Page 62 of Taken By Touch and Torment

“It was locked, and I can sense low level magick as added protection against lock-picking. Does that make you feel better?” Rosalind asked, biting her lip as she dangled a brass key in front of me. “Was in his pants pocket.”

She slid the drawer open, revealing several journals. She gracefully waved her palm at the array of leather as if she were a merchant revealing her fine jewelry at market.

“The hard part is figuring out which one is which. All the pages are blank, and the markings on the spines are gibberish.”

I rolled my neck. Okay, so it would seem there were at least a couple barriers to compromising lines of communication between great powers. That was reassuring.

Lifting each journal, I confirmed what Rosalind had already told me. The markings were indeed indecipherable. The only differences between them all were variations in color and size.

I closed my eyes and cleared my mind.

“As exciting as this has been,” Rosalind said. “I’d like to reiterate my desire not to be put to death. Remember that choosing the wrong one wouldn’t just be a little oopsies. It would be a… very big oopsies.”

“Rosalind,” I snapped.

She huffed and stopped blabbing.

The lines had been tampered with and only recently restored. Rune would’ve been involved in the process.

What had my linked journal looked like? The book that revealed Rune’s beautiful words. All his promises I thought he’d broken.

My eyes flew open. I scanned each journal in the row. Mine had been dark brown, and it had been light in my palm, not too wide or thick.

That eliminated all but two, if my hunch was solid. There was always a chance Rune would’ve given a different color to every recipient.

Oh shit, didn’t that make more sense?

My hands were clammy as I lay the two notebooks on the desk. Loud stomping from the floor above nearly made me leap out of my skin.

The color variations were minuscule. One was darker than the other.

I scanned the others before shaking my head. I had to stick with my gut feeling. Otherwise, I’d be writing in all of them.

I pictured that journal in my mind’s eye, but it was getting harder and harder to remember exactly what shade it had been the more nervous I grew. I looked again at the markings on each spine.

“Valentin has eight letters,” I whispered, counting the symbols on each.

One had an eight-letter word and then two other smaller words. If, in fact, the symbols corresponded to letters. Oh, gods.

The other notebook had a single word, six letters.

I shook out my hands and released a breath. I glanced at Rosalind, who was staring at me as she chewed on her bottom lip furiously.

I snatched the notebook that most matched my memories, backed up by the idea that the eight-letter first word on its spine was code for Valentin.

Hopefully.

Rosalind appeared two seconds away from bolting out of the room. “You do not look confident at all.”

I shot her a glare. Even though she was right.

My hands shook as I opened the journal to its blank parchment paper, relaxing when their appearance matched my memories, too.

When I touched the paper, I jolted. A word appeared, sparked by magick.

Code?

I deflated. If this was an automatic message, did that mean nothing I wrote would make it to Rune without getting the code right first?

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