a little fear. It’s a difficult combination to betray.”
Bruises protested as I pushed up in my chair, twisting to face him. “So what is powerful enough to make someone want to betray Harthon? Money?”
Stefano shook his head, looking troubled. “Everyone in the Citadel is cared for. No one in here is starving. Money isn’t as important as it is elsewhere.”
Then what could it be? And who could it be? Between chambermaids, cooks, soldiers, and every grounds worker, there were an unlimited number of possibilities. If they weren’t found, what would stop something like this from happening again?
In the hallway, a door opened and closed. Harthon, most likely, returning to his room from whatever he’d been taking care of since he left me in the kitchen. Maybe he’d already found the rat.
I pushed to my feet, deciding I should ask him. It would help ease my worries.
Liar.
Okay, so I wanted to check on him. I also wanted to thank him for having the hearing of a bat and registering our attackers while I was sound asleep. And if I was being completely honest, part of me just simply wanted to see him, because we both could have been killed.
What was so wrong with that?
Stefano eyed me warily. “Where are you going?”
“To talk to Harthon,” I replied, walking toward the door. “You don’t need to follow me. He can guard me if someone attacks in the next minute.”
And yet, Stefano was behind me like a shadow as I entered the hallway. “It’s my job to follow you.”
I looked to the ceiling for patience, trying not to be frustrated. He was only trying to protect me, but Harthon would treat me differently with Stefano in the room.
Differently as in, not kiss you? Exactly.
“It’s your job to guard me,” I corrected gently, setting a hand on his arm. “Harthon won’t let anyone in through his window, and as long as you’re here in the hallway, no one will get to me this way. Job, accomplished.” I smiled, seeing the moment he wilted to my logic.
“Fine. But I need to see that it’s him in there before I stay back,” he decided.
I wouldn’t argue with that. If the rat could be anyone, I technically wasn’t safe with any chambermaid, soldier, or worker besides those in the inner circle.
The knob twisted easily in my hand, and I pushed the heavy wood open. The air from the room wafted out, carrying the same masculine scent he’d left in my sheets. At the flash of dark hair, I began to assure Stefano. “See? It’s just hi—”
I stopped as I took in more than Harthon’s hair, shock rendering me speechless. I’d caught him treating a cut high on the back of his leg, his pants lowered to reveal two muscular, tanned globes. He quickly twisted, the front of his pants thankfully lifted higher than the back.
Embarrassment came first, but it was quickly washed away by the burn of horrid recognition.
With his front to me now, I could no longer see it, but I thought…my mind wouldn’t have imagined something like that.
“So eager to say hello that you didn’t knock?” He said it with a playful quirk to his lips, but there was a rigidness in his shoulders.
I forced my throat to work. “You didn’t lock it.”
“Because I wanted easy access to you if another threat arose, and because most people knock, carella.”
But I hadn’t knocked, and I’d caught him with his pants lowered and seen the same image that had haunted my sleep for years.
He has a lot of scars. It’s just a battle wound.
Except battle wounds were jagged or sharp slices, not spiraled shapes.
“Turn around,” I said with a shaking voice.
When he didn’t make a quip about admiring his ass, nausea settled in my stomach. When his smile faded and he dismissed Stefano from the room, something hot and hard sliced through my chest, freezing me in place.
The door closed softly behind me, and he righted his pants, eyes churning with emotion. “I don’t need to turn around. You know what you saw,” he confirmed, and for a moment, I felt as if I was dangling from the tower’s window again.
Harthon, the man I’d trusted, the one who’d kissed me and held me and awoken feelings I never thought I could feel, had the same scar as the man who killed my parents.
“I…you…” I stumbled over impossible thoughts and sharp emotions, incapable of knowing what to say. “Did everyone in the clan have the…the scar?”
I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, that this was reality.
Eying me as one would eye a cornered animal, Harthon slowly took a step forward. “Yes.”
“Were you there?”
He took another step, and I backed up, a flash of fear shooting through me. No—not fear. Even now, I didn’t fear him. It was just a need for space. Still, he kept coming. “I was there.”
Oh, skies.
I bumped into the door behind me, so completely rattled by the visceral pain of betrayal beneath my ribs. “Do you remember it?” I whispered, helpless against his approach.
He stopped one step away from me, pain in his gaze. “Not specifically. They all blend together.”
How ironic that the night that changed the course of my life, the one I dreamed about so often, was nothing but an insignificant blip in his memory.
“When the rest of your people slaughtered villages like mine, did you kill, too?”
“I fought but avoided killing, as much as I could.”
His answer only made this slightly more bearable. If he had eagerly killed my neighbors, been the hand that had stolen their lives, I didn’t know what I would do. Maybe lunge for his knives and try to stab him, take vengeance for what had happened.
Even if you were able, you could never kill him.
Because in the past few weeks, I’d grown attached to him. Comradery and attraction. Who was I fooling? Had it only been that, this would not feel like my insides were being ripped in two.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my voice cracking.
A new realization dawned, striking me deeper.
“You knew that your clan was responsible, back when I told you about my dream in the woods. And you didn’t tell me then.
” He’d kissed me and touched me instead, all the while keeping me oblivious to the truth.
Tears pricked my eyes. Whether they were born of anger, pain, or sadness, I couldn’t tell, but regardless, I couldn’t stop them.
His hand reached toward me as if to comfort.
I flinched, and he stilled, his features turning flat as he dropped his hand back to his side.
“I wanted to tell you, Etarla. You’ve always deserved to know, but the need to get into the Domus, the fate of this world, is above all of that.
I couldn’t risk you trying to leave in anger.
