“Be quiet.” I kneel down. There’s a lock on the cage, and I’m sure the key is hidden somewhere in Edain’s chambers, but the problem lies with what I can’t see.
The cage will be warded.
The second I touch that lock, the owner of the ward will know about it. The question is, did my mother lay that trap? Or was it Edain?
How fast can they return?
And why the hell does my magic elude me? If I’d been able to wield it, I might have been able to break these wards with none the wiser.
“What are you doing?” Finn sits up, frowning a little.
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m rescuing you.”
Apparently, it isn’t obvious, because his eyebrows almost meet his hairline. I study the lock and then realize those gorgeous blue eyes are searching my face.
“What?” I whisper.
There are shadows in his expression. “What’s the cost of this, Princess?”
“There is no cost. Not to you.”
He captures my wrist through the bars, moving shockingly fast. “I’m not talking about me. I saw and heard everything your mother did yesterday.” He shakes his head. “I always knew she was a bitch, but I didn’t realize she treated her own family like that.”
I wrench my hand back.
There’s a gaping wound in my chest, an emptiness I can’t fill. It’s one thing to know that my mother despises me, but another to have others see it.
He pities me. My enemy pities me.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper, and then try to force a smile. “It won’t be the first time she hurts me. It won’t be the last.” And then there’s the matter of this marriage to Etan. What’s the worst thing she can do to me when she’s fucking selling me to a monster?
A hand curls around mine and I realize I slipped away for a moment.
He’s watching me. Eyes full of sympathy.
“I’m Finn,” he says, as if he’s not locked in a cage barely big enough to house a dog.
“I know.”
His smile curves, slightly wicked. “I figured a formal introduction might be in order, considering you’re rescuing me. It’s a little embarrassing, after all.”
“Embarrassing?” The word draws me out of the emptiness.
He shrugs, muscle moving in his chest and shoulders. “I’m the one who’s usually rescuing princesses.”
He has an easy charm about him that makes me relax.
“Do tell…. Ever tried to pick a lock?” I ask.
“Frequently.” He nudges the door of the cage with his boot. “Not this one though. Not yet.”
“The lock will be warded,” I murmur. “If anyone touches it….”
“It will summon a wrathful prince,” he says with a wink. “Want to know a secret, Princess?”
I arch a brow.
Finn slowly reaches out and grips the lock in both hands, gritting his teeth with pain as the iron burns through him.
But nothing happens.
Both of us breathe out as he lets go.
“I kept grabbing the lock in the first day,” he says with a smile. “Having that ward blare in his head like a horn every hour or two was annoying him. So he altered the ward.”
Finn can touch the lock without summoning Edain.
“I just need something to pick it with.”
I reach inside my pocket and produce my catch.
Finn eyes my hairpin with barely disguised disdain.
“It works,” I tell him. “I’ve done it many a time.”
“On what? Your bedchambers?”
Maybe.
“Over there,” he says, tipping his head toward Edain’s pallet and the piles of saddlebags there. “His Royal Sulkiness put the key in there.”
I scramble across the floor toward the packs.
“But you’re not going to touch the key,” Finn whispers. “It’s a trap. I saw him lay the magic on it. Something violent, by the look of it. No. What you’re looking for is a satchel of knives. He’s got an entire roll of them. There’s a dirk there. Thin enough to stab through an ear without leaving a mark.”
I arch a brow at that and find the satchel. “Plotting your escape, were you?”
A flash of a smile greets me. “Not my first time in a cage, Princess. Nor my last, I daresay. Though I wasn’t expecting a helpless accomplice to simply amble in here, and hadn’t yet figured out how to get my hands on that dirk.”
I find the dirk.
The hilt of every single knife in that roll of leather is carved of something pale, like ivory. Or bone. The hilts are gold. The blades wickedly sharp. But the dirk is a thing of murderous beauty.
This was only ever created for assassination.
I knew Edain works in the shadows.
There have been slips of the tongue over the years—mostly my mother—and enemies who simply… vanished. Or were found in their beds with their throats expertly cut.
“Here,” I whisper as I hand it over with the gloves. “These might help.”
“Thanks.” He tugs the gloves on, and leans as close to the cage door as he can with the collar around his neck. Absolute focus settles over his expression as he begins to work the dirk inside the lock.
“Can I… Can I ask you a question?”
A little notch draws between his brows as he tries to slip the tumblers. “I’m not married, sweetheart, but alas, my heart’s already spoken for.”
A nervous laugh tears from me. He’s ridiculous. But somehow it gives me the strength to say this. “You work for the Prince of Evernight.”
This time he looks up. “Yes.”
“What’s he… like?”
A dozen expressions flicker over his face as if I came at him from a direction he didn’t expect. “Thiago?”
I wait.
“Oh, I see now.” His smile turns into a shit-eating grin. “I thought all of this recklessness was for me, but you caught a glimpse of my prince, didn’t you? My poor broken heart.”
Heat scours my cheeks. “Your heart’s already spoken for.”
“I lied.” He shrugs. “I do that on occasion.” He looks far too interested in the topic at hand. “And you’re not going to distract me now. Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” My cheeks flame. “I just… wanted to know. Whether he was… kind?”
“Kind?” Finn tests the word. “He is strict. With himself,” he clarifies, when my gaze jerks to his. “It’s not kindness, so much as protectiveness. He’ll kill to save those he considers his own. And he has all these sorts of rules for himself that nobody, least of all me, can understand. But he’d never hurt an innocent. He’s loyal, and proud, and aloof, and—”
“Aloof?” That wasn’t at all the impression I gained.
Finn sighs. “Sometimes there’s a darkness within him. A distance. You’ll see him staring out over the city as if he sees something else, and you can speak his name but he’s not there. And then it’s like he breaks free of the trance, or shatters the hold of whatever’s got him distracted, and then he’ll blink and he’s back. The prince I know. The prince I’ve fought side-by-side with. The prince I love.”