Chapter 11
Eleven
Sorcha
I’d had started dreading dinner—me, Ansel, and Neal in our previously disused formal dining room.
It felt like a business meeting every damn night—somehow worse than the nights I’d spent eating in my office talking shop with Neal before Ansel arrived.
I’d warmed up to Ansel, mostly. But I quietly mourned the days of sitting in the kitchen with Nokona, eating homemade Comanche food.
She offered, every night. And every night Ansel insisted we had work to do and so I was forced to decline.
I knew Ansel in particular couldn’t stomach the chilis. Neal had sweat through it and kept his mouth shut.
We’d spent the last three weeks digging up anything we could on the portals but turning up precious little.
Ansel had sent word to New York for more research and to have them look into Iksura’s likely fabricated claim about my title.
But progress was agonizingly slow. I was still wracking my brain as to how Iksura’s suitor had managed to get here in what looked like only three to four days instead of the usual several-month timeline.
Neal was obsessing over guard rotations, and Ansel was trying to keep miscellaneous complaints about minor supernatural events off my desk.
It was starting to wear on all of us. Tempers ran short.
Patience wore thin. And careful, professional boundaries were now definitively a thing of the past.
“Sorcha, you’re barely touching your plate,” Ansel said. “You feeling alright?”
“I was out with the bears this afternoon. Berries are good this time of year,” I lied. “I ate a lot on the trail.”
I had been out riding all afternoon and I had seen the bears, but berries wouldn’t flush for weeks. I was avoiding food because I’d almost vomited up porridge this morning, so there was no way the beef stew Ansel had ordered for tonight was staying down.
He didn’t need to know that yet.
“But if you’re starting to show symptoms?” Ansel waved his fork vaguely. “What I’m trying to say is, if you’re carrying, we can always adjust our plans.”
“We don’t have plans, Ansel,” I said. “We’re barely treading water right now.”
“You said you were late,” Neal added. “Last night. In bed.”
Ansel cracked a smile. Neal had slept in my bed since that awful night five weeks back.
I hated myself for it. Hated that I still wanted him to hold me after what he’d done.
But I kept dragging him there—some nights at dusk once I knew Ansel had shut himself in his office to work, some not until the horrible pre-dawn when I was inevitably awake alone and miserable. But one way or another? I woke up in his arms every morning.
We’d kissed again. Once. Briefly. On a particularly grueling night, when I’d been up at two in the morning in tears over the utter chaos that had derailed my life and fallen prey to some primal desire for closeness, connection, and safety.
We hadn’t mentioned it to Ansel. I’d told the owl who lived out in the barn rafters—not a soul else.
“Why are we talking about this at dinner?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ansel asked, voice growing scolding.
“Because I’m not that late, and I don’t have any symptoms, and I just don’t know right now,” I snapped.
It wasn’t true. I was thirteen days past due.
I’d been sweating buckets for almost a week, regardless of temperature.
The nausea had hit this morning, and I could feel something in my body shifting.
But I wasn’t ready to have that conversation yet—not with Ansel, not at dinner.
I was about to get up from the table when someone knocked at the door.
“I’ll get it,” Neal offered, leaving me to slouch into my seat and bury my face in my hands—desperate to avoid eye contact.
Neal returned moments later.
“We have a visitor.” His voice was sharp, uncharacteristically so.
“Hello, High Lady Wilson.” The voice was unfamiliar—with a vaguely Russian accent—dripping with some uncomfortable mixture of self-confidence and repressed rage.
I picked my head up.
“We don’t take visitors after eight,” I replied—deadpan. “It struck half past already. Go.”
“I’m your new Inner Court Emissary, Iosif,” our guest replied—he was tall, black hair slicked back, expensive suit, oddly tidy for coming in off the road. “That technically makes me part of the household, doesn’t it? Won’t you set a plate for me?”
“Jeremy was never part of the household,” I said bluntly. “You aren’t either. Neal will schedule a time you can come back and talk shop. Until then I suggest you find yourself a hotel or a tent.”
“Oh, so she’s every bit as stubborn as Alexi said?” The man chuckled. “This’ll be fun.”
“Out,” I snapped.
“I’ve just a couple little notes and a present from Iksura to leave for you,” he said. “Then I promise I’ll go.”
He deposited a folio of papers and a leather-wrapped package on the dining room table.
“I’ll see myself out.”
He turned heel and left. Neal grabbed the folio off the table and I turned to the package.
“This is insane,” I muttered as I unwrapped it, revealing a tiny, red-black vial of liquid. I read the card attached, then dropped it onto the table, fingers recoiling instinctively.
