Page 18 of A Touch of Poison
This was what I got for letting my feelings run away with me.
The worst thing was, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to uncover the truth. It endangered his court, his queen, his country, and mine.
So I swallowed down my foolish feelings and asked, “Who do you think he was working for?”
Bastian exhaled, brow furrowing more deeply. “That’s not for you to concern yourself with. You’ve dealt with that world enough.”
“Have I?” I gritted my teeth. “I feel like I barely scraped the surface while so much more was going on underneath, and that’s how I ended up here.”
After a pause, Bastian closed the notebook and placed it on the desk, hand spread over it. He watched me for a moment as if weighing me. “It’s my job to work all that out. I just need you to stay safe. All you need to know is that someone didn’t want us forming an alliance with Albion.”
Even though this person was responsible for unCavendish upending my life, he wasn’t going to tell me. State secrets. Or just that he didn’t trust me. It amounted to the same outcome.
He grunted, mouth twisting in a sardonic smile. “And they got their wish.”
When I’d told Bastian about the wedding, he’d explained how Queen Elizabeth had called off her marriage to Asher. Thanks to the return of Excalibur, she had magic of her own now and didn’t require a husband—human or fae—to shore up her rule.
Must be nice to have a choice in such things.
His fingers tapped on the notebook’s leather cover as his gaze turned distant, thoughtful.
“You don’t know, do you?” The realisation burst out of me. “All that time in Albion and the week back here, and you still haven’t uncovered them.”
His gaze shuttered. “I’m still gathering information.”
“But we could have more information, by now, couldn’t we? If you’d told me you were trying to lure out the person spying on you, I could’ve helped. If you’d told me you’d taken the antidote—”
“You mean, like you told me about your spying? And about the poison?”
His words were a punch in the gut.
And for a moment—the blink of an eye, really—I caught a glimpse of something wounded and bloody behind the Business Bastian exterior.
The hurt cut both ways, didn’t it?
On a different day, I might’ve found that funny in a bleak kind of way.
Instead, today, I cleared my throat and looked away. “I’m sorry, Bastian. I wanted to stop, but then he threatened Ella, and I couldn’t find a way out. I never wanted—”
“Tenebris is not like Lunden, Katherine.”
I jerked, back straight like I’d been rapped across the knuckles. I’d overstepped the lines of formality he’d drawn between us.
“Different rules apply here. Rules you’d do well to learn.”
He wasn’t wrong. Didn’t rules keep you safe, after all?
His jaw turned solid. “Especially with Dawn so close.”
“Close?” I glanced at the door. “I didn’t see anyone from Dawn on the way here.” None of the corridors had been decorated in a way that marked them as Dawn rather than Dusk—at least not as far as I could tell.
“You wouldn’t. You remained in our territory.”
I squinted at him. “So… they have one side of the palace. The east or—?”
“Not like that. Not so mundane.”
Of course not. This was faerie.
