“No need,” Guy snapped, his mask slipping for an instant before snapping back into place. “Merely … correspondence… of little interest to anyone save myself.”
But in his haste, he missed one sheet that slid beneath a nearby table. Hugo’s hand closed over it before Guy straightened, the parchment vanishing into his grasp as easily as a coin.
“Safe travels,” Guy added with forced warmth, sweeping from the inn with considerably less grace than he had entered.
Only when the door shut behind him did Rachel exhale. She glanced at Tristan, whose jaw was still set like stone, and nudged him lightly with her shoulder. “Don’t look at me like that, honey. You’re going to bury that bastard. Besides, no one can resist Sir Scowls-a-Lot when he’s in hero mode.”
For the first time in days, the edge of Tristan’s mouth softened—not quite a smile, but enough to ease the steel in his gaze as Hugo slid the rescued parchment into his hand.
Tristan’s thumb brushed the broken seal before he closed his fist around it, a flicker in his eyes promising that Guy’s arrogance would not go unanswered.
Rachel leaned closer, pulse quickening as she smoothed the paper flat. “This isn’t just numbers … it’s a ledger. Something’s wrong here.”
“Wrong how?” Tristan asked, his shoulder brushing hers as he leaned in to look. The contact sent warmth racing through her despite their circumstances.
“Here,” she said, pointing. “It looks like a code for what was received versus what was paid. It has to be a skim.”
Hugo gave a low whistle. “So the bastard’s been stealing.”
Rachel’s mind leapt ahead, piecing together patterns. For once, her odd, impractical modern knowledge wasn’t a liability. It was their weapon. “It looks systematic. Organized. Not petty theft—this is someone with access to records and payments. Someone like Guy.”
Tristan’s breath hissed between his teeth. “And these are the very routes I was accused of stealing from.”
Hugo’s expression darkened. “Then we’ve bought ourselves time, nothing more. When he realizes what’s missing, he won’t stop at exile. A man like that won’t rest until he’s silenced us.”
Rachel looked between the two men—Hugo’s gruff pessimism, Tristan’s careful hope—and for the first time in days, smiled. This was their chance to fight back. To prove the truth.
Tristan’s smile was small but genuine, the first real warmth she’d seen from him since Westminster.Sir Scowls-a-Lot,she thought, but now with pride instead of exasperation. For the first time, he wasn’t merely enduring his banishment—he was planning the way back.
“In that case,” he said quietly, “perhaps it’s time we stopped running and started fighting back.”
A faint draft slipped through the shutters, carrying the metallic tang of distant rain. Thunder rumbled soon after, promising storms ahead. But for the first time since their banishment began, Rachel found herself looking forward to the weather.
CHAPTER 19
The storm had been building for exactly one week now—seven days since the Westminster disaster, seven days since Hertford, where Tristan’s mouth had almost, almost softened into a smile. And seven days of him keeping his distance, speaking only when duty required, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with her anymore.
Rachel sat on her bed, cataloging her mistakes like a scribe tallying debts she’d never repay.
The poisoning.
The spice trade accusations.
The way Tristan’s words still echoed in her chest—that he’d been wrong to trust her.
They’d never really cleared the air, not directly. Some part of her knew they needed to, that silence wouldn’t heal what Westminster had broken. But silence was safer than watching his eyes shutter again.
Through her chamber window, storm clouds pressed down on Greystone like divine judgment. Heavy, gray, relentless. The servants whispered it was unnatural. She couldn’t help but agree.
Lightning flickered in the distance, close enough to make her teeth ache with anticipation. The storm was calling to something—she could feel it in her bones, a vibration that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with possibility.
Rachel picked up her eating knife and pressed the point to her index finger until a bead of blood welled up, bright as garnets in the candlelight. She’d been pricking herself all week, testing, hoping, dreading the moment when her blood might once again serve as a key to impossible journeys. But the small wounds healed within hours, leaving no trace except her growing certainty that she was trapped forever in a world where she brought nothing but trouble.
The ledger fragment lay on her table, Guy’s distinctive flourish mocking her with its promise of vindication she had no way to deliver. What good was proof when its keepers were banished far away from court? What value did evidence have when the king had already pronounced them guilty?
She reached for her quill—a luxury Tristan had once provided, back when he’d thought her worth the expense of fine parchment—and began composing what felt disturbingly like a last letter.
Tristan,she wrote, her hand shaking as modern script spilled across medieval vellum.
