Page 30 of A Tale of Treachery

“I made a deal, and I must follow through. There’s no other option, Redmond. Please.”

“You already got caught. There’s no reason to follow through at this point. Just let it go.”

I wished it were that simple, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t find the words to explain why the promise to Ryken couldn’t be broken, so I lifted the sleeve of my blouse and revealed the silver tally mark on my wrist. “Yeah. That’s not going to work.”

Redmond blinked at the silver mark, not quite understanding what it meant. He grabbed my wrist and examined it, and when recognition hit, he frowned, knowing there was no other choice.

Nobody broke bargains with the fae and lived to tell the tale.

Redmond knew this, and his eyes flared when he looked back up at me. “Oh, you silly girl.”

* * *

I wrappedmy cloak tightly around me, the fall air growing chillier with each passing minute as I hid in a narrow alcove outside the sanctum and waited for Ryken. Redmond had written him into the warding, but not without complaint.

At least, at first.

He kept calling me foolish for getting caught, but his curiosity and excitement regarding the fae male won out. Redmond had never met a fae before and was dying to study him. The fae kept themselves locked away behind the bubble surrounding Faerie, and Redmond wanted to find out everything about their magic and life in Faerie. So he made me promise to inform Ryken that he was free to come and go to the sanctum any time he wanted—so long as he visited.

I worried that Ryken was going to become Redmond’s newest obsession. The last thing I needed was for the assassin to be crawling around every corner of my home.

Frankly, the idea of the two of them becoming friends terrified me. The two of them together would be a disastrous combination.

I tried to talk Redmond down. Tried to tell him that Ryken couldn’t be trusted, but he wouldn’t be swayed. He argued that we knew Ryken’s secret, and therefore, we could trust him. Mutually assured destruction, and all that.

Redmond always had a bad habit of picking up strays, me included.

Two apprentices sauntered by, prepared to bed down for the night, and I sank deeper into the shadowed alcove, not wanting to be seen. The scholars and apprentices typically retired right after sundown so they could wake early and dedicate the morning hours to their studies.

Another ten minutes, and we would be in the clear.

I prayed Ryken wouldn’t show up before then. He’d been permitted to enter the sanctum, so there was no point in hiding him or his presence, but it was best not to alert the others. Scholars didn’t handle anything outside of the ordinary very well. They tended to be very squirrely.

Just then, as if summoned from the deepest pits of the otherworld by thought, the demon appeared. Tall. Imposing. Dressed in studded black leather armor with his hood pulled up and his sword strapped to the front of his chest as if he were dressed to kill. The two apprentices stopped dead at the sight of him and went quiet, their conversation long forgotten.

They looked terrified, frozen with fear.

I stepped out of the alcove with a sigh and revealed myself, feeling the need to rescue the poor boys from the assassin’s glaring gaze. “Did you finish tormenting innocent souls while cackling beneath your breath early?” I asked.

He snorted, the darkness beneath his hood shifting in my direction. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

Fair point.

I turned to the young apprentices, who were now quaking, and waved my hand in dismissal. “Go to bed. I’ll take it from here.”

Relief rolled off them, and they hunched their shoulders, squeezing between the two of us. They broke into a run once they’d passed us, and the hum of the warding notified me that they’d made it safely inside.

Little did they know that the king’s killer would be right behind them.

“You weren’t supposed to arrive so early,” I stated.

He turned to me, and beneath the hood, raised a brow and sniffed, inhaling my scent. His humorous vibe turned dark, and he lifted his head to observe the gargoyles that lined the turrets above us.

“I was watching for you, and you showed up early, so I figured that I might as well join your pathetic attempt at concealing yourself,” he replied, his aura shifting color from a soft shade of silver to a more aggressive vibrancy. “You never came back last night.”

“I didn’t…” I started, unsure of what to say. The sudden shift in our dynamic threw me off. He was usually playfully wicked with me, not outright angry. I could sense the change in his mood, not knowing what spurred it on. “I was otherwise occupied.”

“I can see that,” he crooned, moving close enough that I could see his expression morph into something sinister. “I can smell what you were doing last night. I can smell exactlywhoyou were doing last night.”

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