Page 25 of Dangerous Exile

Yet he’d yanked himself away.

I’m not your hero.

His lips to her ears, the echo of those words haunting her.

And he didn’t have any intention to become so. The anger lacing his eyes when she’d awoken proof of that.

Not that she needed a hero. She just needed a place to exist, to heal, to plan before she could move onward. If she’d learned one thing from Juliet, it was that she needed to be her own hero.

Walking out of his office, Ness had been startled at the destruction they’d caused. Feathers everywhere, two chairs broken, glass from a lamp scattered across the floor. Yet every time Talen brought her back into his office for another training bout, everything looked perfectly tidy and new and intact, as though the tornado of their training hadn’t torn through the office the day before.

Talen was entirely too lenient with her in destroying his possessions.

She winced as her fingertip poked at the side of the lump in the direct center of her forehead. She needed something—anything—to get the swelling down. What was it her mother used to do when she had a lump on her knee from banging into something? Set cold to it. Ice, if they had it.

Surely there wasan ice house adjacent to the kitchens here at the Alabaster. The cook in residence couldn’t have made the apricot iced cream that had been sent up with her dinner two days ago without it.

Grabbing the key for her door that Talen had given her, she walked across the room. She’d been surprised when he’d handed her a copy of the key two days ago. She’d said she felt as though she was in prison, so he’d given her a key without argument, though made her promise that she would stay in her room. It was to be used in an emergency only.

Soothing the pounding red bump on her head seemed like an appropriate emergency. And how hard could it be to avoid people and find the kitchens?

Difficult, it turned out. She’d had to ask two different footmen she encountered as she’d slipped down the servant stairs and along the lower corridors the correct way to the kitchens. Not quite circular stairs, each level seemed to have a set of square stairs with four turns. And now she was lost on her way back to her room, standing in a stairwell by a doorway, ice wrapped in a cloth melting in her hand, trying to remember how many flights she’d just walked up.

The lump on her head had addled her brain.

But the one thing she couldn’t do was step out into the main corridors where she could clearly hear men—too many men—laughing and arguing and carousing. It sounded like a very full gaming night. If Talen discovered she was lurking about the house, he’d kill her—but not before taking away her key—the one small semblance of freedom she now had.

She lifted the ice wrapped in the linen cloth to her forehead, rubbing it about the lump as she closed her eyes, walking back up the stairs in her mind. One more level? No. She could hear what she assumed was the main gaming room on this level. That meant two, maybe three more sets of stairs to climb.

Her eyes opening, Ness continued up the staircase when the door behind her opened. She quickened her steps, hoping to avoid running into another servant. That she already encountered two footmen and three workers in the kitchens wasn’t a good thing.

Footfalls thudded on the stairs behind her. Steps following her upward. Two sets of steps speeding up. She glanced over her shoulder. Two men and neither was a servant, both in expensive dark jackets. Their eyes blurry, their shoulders banging into the outer walls of the tight staircase. Soused. She’d had her fill of drunken asses—enough to last a lifetime.

She doubled her speed up the stairs.

The stout one closest to her reached up, catching the back of her skirts for a second before she kicked back, clearing his hand.

“Stop, little mouse.” His feet on the stairs sped faster. “Are whores now at the Alabaster? Mr. Loggerton didn’t tell us that. We’ve been asking for years now.”

Hell.

Her look dodged upward. There. A door up at the top of this turn of stairwell. That was her escape.

She dropped the ice, her breath speeding as she tried to gather up her skirts with her right hand to bound up the stairs two at a time. Damn skirts in her legs. Tangled.

“Stop—stop—you little whore. We could use you.” The second man yelled at her, his shout echoing off the walls of the staircase. “Stop. It’ll only take a few minutes of your time and we won’t have to leave for the whorehouse down the street. We’ll make it worth your time. Stop her, Harry. Stop her.”

The door. Escape. That was what Talen had been pounding into her head. Escape.

She reached the door, her right hand fumbling as she tried to open it. It swung wide and she bolted into the hallway. Her room. Her room at the end of the hallway. Escape.

Her head jerked back suddenly, the braid of her hair almost yanking from her skull. Her feet flew out from under her and she crashed down onto her backside.

The man directly behind her laughed and then wrenched her braid upward, dragging her up with it onto her feet. Her right hand flew to the base of her braid, trying to hold her hair from tearing out of her head.

“No—no—I’m not a whore. I’m not.”

His laugh didn’t stop as he twisted the braid around the palm of his hand, pulling her closer to him. “I don’t think you get to tell us that, mouse. We get to decide what you are. Filmore, you take a go at her while I have her stuck nice and good—the tail of a little mouse.”

---