Chapter 144: Where Is Heather?

Daemus was gone before breakfast.

Blair heard him leave just after dawn. No goodbye. No good morning. When she came out of her room, there was a note stuck to the fridge in his big, messy handwriting.

Extra practice. Back tonight.

That was all.

Blair stood in front of the fridge and read it three times, as if the words might change if she stared hard enough.

"He’ll come around, dear," Clarice said from the stove, flipping an egg. She didn’t sound particularly concerned. "Boys sulk. It’s what they do best."

After breakfast, Clarice took Kael out into the back garden. Through the window, Blair could see him running in circles on the grass, chasing a butterfly with the single-minded focus of a tiny predator. Clarice sat on the bench beneath the tree with a cup of tea, watching him.

The tree.

Blair looked away from the window.

Killian was already at the dining table. His textbook was open. "Chapter nineteen," he said, without looking up. "Criminal jurisdiction."

The lesson began.

It was the strangest one yet. Killian’s voice was perfectly calm, but he never once looked at her face. When she answered, his eyes stayed on the textbook. When he explained something, he spoke to the page, or the window, or the empty chair at the head of the table.

Yesterday, Blair would have given anything for this.

Today, it made her skin crawl.

Because she was sure she knew why he wasn’t looking at her. He had seen her yesterday. Flushed and trembling and breathing hard, like a lesser who had forgotten her place and started panting after the Crown Prince.

He probably thought she was disgusting.

She didn’t blame him. She didn’t understand what had happened to her either. One moment she had been terrified of him, and the next her whole body had been burning. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

She hadn’t slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw it. A box marked Authorized By. Heather’s name. 3:12 AM. The words kept circling her head until she felt dizzy and sick.

And when she finally pushed those thoughts away, the painting was waiting behind them.

She had pulled the photograph up again last night and stared at it until the laptop screen dimmed. Sister Margaret, kneeling at the front.

Sister Margaret, who had taught her to read. Who had brushed the knots out of her hair every night, and mixed the dye every few weeks without fail. Who had pressed Blair’s face between her dry, papery hands and told her, over and over, You are human, child. Only human.

Blair had zoomed in until the image turned to blurry squares. The paint on the canvas was cracked all over, fine lines spidering across the woman’s cheeks and throat, the way paint cracked when it was very, very old. The frame was dark with age. Whoever had painted that picture had painted it long before Blair was ever born.

So it wasn’t her.

It was someone with her face. Her hair. Her eyes.

And the sisters had hidden that woman in a room Blair had never known existed, while they kept Blair’s own hair dyed brown for as long as she could remember.

"Section four," Killian said. "Kidnapping of a noble. What is the penalty?"

Blair’s pen stopped.

She stared down at the page. Kidnapping.

"Death," she whispered. "Or exile. At the Crown’s discretion."

"And kidnapping of a lesser?"

It wasn’t in the textbook, but Blair knew the answer and it had made her want to throw up. "There isn’t one," she whispered.

"Correct." Killian turned the page.

Heather was a lesser in Dormitory G with a cheap uniform and a list of beastmen she wanted to marry. Nobody would have punished anyone for taking her. Nobody would even have looked.

Nobody except Blair.

"Where is Heather?"

The moment the words left her mouth, she wanted to snatch them back.

Killian stopped writing.

"Who?" he said.

Blair’s hands were shaking in her lap. She pressed them together until her knuckles turned white. Stop. Stop talking. But the dam had already cracked, and weeks of fear came pouring through it.

"Heather Greene," she whispered. "My roommate. She went to a party and never came home. Everyone said she left with a male royal." She swallowed hard. "And then she was just... gone. They said she was dead. They cleared her side of the room."

Killian was silent.

"I have never heard that name in my life," he said.

"Your ID was on her transfer form."

Blair heard what she’d said a second too late. It hung in the air between them, and there was no taking it back.

"Say that again," Killian said softly.

Blair couldn’t.

"Look at me."

She didn’t want to. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her not to. But she found her eyes lifting on their own to his eyes.

Then the fury came.

It hit her like a wave of ice water. Cold, crushing dread poured into her chest and filled her lungs until she couldn’t breathe. Her vision tunneled. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard it hurt. Every cell in her body was screaming that she was about to die, that something hungry was looking at her, and there was nowhere left to run.

Her chair tipped backward.

She hit the floor on her knees, gasping, one hand braced against the tiles. She couldn’t get air. She couldn’t think.

Then, just as suddenly, it was gone.

Killian had turned his head away. He was staring at the wall, his jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek. His hands were flat on the table. They were trembling.

Blair knelt on the floor and sucked in air in ragged, shaking gulps.

"You," Killian said, very quietly, to the wall, "think I stole a lesser in the middle of the night."

Blair couldn’t answer. She could barely breathe.

"Where did you see this form?"

She pressed her lips together.

She couldn’t tell him. If she told him, he would know about Jack’s folder. And whatever else was in it, she had a terrible feeling it was the only thing standing between her and the truth.

So she said nothing.

The silence stretched on. Killian waited. When she still didn’t answer, his mouth twisted into something cold and humorless.

"Silence," he said. "From a lesser. To the Crown Prince."

He stood. He gathered his textbook, his pen, and his bag as if nothing at all had happened. He didn’t look at her once.

At the doorway, he stopped.

"I will find out who is using my name," Killian said. "And when I have dealt with them, human, I will come back and deal with you."

He finally looked down at her, kneeling on the floor where she’d fallen. His eyes were cold.

"You will learn your place."