When the servants found me in the morning, they would think I’d died in the night from shock or grief or some other convenient human weakness.
And Cador would know the truth.
He’d look at my corpse and see the void he’d been searching for since the Bride Market. He’d understand, finally, completely, what he’d brought into his home. What he’d claimed in the alcove. What he’d shielded with his own body when the crossbow bolt flew.
A dead thing. A monster worse than any he’d ever hunted.
I couldn’t let that happen.
The thought cut through the fog of fading. I couldn’t die here. Couldn’t let him find me like this, blue-lipped and hollow, all my secrets laid bare in the evidence of my corpse.
He deserved better than that. Deserved to remember the woman who’d danced with him at the banquet, who’d kissed him in the alcove, who’d burned bright and hot and alive in his arms.
Even if that woman had been a lie.
I forced myself up. My arms shook. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else, distant and unresponsive, but I made them move anyway.
I crawled to the wardrobe. Pulled myself up its carved frame until I was standing, swaying, gripping the wood hard enough to leave marks.
The travel bag was on the top shelf. I hadn’t touched it since arriving, hadn’t thought I’d need it, hadn’t planned beyond the market and the escape from Mabyn.
But it was there. I pulled it down, started filling it.
One dress. A spare shift. The bone box with its two remaining petals, tucked carefully into the bottom where it wouldn’t be crushed. I didn’t have much else. Hadn’t come here with much. A dead woman traveling light.
My hands were clumsy. Numb. The cold was spreading through me faster now, creeping up my arms and into my chest, and every motion felt like pushing through water.
I dropped the dress twice before I managed to fold it. Couldn’t get the clasp on the bag to close. My fingers wouldn’t bend right.
Paper.
I needed paper. Needed to leave something behind, some explanation, some excuse, some lie that would make sense of my disappearance without revealing what I was.
The writing desk by the window had what I needed. I stumbled toward it, knocked over the inkwell, cursed in a voice that came out thin and reedy and wrong.
Found a scrap of parchment. Found a quill.
My hand shook so badly the letters came out crooked, barely legible.
Three short lines. That was all. All I could manage.
I folded the note, left it on the pillow where he would find it if he came looking, and picked up the bag.
I made it halfway to the window before my legs gave out.
I didn’t feel the impact, just a vague awareness of my body collapsing, the bag spilling open and scattering its meager contents across the marble.
The window was three feet away. Might as well have been three miles.
I didn’t have a plan. Didn’t have anywhere to go. But staying meant being found, and being found meant watching him realize what I was.
I started crawling.
Inch by inch. Dragging myself across the cold stone, fingers scraping against marble.
The window was open. I always left it open, because the night air was cold and the cold was comfort.
If I could reach it. If I could pull myself over the sill. If I could disappear into the darkness before…