“What’s wrong?” Ansel asked.
“That’s an abortifacient,” I said. “Presumably for me. Presumably because I’m ignoring all her letters about my title being invalid and went ahead with marrying Neal and not Alexi.”
I shuddered, hands subconsciously drifting down to my belly. I couldn’t even be positive that I was pregnant yet—but the idea of doing away with our baby for political gain made my stomach turn and uncomfortable heat creep up the back of my neck.
“This isn’t good,” Neal muttered as he read through the folio.
“Let me guess,” Ansel said. “She’s suggesting Sorcha either inject herself with that vial, divorce you, and get together with Iosif instead, or she keep the baby and let Iosif act as regent for the next seventy-odd years?
To provide guidance and suggestions—which in this case is obviously an uncomfortable euphemism for coercion, if not torture. ”
“More or less.” Neal shrugged. “If you get over the flowery language.”
“So we’ll go,” I said, suddenly. I didn’t want to leave.
I didn’t want to abandon my mother and brother in the ground.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to Nokona after she’d spent the last two decades loving me like her own child.
But if Iksura wanted control of the Court so badly she was willing to kill off my baby and torture me to get it?
Then we needed out. We needed resources, structure, communications, staff—all things we could get in New York or Edinburgh.
All things in horribly short supply here in Santa Fe.
“Excuse me?” Neal asked, stunned.
“She wants to play hard? We play hard. We do exactly what you’d been begging my father to consider for decades.
We move the Court back to Europe—stop in New York to finalize our arguments against her legal claim on the way.
We prove just how qualified I am to Outer Court like a civilized person instead of a power-hungry despot. ”
“So we just walk out into the desert?” Neal said blankly.
Ansel chuckled, eyes gleaming. He’d spent twenty years arguing for this exact thing, and I could feel just how thrilled he was as he said, “Nonsense, Neal. We’ll use horses.”
“I’ll go see about supplies,” Neal said, making for the door.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Ansel said sharply. “I’ll get us packed—we’ll leave before dawn. I want her in your room tonight.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“You’ve apparently been sleeping together anyway.
That’s his babe you might be carrying. Get over it,” Ansel snapped.
“I don’t trust this Inner Court noble jackass as far as I can throw him.
And if he did want to cause trouble, he’d look for you in your own bed.
Alone. Don’t be there. Don’t be by yourself. Understood?”
Neal had taken up residence in what would have been my baby brother’s room—right next door to mine.
My father had built a whole new wing on the house when we arrived.
They made all kinds of plans. We moved in eight months before she was due.
The room had sat empty and silent for two decades now. I avoided even looking at the door.
But—to his credit—Neal had made it properly cozy.
There were two brass-bodied kerosene lamps with purple-red glass shades, one on the desk and one on his nightstand—which I could only assume he used to keep up with work after dark—a red, gold, and ivory blanket Nokona had woven a few years back lay tucked on top of the usual bleach-white bedlinen.
A bookshelf was affixed to one wall and lined with carefully labeled leather-bound journals, dates embossed on the spines stretching back into the previous century.
His pistols and knife were in their holsters and sheath along his belt, which itself was slung over the footboard.
Everything was meticulously organized and well-kept.
One of my cats already perched in a tree outside the window, screaming to be let in.
I went to the window and wrangled the big, complaining tabby in from its perch as Neal knelt to stoke the fire back to life.
“You’re not sleeping on the floor again, are you?
” I asked. I tried to put bite behind the words but failed.
I was terrified. Iksura had sent an Inquisitor—who was telling me to kill off our potential baby and comply with Iksura’s legally dubious coup—or else.
An Inquisitor who posed a threat severe enough Ansel wouldn’t let me sleep in my own room.
I wanted the closeness, the comfort. I wanted to wake up breathing in his smell when a nightmare inevitably sent me gasping back into consciousness before dawn. I glanced down at the glass vial of drugs, still in my palm. First? I wanted that gone.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Neal replied, getting up and dusting off his palms.
I shoved the vial in his direction.
“Burn it,” I said.
His eyebrows shot up.
“I said destroy it,” I replied, pulling the cat closer into my chest.
“This and asking me to come sleep in bed with you,” Neal said as he uncapped the glass and poured out the contents into the blaze and a reek of wet, burnt foliage filled the room. “I’d almost think you were ready to kiss and make up.”
“Patience,” I snapped. “You know what you did.”
“But you do want me to come to bed with you?” he asked.
I put the cat down on his desk and started unbuttoning my dress, avoiding his eyes. “Of course I do.”