Duty allows no choices,” he said, but his reasoning wasn’t good enough. He did have a choice.
“You lied to me.”
“Had you asked me outright, like you are now, I would have told you the truth.”
I scoffed at that. No matter how he played with words, his omission was as good as a lie. “Is that what you told yourself to feel better as you kissed me, held me, last night, knowing I was clueless?”
His jaw grew taut. “I told you many times that I’m not a good man. You’re the one who decided to believe otherwise. Now you know the truth.”
He might as well have slapped me.
I exhaled, spun, and yanked the door open. The conversation was done. I had no more questions, only tears, and I’d be damned if he’d bear witness to them.
I ignored the startled look on Stefano’s face and barged into my room. He made to follow me, but I turned, stopping him before he entered the doorway. “Stay out,” I said, because I could only manage two coherent words.
By some miracle, he didn’t argue, and I slammed the door shut.
* * *
By the time night fell and I laid in bed, my head and body throbbed equally with exhaustion.
Once my tears had run dry, I’d forced Stefano to train me for hours, partly in anger and partly out of the need to distract myself from the caustic emotions that overwhelmed me.
Now I was too tired to feel much of anything, allowing room for logic to work.
And as much as I loathed to admit it, logic told me that Harthon’s reasoning wasn’t completely wrong.
Getting into Centralis was bigger than me and my emotions, and considering I’d only recently decided to be a fully willing participant in Harthon’s plan…well, I could see how building trust took precedence over revealing this part of his past.
And even after today’s revelation, that trust still stood. In part.
When I’d told Harthon yesterday that he was blameless for what he was part of as a child, I’d wholeheartedly meant it.
Regardless of the fact that I was affected by his past, he’d still been too young to truly be bad, and when he was old enough to be held accountable for wrong and right, he separated from his father and killed him.
He’d been seeking to change things for the better ever since. He was a leader for good.
For me to go back on my beliefs now, only because my emotions were involved, would make me a hypocrite.
So I did still trust that Harthon was the right man to bring into the Domus. He was still a good man for the people. I would still support his—support our—mission.
But for him to hold the truth from me while he’d…while he’d held me like I mattered, kissed me and touched me—that was unforgivable. He’d allowed me to feel things, to trust that he was safe, to want him, all the while knowing he kept this from me.
That was where the betrayal lay.
I’d been played for a fool. I’d allowed that to happen. All because of a few kindnesses and gestures and a well-built body that’d peeled my walls down and exposed me to something I’d never wanted before.
Apparently, Etarla of the past had been right in her mindset of swearing off relationships.
I should have known. Just yesterday, Harthon had called me na?ve for stating that he was a good man. He’d been correct. I wouldn’t be na?ve any longer.
My stomach growled, and I rolled over, trying to ease the ache.
I’d felt too sick to eat all day. Felda had left me dinner, but it was cold by now.
My head landed on the second pillow, and emotions swelled to the surface once more at his scent.
Last night at this time, he’d been here, setting my body on fire.
Trying to settle in, I jammed my arm beneath the pillow—and touched something that was far too crinkly and rough to be part of the bed. I shifted the pillow to the side, revealing a neatly rolled scroll.
If it had been here last night, Harthon would have noticed it. He was too observant not to. It had been placed here today, then. The fact that it was there and not on my dresser, just after we’d been attacked…
This couldn’t be anything good.
I swept out of bed and carried the paper to the fireplace, which still glowed with hot embers. I undid the string that tied the scroll together and rolled out the paper. The letters were thankfully big and neat, and there weren’t many of them.
Slowly, I began to read the two short lines.
“At your riding lesson tomorrow, you will go to Koerlyn, or your old woman will die. Say nothing, or she will face consequences.”
“No. No, no, no,” I whispered, forcing myself to read the lines again to see if they were really there. The words didn’t change.
Oh, skies. Merelda.
My stomach dropped, but the sensation was so much worse than it’d been earlier today. Koerlyn had Merelda. He could be tearing her nails from her fingers at this moment. She could be in the darkest dungeon, chained. We’d been too slow in getting to her, and now she was suffering, all because of me.
Bile rose, but there was nothing in my stomach to vomit. I stood and paced, scanning the scroll once more and forcing myself to take a deep breath. Panic wouldn’t help the situation.
There technically was no proof. Only words and the knowledge that Merelda wasn’t here with me in Fourth. It could be a bluff. The kidnapping attempt had failed, and now Koerlyn was trying to fool me into going to him.
But the fact that they even knew about Merelda was worrisome. She had few contacts outside of our village. For Koerlyn to know about her, he had to have gone to my home. And if Merelda was there, he wouldn’t have hesitated to take her.
And Merelda never left home. She had to have been there. Which meant the letter wasn’t a lie at all.
I had to go.
Getting Harthon into Centralis was bigger than my emotions, but it wasn’t bigger than Merelda’s life. It never would be. I would go, get Merelda, and find a way back here before giving Koerlyn any hints of where the path into Centralis lay.
As if it’ll be that easy. The cynical voice in my head taunted me, and I brushed it aside.
I was more capable now than I had been when Koerlyn first took me. Besides, I had no choice. I couldn’t gamble with Merelda’s life. I would show up to tomorrow’s riding lesson and somehow leave Fourth.
Harthon would think I’d abandoned him. He’d think today’s revelation had changed my loyalties.
There was no way for me to tell him otherwise.
The letter’s warning to say nothing was a clear threat, and if Koerlyn’s spy was trusted enough to have access to my room today, they could very well know if I spoke to Harthon.
I couldn’t take the risk with Merelda’s well-being. I would go.