Nightsworn | The Whispering Wall #2

Four: Interrogation

"Someone's going to find us."

"They will if you keep talking." Grace's voice was breathless and excited. She pressed a kiss to Nova's neck, her hair tickling Nova's face. She tightened her grip on Grace's hips, and in response Grace rucked up the edge of Nova's linen shift. Their lips met, and then Grace started trailing kisses downwards, pulling the shift up further, further...

Someone knocked on the door and they broke apart with a gasp, Nova pulling her skirt back down and Grace smoothing her hair back from her face.

"I told you," Nova muttered. She pressed herself back against the pantry wall as Grace went to open the door.

"Oh," she said flatly. Nova frowned a question at her, and Grace opened it wider to reveal Jeorge Nerahardt standing in the gap looking as close to sheepish as he ever got. Nova mirrored Grace's scowl.

"You pick your timings," she growled, shrugging away from the wall and brushing herself free of dried herbs and wood splinters from the shelves. "What do you want?"

"Harkenn's gone into a fit again," Nerahardt said. "He's about to interrogate Ethred for the hundredth time."

Not again. Nova couldn't count the hours she'd spent in that stinking dungeon over the past month as her owner tried to get answers out of his favourite prisoner. The longer it went on without them forthcoming, the more determined the High Lord of the Reach seemed to get. After the baron Ethred was caught in the castle at antisocial hours with an Angel spy, suspiciously soon after the death of his predecessor on the Orthanian House seat, Harkenn had been interrogating him relentlessly, convinced he was the key to a vast plot. While Nova thought Ethred was an important figure in said plot, the hours of interrogation had thoroughly convinced her that the baron was nowhere near clever enough to orchestrate it.

Her bets were on her own uncle, holed away in the Angel fortress on the other side of the Barrens, but it was somewhat difficult to investigate that theory while chained up and tagging the lord around like a dog.

"Let me guess, he wants me there?" she said, though she wasn't guessing at all.

"What an unsettlingly accurate prediction," Jeorge said. He leaned on a thick wooden walking stick; the other Angel had also endured a spell in the lord's dungeons and barely escaped with both legs.

"Why can't you do it?" Nova grumbled, resenting everything and everyone for interrupting what was promising to be some very enjoyable time alone with Grace. As a slave she didn't get many opportunities to enjoy herself, and the lord had an uncanny knack for interrupting those few she did manage to grab. Especially since Jeorge could tell when someone was lying just as well as she could.

"Doesn't trust me as much, I s'pose," Jeorge said.

"You think he trusts me?" Nova said. "He knows I'd smother him if I got half a chance. He just enjoys watching me suffer more than he does you."

"Also likely to be true," Jeorge conceded. If he had noticed Grace staring daggers at the side of his head, he didn't acknowledge her.

"I'll see you sometime..." Grace said, then trailed off, face falling. Nova hated that her heart clenched at the sight, but Grace knew what she had been signing up for. Elandriel's balls, Nova had warned her often enough. Choose to have a clandestine affair with a slave and one had to accept that most nights wouldn't contain deep talks and cuddling.

She still couldn't believe it some days; sometimes she even forgot, caught up in the misery of her hours at Harkenn's side, and was reminded with a jolt when Grace greeted her with habitual enthusiasm. That the strange, hot-headed girl from another world had taken interest in Nova, of all people – not only that, but persisted even after learning Nova's past – was a mystery. On those days where she did remember, she spent them wondering when the trap was going to snap shut, when the rug was going to be tugged out from beneath her feet.