Page 40 of Cinder
Cin nearly slammed into the front door in his flight, yanking it open so fast that Louise’s fist flew through the space. She stumbled into him with a gasp. For a moment, her gaze went too wide, too knowing. Then she huffed, straightening her outfit and scowling at Cin. “My God, this is a level of irresponsibility I expect from Emma, even Manfred, but never—”
“I’m sorry,” Cin didn’t even have to pretend—the bite of Louise’s words hit home. He’d known better, known he was out too long, known that accompanying the prince back to the city was a bad idea, and he’d—but he couldn’t dwell on that now. He’d already washed the blood off. Lamely, he added, “I fell asleep.”
Louise only scowled harder. As she pushed past Cin, she grumbled, “Be sure it doesn’t happen next time.”
Manfred pushed past after her, markedly harder than Louise had. “Bet you were fingering yourself in the ashes,” he spat.
Floy followed him, their nose in the air. They seemed to have no time for Cin, but he caught their muttering, “We should have stayed. ItoldMother he was merely testing us...”
Last came Emma, throwing herself against Cin’s chest in a dramatic sigh. He sucked in a pained breath, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I still think you’re the best,” she said. Her brow furrowed, and she touched the edge of Cin’s cheek tenderly.
Blood, Cin realized. He hadn’t fully cleaned it after all.
Instead of accusations, Emma said only, “I’m sorry you’re hurt.”
For a moment, Cin hated them all a little less.
But then Floy stopped in the doorway to the hall, turning back. Their eyes narrowed. And Cin felt like they had been the one he’d killed in front of.
Floy seemed no less suspicious of Cin the next morning, but they said nothing to him, slinking around the house during their usual morning piano hour as though searching for something—across the floors, the walls, the back garden. Cin wasn’t sure what they were looking for, only what they stood to find if he’d been any sloppier coming home.
Cin tried not to let it terrify him.
He didn’t quite trust when Floy seemed to turn back into their normal self, spending the better half of the day complaining that they’d left the ball too soon. According to the gossip, the prince had shown up in the final hour, twice as flamboyant as ever, and danced with every attendee who remained. And, to hear Floy tell it, the worst tragedy of their century was the fact that Floy had not been there. It would have made Cin smile, if not for the fact that he was just as hurt, deep down.
Prince Lorenz had witnessed Cin kill a man and gone back to flirt his heart out. It didn’t help that it was what he wasmeantto do, what Cin had always expected of him. He had to choose a partner, and Cin had taken him away from that, out on an adventure that ended in tragedy. The fact that he had managed to pull himself together enough to act the princely rake was incredible.
And, if Cin had any sense, he’d be more worried about what the prince could have said to those who’d planned the party than to those attending it.
By midday, word had already spread throughout the kingdom that the Plumed Menace had struck again—this time at the kingdom’s heart. It turned out that Cin’s victim had been a lower aristocrat, already partially disgraced by his many unsavory habits, but to hear some tell it, he was the prince’s truest friend, closer than the elder brother who inevitably came up a minute into every gossiped conversation. Was this, they asked, a return to origin for the Plumed Menace; a sign that they truly had killed Prince Adalwin?
Worse though, were the other brand of whispered rumors, circulated by the Menace’s fanatics: that if the Plumed Menace truly was content to kill aristocracy if they were deemed terrible enough, then that must mean Prince Adalwin had been one such villain. Cin felt sick at the thought of Prince Lorenz hearing such nonsense, even if he would, technically, know better. Know better, yet be holding all that knowledge inside himself, to protect Cin.
As one day turned to the next, Cin wanted to trust that if the prince had not spilled his secret yet, then he had no plans to. But he had felt his blade sever through muscle and tendon, seen the look on Prince Lorenz’s face after, felt the blood on his hands, and he could only trust so much.
Cin ran spirals around the thought, working himself into a panic before forcing his mind elsewhere. The way he kept himself sane was to focus on what justice he had brought—could bring—as the Plumed Menace. The little spots of good he’d sacrificed his righteousness for. He went out more and more, feeling a rush every time he spotted a member of the crown’s watch in town, an empty hollow after.
On his way home, he’d visit the woman he’d last seen sobbing behind her farmhouse well—not introducing himself, of course, always keeping to the brush and the roofs—but still he felt the more he saw of her, the closer to her he became. He knew hernow, knew how much she loved the cats that lounged in her garden, feeding them even when her husband disapproved, how she could read, and read well, and would take a break for a book at exactly noon every day, her choices so varied that Cin swore she must have a library hidden somewhere in her tiny house. And how outside of those two joys, she was terribly unhappy.
Her sobbing behind the well was far from the last of her breakdowns.
By the end of the week, Cin made it there in time to catch the preamble to one, sitting on the couple’s roof as the fight crescendoed into screams.
“Get rid of her!” The husband shouted, moving through the kitchen after his wife. Cin couldn’t make out the rest of his lecture, until he was poised on the other side of the house, leaning out above their front window. “Your family isnothingto us anymore. Nothing.”
Cin’s stomach sank. Cutting her off from her family—that was what her husband was asking.Family. Security. Home.
It made Cin cling to the hilt of the kitchen blade he’d placed in his knife’s empty sheath.
But he didn’t go down. He thought of Prince Lorenz’s face, the horror and shock, and he crouched there, motionless, as the woman ran through the house, out to her place behind the well, and sobbed again.
Chest binding tight against his heart, Cin sobbed with her.
Seventeen
The day of the next ball came, and the watch had not come for Cin. That should have made him feel better—his safety intact, his identity a secret. His role as the Plumed Menace could continue, just as it always had, and he with it. Yet the more certain that future became, the more pointless it all felt to Cin.
