The Rogue Guardian

Chapter 45: the Courtyard

My hands were untied, but Roman himself steered me toward a new cell with a hand on my arm, and I didn't dare even think of trying another escape. "Are you at least going to give me my letter?" I asked instead.

"Not just yet," he answered slowly, as though savoring denying me. "Too much information, too soon." He nudged me into a cell. "Wait here. Tori will come get you when it's time."

"Really? You trust her around me?"

"I'm sure she won't injure you too badly." He didn't sound like he'd lose sleep if she did.

"I meant, you trust her not to let me escape."

"In my court, people rarely make the same mistake twice." He pushed the door shut behind me. The key clicked loudly in the lock, a sound that made my fingers twitch. I hadn't checked if the lock picks in my boots had survived Tori's search. Probably too late for that at this point.

"Are you going to tell me anything else?"

He considered me through the bars for a moment. "I think not."

"Thanks."

There was no reply as he strode back down the hallway, leaving me in the near-darkness of the cold cell. I took a deep breath and let myself sink to the floor.

Nemia had sent me a letter. Nemia had known where to find me. She'd known, somehow, apparently, that I was being followed.

How?

There was a knot in my stomach-- I pressed my hand over it like a physical ache. Just guilt, same as I'd felt since I'd left the capital. Since I'd left her.

It wasn't just that I'd taken Pitch. That had been selfish, but it was just something else to focus my feelings on. Nemia had needed me. I'd known it, and I'd still left.

It was something I hadn't thought about in weeks. Even in dreams where I relived the night of the masked ball and Jaden's disappearance, my memories cut off as I ran out of the ballroom. That was where the true horror of the night had ended, after all. The blood, the confusion. But it wasn't everything.

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I'd run to my room. The tangle of hallways and the thump of my bare feet on stairs-- there was blood beneath my soles, rubbing off with each step. His blood. I'd already thrown up outside and I could still taste it. Adrenaline, rushing hot in my veins, as if my own blood had been replaced. I was all chaos, unsteady breathing, whirling thoughts, the bright flames of an anger too big to process.

And then there was the letter. It was waiting for me when I whirled into the room like a storm seeking an ocean to wreck, like a child running from a nightmare. A carefully folded square covered in his writing, within moments spotted with wet patches that bled the ink fuzzy. A storm raining. A child crying. I couldn't tell which I was.

He thought he might be in danger, it said. I could practically hear the cool calm of his voice. It wasn't enough.

Who would hurt Jaden? I had already thought of enough names to make my fists clench, nail carving into my skin. But at the moment I thought, Magali let this happen. I don't know that I believed it, but justifications kept offering themselves to the desperate snatches on my mind. On her grounds, on her birthday. Tobias had hated him. She should have known. If she had taken charge of her own authority sooner, she would have known.

That was when I filled my pack with jewelry and clothes and filled my head with Maenar. But it wasn't to the gates that my feet, now dry but, in my mind, stained scarlet, took me. I headed to the damp cold of the dungeons. As if I could stifle the heat trapped in my body with its darkness.