Addie felt her heart ache for the young man before her. So strong, and yet that strength meant nothing if he wasn’t in control of it.
“Do you know what it’s like watching yourself harm someone? Not being able to stop?” The haunted look returned to his features.
This time, it was Addie who reached out for his hand, gently brushing her dirty fingers over his wrist. “I am sorry.”
He looked at her. Really looked at her. And his emerald eyes tightened ever so slightly. “Who would have thought that my mother’s servant would become my trusted ally?”
Addie knew he wasn’t asking for an answer, and she didn’t have one except for that one truth she had no one in this castle. That she, as much as he, was a prisoner here.
“How badly is she hurt?” he asked, shame yet again on his features. Addie could read him so easily. Every emotion plain on his face as if his features were the clouds in the skies, telling by their color and shape whether they would begin to storm and rain or pass and leave sunshine.
“Her face looks pretty bad.” Addie didn’t go into the brutal details of the swelling or the black and blue bruise that was developing along her nose and lips. “As for the rest of it, she needs food and rest.” Addie watched Joshua’s eyes darken at her words, and she could almost feel how sorry he was. How little he had wanted for this to happen. Instinctively, she rubbed her thumb over his hand in small circles. “You saved her by hurting her like that,” she reminded him. “It was a better option than killing her.”
“It should have been I who was locked up in that cell.” Joshua turned his head in disgust at himself then cursed as he moved the burnt areas around his neck too much. “I deserved every little inch of what she did to me.” He waved his bandaged hand at his neck and flinched.
“What exactly is it that she did to you?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“You didn’t abduct him,” Gandrett thought aloud. “You brought him home.”
Armand eyed her with calculating cool. “What would a merchant’s daughter know of the politics in my court?”
Gandrett blinked at the question, realizing she had said too much. Heat flooded her as he stared her down. “Isn’t it common knowledge that—”
“Not common knowledge. No,” was all he said. “And no one but the inner circle of his court even knows Joshua Brenheran is here.” He was on his feet, pacing again, the bowl swaying in the wake of his rushed movement. “Probably no one outside Ackwood castle knows he’s been gone for years. It would make the west look weak.”
Wasn’t there an easy way out? A solution she could fight out with her sword, for that was what she was good at. That was why the Lord of Ackwood had bought her from the Order of Vala to retrieve his lost son.
Vala help her, there were no words she could say to make Armand any less suspicious. Nothing. She couldn’t even run, her body too weak after the strain of the day—or more than one. She hadn’t had a chance to ask.
And she, sure as Shaelak reigned over darkness, couldn’t return to Lord Tyrem Brenheran empty-handed.
“Who are you, Gandrett Starhaeven?” Armand had stopped before her, his expression as if someone had dragged him through the mud. And as she didn’t respond, “We both know you used magic down there.” Gandrett’s stomach knotted as adrenaline rushed through her system, wiping all exhaustion away as her instinct for survival set in once more. His gaze lowered to her bandaged hands. “The question remains: did you use it to defend yourself or to attack?”
Gandrett couldn’t help registering some sort of fascination flickering in his eyes as he ran his hands through his hair like sorting that honey-gold mess would straighten out his problems, too.
“I don’t know what happened down there,” Gandrett said truthfully. “The only thing I know is that I was defending myself and that Joshua locked me in that cell right after you left to speak to your father.”
He froze, all agitation vanished, his lips paling as he took her in as if he was seeing her for the first time. “Gods above, Gandrett, that was three days ago.”
Three days? That explained why she had been near exhaustion even before Joshua had attacked her in the cell.
“How can you be even standing?” He still bore that same look, but his voice had turned devastated.
Gandrett attempted to smile but gave up as her injury stung at the strain. “I’m not standing, Lord Armand,” she said and gestured at the sofa. She had endured worse, had spent longer without food, without knowing when she’d see the desert sun again. Yet, here he was, giving her that look that could have meant she was Vala made flesh.
Armand didn’t laugh. His lips didn’t as much as twitch. “Aren’t we past you calling me Lord Armand?” His face was unreadable as he measured her, gaze slowly swiping over her as if he was looking for something, some hint to give her away.
“What am I supposed to call you, milord?” She thought of the days she’d spent preparing with Mckenzie exactly for this, for deceiving Armand Denderlain, for making him believe she was something she was not.
But he didn’t fall for it. He didn’t seem pleased at her words, the way he had in the beginning when every not so deliberate statement had sent him laughing. No. Armand Denderlain had finally caught on to it that something was wrong with her, and he had done so at the worst possible moment. When her target was finally just one room away.
“Call me Armand.”
Now it was Gandrett who stared as Armand returned to her side and picked up that bowl, placing it in his lap. He reached into the water, wrung out the cloth, and continued where he had left off earlier.
“After what happened, I think we are beyond titles”—his eyes narrowed as he leaned closer, cloth brushing over her cheek—“and beyond lies, I hope.”
It was an honest offer, she could tell by the look in his eyes—so open, so vulnerable.
So what if she told him the truth? That she had come here working for his enemy? That she had befriended him only to betray him? That she was neither a lady nor a merchant’s daughter, but a Child of Vala, that she would not marry any man and what Deelah had hoped for would never happen?
Neither of them felt like the right thing to say—not yet. So she said, “Thank you, Armand, for coming to my rescue.” She gave him a long look—not the flirtatious type that Mckenzie had taught her and that she had perfected during her hours spent with Brax, but a deep look that let him, she hoped, glimpse into her soul. “I didn’t deserve it.” That was the truth.
Truth. He had told her the truth about Joshua. All those years since he had found out he even had a cousin. Then, the day his father had ordered him to bring Joshua to Eedwood under the impression he was abducting his enemy’s son to have a tool to pressure him.
That’s what his father had been doing all those years—using Joshua against the Brenheran family. To keep at bay their efforts to win over central-Sives and slowly push back the Denderlain troops that were scattered over the territory in strategic positions, ready to strike the moment Brenheran made a move.
The month he and his mother had spent convincing his father to let Joshua live in normal chambers—even if they were guarded like a prison, but with humane conditions—rather than the dungeons. All that time, keeping the truth hidden from his father. For if Lord Hamyn Denderlain knew that Joshua was not only Tyrem Brenheran’s son but also Linniue’s, he would have executed him on the spot.