Page 31 of The Rose in the Shadows

“Stefania’s not here,” he answered suspiciously. “What you be needin’?”

“We’re from the city of Alepolis,” she lied. “Just came into town. Old client of mine said he used to find girls here, said Stefania was the woman to talk to about a job.”

“Name of your client?” he questioned, pouring her a drink and passing one to me as well.

“Zachariah Moore.”

A woman two seats over from us began laughing. She was about my age, with chestnut hair and large brown eyes. Her expression was confident, and her gown was practically sheer. She leaned against the bar with the ease of someone who had spent quite a long time in this room.

“I doubt that,” the woman said to us.

“You knew Zachariah?” Iris asked.

The woman nodded. “Came here often, he did. Wasn’t particularly interested in folks like you, though. Tended to prefer the company of men a bit more than ladies like yourselves.”

That… was possible, I supposed. If Zachariah was my father, though, then he had to have enjoyed the company of a woman at least once.

It was either that, or the Dragon had been wrong and he simply wasn’t my father.

Just then, shouting sounded across the room as a heated conversation between two men in the space's corner turned violent. One threw a punch while the other tossed a table carelessly into the wall. The legs of it splintered in the crash.

“There they go again,” the barkeep complained, wiping his hands on a towel. “Stefania will be here tomorrow. You can come back then if you’re still looking for work.”

Iris and I left just as he began to break up the fight.

Chapter Nine

Sneaking back into my roomhadbeen easier than sneaking out. We arrived back at the castle just as Dimitri was trading posts with another guard. Iris, in her magically disguised form, feigned a fall at the end of the hallway. Both guards tried to help her up while she cried theatrically, and I slipped right past them and back into my suite.

I bathed as quickly as I could, eager to wash the stench of the night off of me, but knew that sleep would be impossible. Too much had happened that had given me too much to think about.

The fact that Zachariah preferred male partners didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t my father. After all, it only really took one night of passion to create a child. It did make it all seem a bit more unlikely, though. Could I really trust that Zachariah, who favored male partners overall, randomly fathered me and left me in the care of a mortal woman who hid my powers from me? And even if that had happened, I still had no additionalinformation about my mother. Was she alive? Or had she failed to come looking for me because something had happened to her?

I needed to remember what happened to me before I ended up on that bridge.

Frustrated and overwhelmed by it all, I spent most of the night pacing and tossing over the possibilities in my mind. Occasionally, I dozed off for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, only to wake suddenly once more as a fresh wave of uncertainty washed over me.

And then, as the light of morning filtered into my room, the sound of a card sliding under the door startled me. I approached it cautiously, sighing audibly as I picked it up and read the message.

The Dragon has requested your presence at dinner this evening. I’ve sent Nessira something for you to wear. -Clayton Vail, Crown Prince of Athenia

Did they know I had escaped last night?

Or was this just a casual dinner?

Was anything with the Dragon casual? Nothing about any of my interactions with Clay or his father made me suspect it would be. So an evening spent in their company was unlikely to be very enjoyable.

In frustration, I threw myself down on the bed and didn’t bother to look up when Nessira and Geia entered my room. Nessira quickly tucked the gown away in the closet before I could see it, which told me all I needed to know about it. The evening would be another occasion in which they would expect me to play the long-lost princess. A role that would undoubtedly involve some awfully gaudy gown. I bit my lip as Nessira and Geia began preparing me. They, thankfully, didn’t notice that I’d bit down hard enough to draw blood.

“When will the dresses we commissioned for me be ready?” I asked them. Once I finally had my own clothes, maybe Iwouldn’t have to keep wearing the fashions everyone else chose for me.

“Later today, my lady,” Geia promised me. “I checked on them personally this morning. They’ll be delivered in no time.”

In truth, the gown Clay had sent for me wasn’tasatrocious as the last one he had picked, but it was still far from my personal preferences. Its high neck felt like a collar closing in on me whenever I moved. It cinched at my waist and fell around me in golden waves of shimmering fabric. I was a sunbeam personified, impossible to miss. And even though the dress covered my chest and throat, the sheer fabric still allowed my Mark of Hyrax to remain visible.

Nessira styled my hair classically. She folded golden clips of ivy leaves into it and pulled it carefully into a knot at the nape of my neck.

“Is this entirely necessary just for a dinner?” I questioned as she painted my eyelids golden.

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