Page 89 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

“Just the one dead. Neve.” A self-satisfied curve works at the edges of his lips. “But you made the few people who were smart enough to bet on you quite a lot of money by not dying.”Amusement skates across his expression. “Including me.”

He turns toward the door, and I catch a glimpse of crimson-and-black uniforms lined up outside. They part quickly to let him through, then close ranks again. No one is getting past them until he gets back. Inorout.

My mind whirls. Cashel knows nothing about me, but he would have known the noble daughters for years, his whole life. There’s no logical reason for him to bet on me.

Unless…

Maybe this is the kind of thing Wolf had in mind when he made me bait for a prince. Cashel is clearly clever—that’s obvious—if he wasn’t lying about going down to the dungeons and seeing the girl the gardai had brought in as the peasant in the Assay before the Whisperers planted me.

Is that why the Whisperers want him distracted?

Hot water has to help. I remember the way it unraveled the knots in my shoulders in the baths with Aoife, how it was almost enough to make the rest of the world fall away.

My entire body feels like one giant, painful bruise.

A bruise that’s on fire.

I stand slowly, wincing at the nerve pain needling along my palms, between my fingers. Everywhere that I felt the squeeze of hands in mine when the creatlach nearly killed me. The pain almost steals my breath, but my head is clear enough now to realize there’s a dulling effect that wasn’t there when the pain first hit in the training yard, right after I drank the poison.

The antidote, maybe?

Stumbling across the room to the door in the wall, I press one shoulder into it—and gasp.

By the fucking Old Ones.

The entire bathing room gleams in ceramic tiles inlaid with jewels. Sunlight filters through a glazed window carved into the wall, and dances off the neatly cut facets of thousands of tiny mosaics carefully set across the floor.

Eireann, laid out in a bird’s-eye view.

This one doesn’t have any of the strange discrepancies the tapestries in the temple or the hall behind the castle baths did. The crown marking where Dyfflin lies has two peaks, not three. And seven dark pools mark the estates of the Seven Families in chips of obsidian and jet.

My hands work the strange metal knobs along the tiled walls as I study the details. A burst of water pours out from a spigot in the ceiling, and I gasp.

Now, this—thisis magic.

Although the water initially hits my skin like needles, soon the relief is pure bliss, washing away the filth of the last three days, stripping me clean. I tilt my head back to let the warmth pour over me. My hair’s a tangled mess, and working through it takes at least ten minutes.

I hear the click of a latch outside and wonder what kind of food a prince brings to his rooms.

I pluck one of the amber stones from a woven basket just out of the water’s reach, and sniff. The spicy smell of him hits my nose. The brick suds up where the water falls over my hand—soap—so different from the rough bricks of lye and animal fat we use in Quayside that I have to fight the instinct to put it back down and find something less precious. There must be a dozen of them, all piled up like little gems of amber in the basket.

Surely, he won’t mind if I use one. And if he does, what’s he going to do about it now?

My stomach growls again, and I rinse away the lather, turn the spigot off, and reach for one of the thick towels waiting on a wooden table beneath the window. It’s luxuriously soft against my raw skin. I manage to tuck the ends into something resembling a fold to keep it in place around me and pad back out to the bedchamber.

But there’s no food.

No Cashel.

The curtains at the edge of the massive window shift, and a figure cloaked in black leather and simmering wrath steps out. Wolf’s lip curls, tugging at the scar down his jaw, and he moves so close I can see the coals flaring in his eyes. “Why thefuckdo you smell like him?”

I manage to keep from yelling in shock, but just barely. How I manage not to drop the towel is beyond me, and I clutch at the knot keeping it in place above my breasts.

“Fuck, Wolf! I’m not wearing anything.”

His green eyes flare with something inexplicably close to relief as his gaze flies over my bare limbs, as if he’s checking me for bruises.

In the span of a second, a lethal stillness settles over him. “You look entirely too comfortable. And here I’ve spent the last three days worried you were on your deathbed.”