Page 17 of A Touch of Poison
So I sat like this was a formal meeting, hands clasped in my lap. “You wanted to see me?”
He blinked as though realising he’d been staring at me. “I trust you’re well rested, because we have a number of matters to discuss.”
Wereweone of those matters? My stomach was so tight with nerves I couldn’t tell if I wanted that or dreaded it.
He opened a notebook and took a silver pen. “I need you to tell me about every interaction you had with the changeling. From the beginning.”
My throat clenched around any words I might’ve tried to say. That was it. He still just wanted me in order to catch his enemy. I swallowed down my anger and hurt and began at that first summons to the changeling’s office.
Bastian listened, making notes in his book, asking a string of questions when I got to the end of each encounter. So many questions.
But he didn’t invade my space as unCavendish had. He didn’t touch me or leer at me. He was the consummate professional.
How unCavendish should’ve behaved.
Good gods, I should’ve known he wasn’t the real spymaster. The realisation crumpled inside me as I described the time he’d shoved me against a wall.
I could feel his fingers on my chest and shoulders. Every hair on my body strained to attention like it wanted to escape the mere memory of his touch.
My hands squeezed together until my knuckles ached.
I should’ve known.
Shifting in my chair, I tried to erase the ghost of his thigh pressing between mine. I swallowed back the bile in my throat, focusing on the words, on the simplicity of forming sentences, relaying every detail like I was watching it all from the outside.
It was only when I reached the end of that encounter and Bastian asked no questions that I pulled my gaze up from the surface of his desk.
His pen had fallen still in his white-knuckled hold, and a terrible stillness gripped him. His chest barely moved with his breath. Above his collar, the pulse leapt in his throat. Otherwise, he might’ve been a statue.
But his shadows?
They surged from his shoulders and thrashed over the desk, reaching for me.
I didn’t pull away. Maybe with how violently they moved, I should’ve.
Before they got halfway across the desk, Bastian’s jaw twitched, and the shadows crashed to a stop like waves hitting a cliff face. He sucked in a deep breath and they retreated, spilling into his lap and out of sight. His voice grated as he continued his questions.
I had no idea how long we sat there for. I spoke myself hoarse, and Bastian brought chilled water from a cabinet and offered me tea and coffee, but his questioning didn’t relent.
At last, I reached the wedding and the realisation that unCavendish was not who I thought and his death at Bastian’s double’s hands. I sank back in my chair when his questions stopped.
My head pounded and my heart weighed in me, but there was also a kind of relief, like in voicing it, I’d handed it all over to someone else.
I still felt foolish for not realising sooner. I still felt foolish for trusting Bastian.
But I had spilled all those horrible moments I’d kept secret and festering inside me. That poison, at least, was gone.
Bastian flicked back through his notes, a thoughtful frown between his eyebrows.
The moments after unCavendish’s last breaths continued in my mind. He hadn’t asked about those, since he’d been there, but it was like my brain had been set on a course and couldn’t stop.
“You’re not allowed to die yet. That thing is dead, but it was working for someone else.”
The movement. The pain. The strange wheeling of the world round and round and round.
“I still need you.”
At the time it had felt true, like he neededme. But now I knew better. This was what he needed—my information to help him trace unCavendish’s plot back to its source.
