A House Divided

Chapter 30

Alarm shot through Kila when Cianne staggered into his lodgings, bringing a metallic taste to his mouth.

"Cianne, what is it? Are you hurt?"

Despite his urgent tone, she didn't seem to hear him. She stared blindly ahead, as if she were looking straight through him, leaving him sick with fear.

"Are you wounded?" he asked again. When she still didn't respond, he grabbed her and began moving her limbs around, searching for an injury that didn't exist. From the way she was behaving he had feared she was suffering from shock brought on by pain and blood loss, but then he realized that though her face was colorless, no trail of blood streaked his floor. Her shock must have been caused by something she had learned.

"What is it?" he asked, guiding her into a chair, touching her face with gentle hands. "What is it? What's happened? What can I do?"

He was so distracted, so distraught by her catatonia, that he didn't notice they had company until someone seized him. Pinning his wrists behind him, his captor pressed a blade to his throat.

"What were you doing at that warehouse?" a familiar voice growled in his ear.

"Cianne," he choked, straining to reach for her even though he knew it was futile. A woman he'd never seen before had her arm around Cianne's shoulders, a blade held to her throat as well. "Don't harm her. Please, I beg you, don't harm her. She's not well."

The woman holding Cianne flicked her eyes toward Kila's captor, who tightened her grip on him.

"What were you doing at that warehouse?" his captor repeated.

At last the voice pricked the bubble of panic surrounding him, and he tried to no avail to turn his head so he could look at her face.

"Chief Flim?" he asked, his voice ringing with disbelief.

"I won't ask you again."

If Kila thought he'd been worried before, he had known nothing. His fear was so palpable he felt as if it could crush him. He had been so certain no one had seen him, that he had made it back to his lodgings without anyone following him. Staying far from the warehouse, he had walked in a wide circle around it, studying the streets, searching for any clue he could find. He hadn't seen a thing that had given him pause, and that worried him more than anything.

"Do you think I'll answer that?" he asked harshly. "You may as well slit my throat now, spill my blood all over this floor."

"Flim," the other woman said, her voice high and thin.

"What?" the chief barked.

"This is Cianne Wyland."

"What? They know. House Staerleigh knows," the chief said, and now she was the one who sounded terrified.

To Kila's surprise, Cianne snapped out of her stupor. While her captor was distracted, she bent back her assailant's finger, causing the woman to cry out and drop her dagger.

"Don't move!" Flim ordered, the words cracking through the room, even though she spoke in a low voice. "I will kill him."

"Not if I kill you first," Cianne said in a rasping voice that sounded nothing like her own.

"Stop," Cianne's assailant gasped, cradling her injured hand against her chest, her face white. "You don't understand. She's Annalith's daughter."

"Why are you talking about my mother?" Cianne asked, so viciously her assailant flinched away.

"I'm not letting him go until I know why they were at that warehouse," Chief Flim said. She hadn't let her guard down in the slightest, and Kila wasn't about to test her. The pieces were all jumbled, and he couldn't make sense of anything that was happening, not why the chief and this other woman were in his lodgings, not why Cianne was acting as though she'd lost contact with reality, and least of all why the other woman was bringing Cianne's long-dead mother into the discussion.