“I don’t want to believe Ravik is guilty. I’ve known him since I could walk.”
She turned back toward Vesena. She was still scanning the journal with focus.
“But also, I don't think it was the heretics,” Evelyne pondered. “I think it was ordered. Maybe to stop something. Maybe to start something.”
She hesitated, the silence folded carefully around her. Saying it aloud would make it real. Would strip away the comforting distance of theory and force it into the cold light of truth.
“And I think…” —a breath, shallow but deliberate— “I think my family might have been involved.”
There. Said aloud. The words hung in the air like smoke. Heavier than she expected. Vesena was still. Evelyne could see her thinking, reading between the lines not just on the page but in the room.
Then, finally, Vesena looked up.
“I’m already working on it,” she confessed.
Evelyne’s brow rose. “What?”
Vesena gave a small, matter-of-fact nod. “Cedric and I found a hidden passage beneath Orvath’s chapel.”
Evelyne gasped, the words taking a moment to land. A tunnel. Of course there was a tunnel. There were always tunnels—beneath shrines, behind thrones, under the feet of anyone foolish enough to believe in open ground. Still, something about Orvath’s chapel made it worse. That place had always reeked of something secretly haunting. But this? This meant those secrets moved.
“Hidden passage? Are you certain?”
“I’m not certain of anything,” Vesena admitted. “But I’m close.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly, her voice calm but edged. “What was Cedric doing there?”
Vesena replied without hesitation. “The prince sent him. Alaric has his own suspicions about Ravik and the High Preceptor. Someone who possibly is working for Grand Marshal disappeared there.”
That caught Evelyne off guard.
She turned from the table and took a few slow steps toward the window, the light outside was fading into the afternoon. She didn’t open the curtains, only stood in front of them, arms lightly folded, watching dust dance in the air.
“It’s none of his concern,” she muttered.
“It became his concern the moment his fiancée’s life may be in danger,” Vesena said closing the journal.
Evelyne's heart gave a traitorous little skip.
Oh.
The blood was on her hands that day. Her hands, not anyone else’s. It was one thing to have him at her side on paper. Quite another to think he’dcare.
Vesena continued, matter-of-fact. “Cedric told him that you are concerned. It’s likely Alaric will try to speak with you. Soon.”
Evelyne halted mid-spin. So that explained Cedric’s unrelenting insistence earlier. The ride, the sunshine. Sheshould have guessed. Nothing in this castle ever truly came without a second intention.
She turned back to Vesena. “He already tried,” she admitted.
“And?” Vesena asked. “Will you meet him?”
Evelyne lifted her chin. “Well… It’s possible—entirely possible—that I may have... declined.”
There was a short pause when Vesena looked at her without any reaction.
“Oh,” she said eventually, the single syllable carrying all the elegance ofyou absolute idiotwithout ever needing to say the words.
Chapter 25
