Page 60 of The Rose in the Shadows

Chapter Eighteen

We walked for a long time. I couldn’t be sure if it was minutes or hours. Time had somehow lost all meaning.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep in his arms despite his warnings. When I woke, he was carrying me up a dusty staircase and into a tiny bedroom. The air felt damp and cold, and the bed made a terrible creaking sound as he deposited me heavily onto it and shut the door behind himself.

“Where are we?” I asked, but the words came out in a slurred mess.

“An inn,” Clay replied in a clipped tone.

He was angry. He was very angry.

“We are in the last shitty room in a shitty inn because the roads back to the castle are too dangerous to travel at night. And unlike me, you can’t very well fly home.”

The room was small. The bed took up too much of the space, leaving only a few feet on either side to walk. Without a fireplace, the air was frigid, made worse by the window with a clear crackacross its center. There was no armoire for clothes, not even a hall or doorway to a bathing chamber. Just a bed with a single sheet and a small stool in the room's corner. We were a long way from the palace, indeed.

Numbly, I noticed that the single bed meant we would be sharing. It was a clear violation of court protocols, but I couldn’t bring myself to care after everything that had happened. Obviously, I’d broken more than a few rules tonight.

As he looked down at me, his eyes caught alight, burning brilliantly and unabashedly golden. He stood, leaning against the door with arms crossed over his chest. His fury rolled off of him in waves and I felt myself sinking back into the bed. If the Gods were kind, they would have killed me right then and there rather than making me face him.

The Gods were not kind, though.

“How exactlywereyou planning to get back to the castle?” he demanded.

“I suppose I hadn’t thought that far."

He scoffed, raising an eyebrow at me in a look of such utter disappointment that I suddenly felt like a child. “You have no idea how much danger you placed yourself in tonight! What in all of creation did you even go there looking for?”

“A memory potion.”

“A memory potion?” He echoed me incredulously, as if he couldn’t even comprehend the ridiculousness of the idea.

Irritation soared, breaking through to the surface despite the fog of what drug remained in my system. I sat up on my knees on the bed, not minding the way the slits of my dress opened wider against my thighs. Clay’s eyes flickered unabashedly to my legs as I did, but his jaw only clenched tighter in anger.

“How can I trust that you or the Dragon will give me any of the answers I need?” I criticized with a raised voice. “You clearly don’t care for my well-being.”

Clay turned away from me suddenly. His hand twitched and for a moment I thought he might actually punch one of the thin walls of the room, but he ran it through his hair instead as he released a pained sigh.

“All I have done is try to keep you safe! Though I can’t bring myself to understand why I care so much when you’re willing to throw your life away over some fake promise of a potion that doesn’t exist.”

My anger at him met my frustration with myself and the situation overall. Of course, the potion hadn’t been real. I’d realized that once I recognized Mara knew what I was. But still, hearing it said aloud stung.

I would never remember the life I had before I came to Athenia.

“He uses the potions to lure women to the estate,” Clay explained, voice low and expression grim. “Then he doses them with that drug and moves them to a private estate. He keeps them there for a few months,trainingthem, before he sells them off to the highest bidder.”

“And what wereyoudoing there?” I spit out through the tears that had welled in my eyes.

“He imports the drugs, Thea! Fortwo years,I’ve been working to get close enough to him to identify the port they’re coming from. Two years of work that I almost abandoned the second I smelt you on the property.”

I found myself momentarily distracted by the apparent refinement of Clay's sense of smell. Was that because of his powers? What did I smell like?

“You bought me,” I muttered, making sense of the conversation I’d overheard earlier. “What would you have done if he said no when you asked for me?”

Clay’s eyes were piercing, unflinching in their intensity as he held my gaze. “I would have killed him.”

He would have. He said it so seriously, with such resolution.

Clayton Vail would have abandoned his plan and killed the Alchemist if that was what it would have taken to get me out of there safely.

---