Page 18 of A Promise of Peridot
“I don’t envy you. That”—he gestured at my face—“looks worse than an axe wound.”
“Thanks.” He’d likely never suffer my miserable fate. I wasn’t sure Griffin was capable of romantic love. It wasn’t as if he’d ever had an example to learn from. He grew up in a colder home than my own.
“She was too good for you anyway,” he offered earnestly.
“I know that.”
“I’m not going to talk feelings with you.”
“I know that, too,” I mumbled, letting my head fall back behind me. The ceiling had a swirled, wavelike design chiseled into it.
“Good,” he said.
“They’re going to let us stay.”
“Also good.”
“I had to promise Sera to whoever takes the throne in Lumera, if we win.”
“Less good.”
I smirked.
“Who will it be?” he asked. “You?”
I lifted my head and found humor in his eyes. “Of course not. How about you?”
That humor died instantly in exchange for crackling contempt.
“We’ll keep thinking, then,” I said. “What’s our route to the collector?”
“A private event he hosts. We can attend with the prince.” Griffin dipped his head, studying the shell still in his hands.
I furrowed a brow. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“No obliterating Crawford. Not until we get the blade.”
“Fine,” I agreed.
“Aled said Crawford has been collecting Mer girls. The royals didn’t know until he had sold almost thirty of them.Younggirls.”
Bitterness churned in my stomach. Crawford already deserved a long and thorough beating for all the people he had scammed and stolen from. Now he deserved death. “Why didn’t they arrest him? Try him for his crimes?”
Griffin looked almost as murderous as I felt. “They don’t have enough evidence. Didn’t want to risk it given his status in the city. He had one of his longtime cronies to take the fall. Isolde and Broderick hanged the lackey in the city center. Not much of a punishment if you ask me.”
Griffin’s father was the head of my father’s army, and the most brutal man I had ever met. His mother was even icier. In his opinion, hanging was a swift and honorable death. A courtesy almost.
I stood, sprinkling the chair in water droplets. “We’ll get any information on the blade that we can while we’re in town, then we’ll do Isolde and Broderick a favor by exterminating one of their pests.”
Griffin stood, too. “Kane—”
“Where do we meet him tonight?”
He loosed a long-suffering sigh. “Nowthat’sthe fun part.”
7
arwen
