Her expression smoothed into a blank slate.
The questions were fired rapidly with each footstep closer. “You think I’m breaking when I’m alone? That I’m huddled in a corner sobbing in despair? Trembling in fear of your brothers?”
I nodded, worried it might be true.
Nelle stared back, scanning my face, giving nothing away.
All of a sudden, her upper body buckled forward with a stifled chortle she tried to hide by slapping a palm over her mouth. A second later, her hand dropped to her chest, and an obnoxiously loud cackle of laughter erupted.
My eyelids flattened and my jaw went—tic, tic, tic—as I watched her slender shoulders quake and her cute, messy hair tremble when she fell into one of those deep belly laughs. The kind of hearty belly laugh you couldn’t stop. The kind of laugh where you laughed so much you ended up crying.
Nelle did that.
She howled with laughter for a full two minutes. I knew because, like a fucking masochist, I stood there and actually counted in my head.
Every time she glanced at me, her cackling grew rougher and more uneven. Tears streamed down her rosy, puffy cheeks. She even snort-laughed in between,“All alone and crying… Oh my gods, that’s priceless.”
Eventually, because it happened to the best of us, she got intoxicated on laughter, swayed drunkenly, and collapsed into a heap on the carpet.
I threw up my arms.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Swiveling around, I stalked to my makeshift wardrobe, grabbed a pair of overalls marred with old stains of oil and grease, and left. The tower’s door slammed behind me with a loud bang as I shut away Nelle lying on the floor holding her jiggling stomach and sob-laughing like a fucking hyena.
34
Nelle
Ihadn’t laughed so hard in my entire life.
Sage pawed at my leg with a half-hearted bark, trying to rouse me from my laugh-induced coma. I lay there staring up at the vaulted ceiling, cheeks tingling, belly aching from how long I’d been howling.
“Okay, okay,” I murmured, nudging him away. I pushed upright, the messenger bag’s strap digging into my shoulder, and wiped my damp cheeks with the hem of my dress before heading to the kitchen on unsteady legs.
The Crowthers really thought I was frightened of them. That I’d be cowering in a dark corner, broken and weeping. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard come out of Graysen’s mouth. And the look on his face when he asked…he’d actually been worried.
I filled a cup with water and drank deeply, sighing as the coolness slid down my throat. The glass chimed softly against the sink when I set it down to deal with tomorrow with myvery own hands,since the servants had the weekend off.
Entering the bathroom, I padded to the vanity and rose on tiptoes to pluck my toothbrush from the canister. When I opened the drawer for toothpaste, my gaze snagged on the shallow wicker basket overflowing with brand-new toothbrushes still sealed in their packets. I shook my head at Graysen—he had no idea at all what I’d done.
Ten minutes later, ready for bed, I stepped into the bedroom. Tossing the bag onto the mattress, I stripped, letting my clothes fall where they landed. My nightie slid over my skin in a ripple of silk. Sage trotted in, tail wagging, as I pulled back the blankets and slipped between the soft sheets, tucking them around my hips.
For the past few hours, I’d spent my time undisturbed in the library, hunting through the computer’s archives for the Keep’s blueprints. Of course, there weren’t any. The digital catalog teased me with titles that should’ve held floor plans, but the books themselves were missing from the shelves.
The Crowthers really were paranoid motherfuckers.
Sage had curled up by the fire while I scoured the Heart of the Keep for any hint of a hidden doorway. The library was enormous, and I had no idea what would unlock it—a trigger in a book, a sconce, a pressure plate beneath a rug. It would take more than one night to search properly. And at my family home, you needed a key to open the escape tunnel door.
That would be a problem for later.
First, I needed to find the godsdamned tunnel.
Dragging the bag closer, I dug out the book Dustin had given me under the pretense that I’d dropped it. It wasn’t the book I was interested in; it was the letter Dustin had surreptitiously passed onto me, hidden between its leaves.
I’d read the letter a few times in the library, and now I couldn’t resist one more read-through before I hid it away with my notebook and caught some sleep.
Spreading the book open on my lap, I plucked out the formal envelope. It was exactly the same as all the other letters Evvie had received over the past few months. Concealed inside was a smaller envelope addressed to me. I ran my finger overNelle Wychthornwritten in black ink on the latest letter sent to me from my secret pen pal.
