Page 147 of A Dance of Shadows

Bastien tips his head in a brusque nod I’m not sure I can trust, but then, it’s hard to say I could bring myself to hang back if I thoughttheywere in trouble.

Raul slides the panel open. I step out into my husband’s private chambers for the very first time.

Unsurprisingly, his apartment is even larger than my own. I find myself in a sitting room with a cards table and a liquor cabinet, I suppose for if he feels like bringing friends of one sort or another back for a more private gathering. The scent of his usual cologne lingers in the air: the tart notes of amber overlying the smoky vetiver.

The double doors at one side of the room stand slightly ajar. I ease past them to find the bedroom.

A fire crackles in the hearth at the other end of the room, keeping the air warm for its master’s return. And perhaps keeping its other master warm in the meantime.

As I approach the neighboring bookcase, tension crawls up my chest to my throat. I force my voice past it.

“Marc?” It isn’t hard to work a quaver into my words. “Can you hear me? Please—I didn’t know where else to go. There’s no one else I can turn to.”

I hear nothing but the thunder of my heartbeat. I suck in another ragged breath. “Please, Marc. I need you. No one else is here to?—”

The bookcase swings open with the softest squeak, and Marc hurtles past it. His golden curls are more rumpled than usual, and the causal black trousers and loose gray shirt he’s wearing look like something he might have been planning to sleep in.

At the sight of him, I lose my breath completely, though it’s from fear rather than the relief I hope he takes my reaction as. I let my legs buckle.

Marc dives in to catch me before my knees hit the floor. “What’s wrong? What happened?” A fierce edge hardens his voice.

He’s so good at playing the concerned husband when he thinks I’ll still believe that act, isn’t he?

I clutch at his shoulders, at the back of his neck—which gives me the perfect opportunity to prick the tiny needle point of my ring into his flesh to deliver the sedative. “I don’t know what got into him—it happened so fast?—”

Panicked babbling doesn’t require any specifics.

Marc crouches next to me, his arms coming around my body. “I’ll take care of it. What did he do to you? Are you hurt?”

“I—I don’t know. The baby—the way he looked at me?—”

“Hey. Take a moment and breathe. You’re with me now. We’ll make sure…”

With the last few words, his firm tone slurs. He trails off, swaying slightly, the muscles in his arms twitching in confusion.

Then he sags right over onto his side. His eyelids drift shut. His body goes completely slack, like the Lavirian rebel I fought in the arena months ago to finally win my full title of empress.

Somehow this doesn’t feel like any more of a victory than that moment did.

I pull myself away from my husband and hustle back to the wall I emerged from. At my soft knock, the three princes spill out of the passage.

When I lead them wordlessly to the bedroom, Marc is sprawled on his side where I left him. Bastien grimaces at his imperial foster brother and darts past the bookcase entrance to deposit the note he drafted. As he returns, shutting the secret doorway behind him, Raul and Lorenzo grasp the fallen man by the wrists and ankles to heft him into the air.

In the space of a minute, we’ve carried my unconscious husband into the passage. The panel slides shut behind us.

To anyone who walks into Marclinus’s apartment now, it’d look as if nothing had been disturbed.

We shuffle along the winding route down two staircases to the old servants’ room. Raul and Lorenzo drape Marc’s limp body on one of the armchairs. They grab the ropes they brought in advance and bind the emperor’s forearms tightly to the chair arms, his calves to the wooden legs.

Raul pauses over the gold wedding band that hugs Marc’s right wrist. “We’re going to need to get rid of this someplace else. Maybe just leave it down here. It makes identifying him too easy.”

He dips his hand into the shadows and brings out a solidified blob of the gauzy black material his gift can shape the darknessinto. In his grasp, the blob shifts into a form like garden sheers with thin, serrated blades.

His thickened shadows must be hard as steel, because when he wiggles the lower blade under the wedding band, it only takes a few squeezes between their edges to snap through the golden surface.

Raul yanks the band wide with his bare hands and tosses it onto the settee with a satisfied expression. “Let’s consider this marriage broken.”

Lorenzo stirs uneasily on his feet, peering at Marc.“Should we do away with him now? Once he wakes up…”

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