Chapter 233

Chapter 233: Chapter 233

Lysander’s pov

I pictured Drake standing in the middle of his room at midnight with his hands on his hips, glaring at a crooked portrait of some stern ancestor. I pictured Calix gliding in behind him in that perfect gray suit, reaching to fix it, and the frame swinging sideways again the second he let go. My shoulders started shaking, and I pressed my fist against my mouth to keep the sound in.

"It’s a good plan," I told the baby. "It’s the best plan anybody in this house has come up with all week. You can vote on it when you’re older."

He didn’t vote, and I laughed so hard my eyes stung. Halfway through, the laugh turned into something wetter, and I had to bend over my knees and breathe until it passed. When I straightened again, my cheeks were damp, and I wiped them with the back of my wrist and felt stupid and terrified at the same time.

I got up and locked the door. The key turned with a heavy click I felt in my teeth, and I tried the handle twice to make sure the bolt had caught. It held. I checked it a third time anyway, then left the key in the lock so no one could slide another one in from the other side.

I didn’t undress. I lay down on top of the covers in my linen tunic, turned onto my side to face the door, and curled my body around the baby with my knees drawn up. The lamp on the nightstand guttered low. I let it burn out on its own instead of putting it out, because I couldn’t stand the idea of reaching over and choosing the dark. I’d had enough of the dark for one lifetime.

Later, I heard lighter footsteps, quick and careful, a servant on some late errand. I sat up anyway with my pulse pounding until they passed. A door shut somewhere far off, the pipes groaned, and the wind picked up and dropped again.

Somewhere beneath all of it, Julian was sitting in the dark of the dungeon. I hated him for the potions and the fake bond and every lie he’d fed Drake about me, and I hadn’t lost a minute of sleep since the guards dragged him below. That night, though, I’d have given a lot to ask him if he’d ever seen Calix’s real face. I’d have given even more to ask him if he saw it coming.

My stomach growled into the quiet, loud enough that I winced. I hadn’t eaten since noon, and the baby wanted what he wanted. A dish of dried figs sat on the dresser five steps away, and I lay there arguing with myself about whether five steps was too far to walk in the dark.

In the end, I went. I ate three figs standing beside the dresser with my back to the wall and my eyes on the door, chewing as quietly as I could, and I felt ridiculous the whole time. Nobody in history had ever been murdered over the sound of chewing figs, but I wasn’t taking chances.

A long time after the guards’ second pass, I heard another set of footsteps. They didn’t belong to anyone I recognized. They were slow and even, too heavy for a servant and too light for a guard, and they came from the direction of the east wing. My whole body went rigid on the bed. I stopped breathing so I could hear better. The loose board creaked three steps from my door, and the footsteps stopped.

I stared at the strip of dark under the door. I couldn’t see a shadow there, but I couldn’t see much of anything with the lamp burned so low. My fingers dug into the blanket hard enough to hurt. Every muscle in my body wanted to move, to get up and grab the fire iron or shove the dresser against the door, and I didn’t move at all, because I was afraid the bed would creak and tell whoever was out there that I was awake and listening.

Nothing moved out there for one heartbeat, then another, then ten, and I didn’t let myself blink.

Then the footsteps moved on, steady and slow, down the hall and around the corner and gone.

I lay there shaking for a long time afterward. My heart wouldn’t settle, and my hand stayed spread across my waist as if my palm could stop whatever came through that door. I told myself it could’ve been anyone. It could’ve been a guard checking a window latch, or a servant who’d lost her way in the dark, or someone who stopped to fix a boot. I told myself all of it, and I didn’t believe a word.

The council assembly should’ve ended hours earlier. Drake told me he wouldn’t be long. Through the bond, I could feel him the same faint way I always could, like warmth from a fire in another room, and he’d always felt me far more clearly than I felt him. He had to know I was frightened, because the fear was pouring out of me like heat off a stove.

He didn’t come. Either the assembly had run late into the night, or he’d decided my fear was just another symptom of the damage he’d already done. I lay in the dark and turned both answers over, and I couldn’t decide which one I’d hate more.

The hours dragged. The lamp died with a last pop of oil, and the room went black except for the faint gray outline of the window behind the curtains. I kept my eyes on the door anyway. My back ached from holding the same curled position, and my hip had gone numb against the mattress, but I didn’t roll over, because rolling over meant turning my back to the door.

Somewhere in the long stretch before morning, the baby rolled under my palm, slow and sleepy. I pressed my hand over the spot and held my breath, waiting to feel him again. He went still, but I kept my hand there anyway, because he was the only thing in that room on my side, and I wasn’t letting go of him.

Near dawn, when the house was as quiet as it ever got and even the wind had given up, the truth finally crawled out of wherever I’d been hiding it.

It wasn’t that Drake wouldn’t believe me. I could live with that. I could keep saying it until he listened, or until Calix slipped up, or until I found proof. What I couldn’t live with was the other possibility, the one I’d been circling all night without letting myself look at it straight on.

I was afraid to tell my own mate I was in danger, because I didn’t know whose side he’d take.

The last time someone handed Drake a convincing lie about me, he believed it for weeks. I remembered the cold stone under my knees and the sound of the lock turning, and I remembered how long I waited for him to come down those stairs and look at me the way he had that evening on the sofa. He knew the truth now. He’d held our son through my skin a few hours earlier and called him active, and his voice had gone so gentle I barely recognized it. None of that changed what I knew in my bones. Drake had chosen wrong once, and Calix was a far better liar than Julian ever was.