But she didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust him at all. Not anymore.
Back stiffening, she tried to rip herself free from his grasp, to shove him off the horse. “Let me go!”
Tiberius kicked the horse into a hard canter and veered into the trees.
“My lord!” someone shouted, though the words were swiftly swallowed by the wind.
The world blurred into streaks of gray and brown as the King’s Forest whipped past, low branches narrowly avoiding striking her and the baron holding her captive.Captive. Twice in one day.
Bitterness welled up in her, hard and fast, as the wind tore at her hair, her clothes. Her left cheek still stung, burning in the frigid air. But she hardly felt it. She hardly felt anything at all but the fire smoldering low in her belly. Catching flame. Flaring brighter with each passing moment.
Rage.
“I hate you!” she shouted into the wind. It was childish, beneath her. But she no longer cared. Decades of friendship, of trust—gone.
“You will thank me one day,” he bit back, as if he were doing her a great favor, stealing her away while leaving her godparents and Olivia to die.Arkwright. Sir Arkwright was already dead. Alyx was still back there, too.
She wouldneverthank him for this.
Tiberius bent lower over the horse’s neck, urging the poor beast onward, shoving her down with him. The angle gave her an opportunity.
Her fingers scrabbled at the neckline of her gown, pulling her bodice dagger free.
“Don’t, Sera—”
She didn’t listen. She was tired of listening. “Why?” she half-sobbed, half-screamed, thrusting the weapon backward, trying to drive the blade into his gut.
It met with resistance, chinking against armor—chainmail hidden beneath his fine doublet.
His grip on her midsection shifted, gloved fingers wrenching something free from within his doublet. His mouth brushed her ear. His breath warm. His tone strained. “It’s complicated.”
Complicated.
Complicated?
Before she could react, his left hand lifted and clamped something over her mouth and nose. A handkerchief—damp. Sweet-smelling.
Too sweet.
She clawed at his hand, trying to pry it free, but his grip was too strong. Through his glove, she felt something strange—a ridge along the base of his third finger.Aring.
She tried to scream but only inhaled more of the sickly scent. A mistake. It filled her lungs, hazed her vision. The forest blurred further. The fingers holding her dagger loosened; the weapon slipped away, lost to the underbrush.
Tiberius’s voice sounded far away now as he whispered, “I know it does not seem like it now, but I am doing you a favor…”
A favor. She would have laughed if she could, but she couldn’t.
She was already gone.
Lost to the darkness.
Chapter fifty-two
Olivia
The barricaded sitting room door boomed again, hard enough that Seraphina’s bedroom wall rattled. Olivia’s pulse jumped with each strike, keeping time with the Pain flaring down her ruined leg.
“Olivia, Percy,” Duchess Edith whispered from within the wardrobe, one hand on Rogue’s scruff. The varhound growled, his teeth bared toward the locked bedroom door in a rare, threatening show. “We must go.”
