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Rainer stops in his tracks. When he turns, my breath hitches at his cruel indifference.
“Oh, I know.”
“No!” I scream after him, irritating my newly healed throat once again. “Get the prince! Please just get the prince, let me explain! Please.”
A flash of amusement creeps onto his face. “I hear the prince is a cruel bastard. Something tells me you won’t care much for him. But since I’m not entirely heartless, I’ll send Das Celyn to tend you in the meantime.” With that, he strides away, leaving me sobbing in the enchanted doorway. “Welcome to the Umbra Court.”
eight
I Am Conflicted
Rainer
I storm into my office, planting my hands on my desk and letting out a roar. It echoes off the tall ceilings. With a quick swipe of my arm, I clear my oversized desk of its piles of parchment. After I compose myself, I slowly roll up my sleeves and turn to Kenisius.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“Well,” he says with a sheepish grin and half-shrug, “too late?”
He plops sideways into one of the ornate couches with red and gold velvet, kicking his feet up and placing his arms behind his head.
“Too damn late.”
I eye the papers scattered across my office floor with distaste—correspondences with Terra Court, and, worse, with the human queen, Wyetta. Another thorn in my side. “We’re lucky the girl isn’t a spy.”
The human girl with grey eyes and pouty lips. A beautifully sad girl that stunned me silent—not because of her appearance, but because of the charged energy between us.
The pull I felt to her.
“I would’ve sent her back like the rest if she was.”
“That’s not my point. My point is that you had no way of knowing she wasn’t, Kenisius.”
Stooping, I angrily snatch up some of the papers, placing them in a neat pile. I can’t stand messes.
“It’s clear as day, Rai. Don’t be like that.”
He isn’t wrong. It’s obvious she isn’t a spy. She’s timid. Scrawny. Clearly unskilled. She might’ve survived the woods, but barely. If Kenisius and I hadn’t found her, she’d likely be dead right now.
It’d be another tally to my body count.
“It’s almost worse that she isn’t a spy.” I slam my fist on the desk, and my rings bite into my fingers. The wine decanter rattles, threatening to shatter. “She’s a Tradeling. She has an owner. And if anyone saw her cross, there could be trouble.”
This isn’t the first time a Tradeling escaped from Dovenak into our realm. We always send them back. Granted, the forest normally gets to them before I do, so they often return in corpse form, but Queen Wyetta never once specified they had to be returned alive.
If only they stayed away from the Gleam—from Avylon.
If anyone saw the girl cross, and we don’t produce a body soon—dead or alive—it’s likely the girl’s owner will send someone more skilled after her.
A spy.
An assassin.
Those are the ones who do occasionally make it through the trees, at the behest of Queen Wyetta, only to meet death at my hands. I always blame it on the woods, of course, but the queen isn’t dimwitted. We both know the unspoken truth.
The woods and I really aren’t that different, after all.
“So you’re not sending her back?”
