Page 7

She prickled as if unease slithered beneath her skin. “Why would you say that?” Her voice dropped to a breathy tone, just above a whisper.

I took a long inhale and let it out slowly. “Because you deserve to know the truth.”

Ruby didn’t move. She stood with her hand on the knife still pointed at my chest and her tea going cold, staring at me. Her chest rose and fell with her breaths, her expression fighting to determine what was real.

“How did you know how she wakes me?” she asked.

“We’ve retrieved files over the years.”

She snorted. “You mean stolen.”

I didn’t reply to that.

Her brows arched upward. “Why would it note how she wakes me in a file?”

I paused, sensing what I said next would hurt her. “Because she wakes all her trainees the same way.”

Ruby flinched so imperceptibly I would have missed it had I not been expecting it. She’d been trained well not to show emotion, but I caught a flicker of pain in her eyes. She now knew that wasn’t a special familial greeting they shared each morning. It was standard among operatives: a saccharine start before she trained in violence.

“How did you learn her voice?” she asked at last.

“At Wetherel, twelve years ago. She read the sentence on my father.”

No movement except for her eyes as she continued to assess. “So that’s why you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You want me dead.”

“You’re the assassin, holding a weapon.” I lifted my mug slowly. “I’m holding a cup of tea.” I sipped it slowly, watching thoughts play out on her face.

Seconds passed. “What do you want?”

I motioned to her chair. “For you to sit. So we can talk.”

She remained where she stood for several more seconds before she took three steps back toward the table. She sat.

“Good,” I said. “First, we eat.”

I made Ruby eat.

She’d protested at first, pride rising through, as she demanded answers instead. I insisted our conversation would go better if we ate first. I’d cooked a stew with hare and winter turnip, served with bread I’d baked that morning.

She checked the bowl first. She turned it and looked at the underside of the rim for a residue line, which is what you do when you’ve been taught to look for it. I served myself a bowl from the same pot and ate two spoonfuls in front of her. She hesitated, assessed, then ate from her bowl, and neither of us said a word about it.

Then we talked. I told her the corridor sigils had been recut eight times in the last decade, and by whom, because she’d counted them on the way in and she’d know I was right. She put her spoon down when I said it. Recut means maintained. Maintained means somebody wanted the road open, and the Order hasn’t held that road in ten years, so the somebody was me. Which means the trap she’d walked into had been advertising itself for a decade, and nobody at headquarters had ever mentioned it to her.

I told her the intake age at the Order had been eight until eighteen years ago and that the change to six went through in a single season on a single signature. She could check that against her own year. She appeared to do the arithmetic behind her eyes and her jaw moved.

Then I had a question only she could answer. “Why didn’t you try to kill me right away?”

She paused before answering. “I haven’t done the verification.”

“You could quickly assess I am who you’ve been sent to kill.”

Her lips pursed. She stirred her stew with her spoon and kept her gaze on it. “Discretion. I need to assess what you know.”

“Section four.”