Page 37 of A Promise of Peridot
I had run in here after a man like this? After all he had done to me? Out of some revolting need to make surehewouldn’t be in danger?
“How... how could you have done that?” I wasn’t sure which of us I was talking to.
Kane sucked in a steady lungful of air. “Save your lecture. The map’s in here. He kept looking around the room.”
In a daze I swept the space. “Maybe the walls... they’re covered in—”
But Kane prowled over to that ornate, creaking desk. I watched, waiting for him to scavenge through the drawers, the papers crowding its face, the inkwell in its corner. Instead, he nudged it a few times. Tentative, studying—looking for something. He prodded it again and I realized he was hunting for the source of the wobble. The weak leg that couldn’t sustain the weight of the hefty wood. When he found it, he knelt and yanked the thing clean off, toppling the desk altogether with a loudcrunch.
I jumped at the sound—the papers floating across the floor, the ink that soaked into the carpet below.
Kane returned to me with the desk leg—an intricately engraved wooden stake—and held it out for me like a dog with a bone. His hand was shaking.
Before I could breathe a word, the door behind us flung open.
Trevyn rushed in, raising a silver machete that glinted in the candlelight. “Leave him alone!” he sputtered, red in the face and sweating furiously.
“Fuck,” Kane swore, unsheathing his own sword.
But Trevyn froze, eyes not on Kane, but rather on Crawford’s slumped body. He gasped, the machete now pointed out as if to keep us at bay rather than to attack, panic worming its way through his slender face and quaking limbs.
“Trevyn,” I cautioned. “You tell everyone Crawford choked to death on his dinner. All right? You found him like this. Live the rest of your life with that secret, and we’ll spare you.”
“We won’t be doing that,” Kane said, more tired than anything.
Guilt slid through my chest. Even a seedily employed man like Trevyn had a life he cared to live. Hopes and dreams and possibly those whom he loved. Those who loved him. And I didn’t want to see Kane murder another man. Especially not one who had only tried to protect his patron.
“If Trevyn swears to never tell a soul what he saw,” I said to Kane with as much severity as I could muster, “then we can.”
“Why should we?” Kane’s eyes were predatory on the crook.
“Because Isaid so.”
I was placing a lot of faith in Crawford’s big mouth. In the hope that he had told his underling what I was. What I was capable of.
“I swear it,” Trevyn stammered. “Whatever you say.” The machete clanged to the tattered rug.
I stalked even closer to him, my hair beginning to feel a bit like static. “I will know if you’re lying. I knoweverything.”
“I believe you,” he whispered.
“If we find out you betrayed us, I will come to your home and drench all whom you love in blood. You’ll be cleaning them out from under your fingernails for weeks.”
“I think you proved your point,oh powerful one,” Kane said with irritation. “It’s time to leave.”
13
arwen
You didn’t have to wait for us,” I said to Fedrik.
The streets were empty at the strange hour—too late for the now-weary revelers, too early for the morning risers. We were alone save for a sleeping beggar and a stray tabby cat. I could smell the freshly caught fish and garden-grown kumquats from the nearby taverns, and I sucked in a lungful.
“I was too worried to go back with your brother and friend,” Fedrik said, placing a hand on the small of my back. Griffin pushed off a stone column he had been leaning against to walk beside us. His expression was tight, being stuck outside with Fedrik clearly not how he wished to spend his night.
Fedrik guided me down a narrow alley on the way back to the palace. I had hoped his palm against my back might soothe me, or elicit something pleasant, but it didn’t. Only that same suffocating hollowness settled back into my bones.
“What happened in there?” he asked.
