Page 32 of A Heart of Bluestone

It flies through a gap in the drapes and hits the foot of my bed. I watch it lamely topple off the side and hit the floor.

“Last I saw,” she says, “they were headed out of the Living Quarter. They didn’t say where to.”

The implications aren’t lost on me.

Probably gone to a find private room somewhere.

A groan tugs out of me as I roll off the bed.

The moment the blankets slip from my body, the frozen air chills me. The bare flesh of my legs prickle into tiny bumps. I could change into more than just shorts and a t-shirt, but Iheavily suspect the slightest bend for the drawers will release all the wee and I’ll wet myself right here.

My only saving grace is the pair of thick bedsocks slumped around my calves. At least the floorboards aren’t ice-blocks on the soles of my feet.

I rush out of the room and—sorry Courtney, butfuck you Asta—slam the door shut behind me.

The wall shudders from the impact.

I’m quick to scurry down the corridor, like a mouse in the dead of night.Hm. That’s about right, actually.

I rush past the first staircase, the wider one whose steps are sheathed in fitted rugs, and I head for the small, narrow one that’s tucked away at the end of the corridor.

I take those down to the cigar room.

Oliver likes an audience, so I’m guessing—andhoping—the Snakes will be in the grand parlour, where the large fireplace roasts everyone, and there are all kinds of card games and pool tables to distract us from our assignments.

The smaller room is the smoke-friendly one, whose windows open to the freshest bursts of winds, but it’s mostly used for quiet moments, isolated drinks, light reading, and letter writing.

In my shorts and t-shirt, even with the heating on blast in this ice-manor, it’s still the Swiss Alps, and I’m freezing my ass off by the time I’m creeping down the last of the steps.

The corridors are quieter than a graveyard before a ritual. All the doors I pass are firmly shut and few have slivers of light wedging out from under them.

I make it to the cigar room in one piece, unharmed.

The door is slightly ajar, letting out a fiery red glow from the fire that must still be burning in the hearth.

I inch towards the door.

My thighs are pressed tight as I peer through the gap.

The flames lash at logs stacked in the hearth. The chairs angled around it, like the leather sofa, are empty.

I push aside the door and take a single, soft step over the threshold.

And I still.

My heart is thrumming in my chest. I feel the beats bobbing in my throat.

I inch my head around the side of the wall.

There, sprawled on the couch pushed against the wall, is a gentry senior, Mikal.

A choppy sound cuts through me and I freeze, as though stuck in the battering winds beyond the walls of Bluestone. But then firelight dances over his freckled face, his eyes shut, lips parted, crimson hair dishevelled, and I recognise that he is deep in sleep.

Still, I hesitate.

Mikal’s reasons for being in this room past midnight might not bode well for me. He might be on the lookout for me. Could be that I’m so conceited that I delude myself, and he really did come in here for some peace, then drifted off.

But then a pained pang strikes my bladder, and I stifle a groan. Takes every clamping muscle in my body to not double over where I stand.

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