“I love you too. I can’t believe that I could ever get this lucky.” She slid her hand up his chest, placing her palm over his heart so she could feel it beating. “You know, I love being able to shift, I love my unicorn—”
I should hope so, her unicorn said indignantly.
“—but I’ve never been as happy to be a shifter as I am right now. I’m just unbelievably grateful that I got to know you were my mate right away. I’m glad I get a head-start on loving you.”
He held her for a long time, cradled against him, his breath lightly stirring her hair.
He said, “I’d still be circling around you if I wasn’t a shifter. I’d probably be too shy to even talk to you.”
“And I’d be too intimidated to talk toyou, since I wouldn’t have broken out of my shell. As weird as the whole system is, we owe a lot to Marianne.”
They really did, and she was starting to realize how hard it would be for her to sit idly by while Keith’s team worked the case in their absence. It was ridiculous. She didn’t have any investigative skills or experience. She’d never even successfully guessed the end of an Agatha Christie book. What made her think that she could be any help at all?
I know this place. I know these people. I’ve been an insiderandan outsider, and I’ve spent a lot of time paying attention.
But maybe it wasn’t about how much help she would or wouldn’t be. Maybe it was just about what she owed Lady Marianne, who’d been the only person to really take her transformation seriously. Marianne had believed in her when no one else had. Even though that belief had been wrong in a lot of ways, there was no denying that it had meant a lot to Iris at the time.
Besides, it wasn’t like everyone who thought she’d never stop being the same old screw-up had actually been on her side or had any real concerns about whether or not she was erasing her true self.Everyonehere, except maybe Seraphina, had believed that Iris needed to change; Marianne was just the only one who had ever believed she could. She had taken Iris’s reformation at face value, and in a village full of people who were skeptical of her, that kind of trustmattered.
Most of all, though, she owed Marianne for introducing her to Keith. No matter how broken their world was, the bond she shared with Keith was whole and untainted.
Keith tipped her chin up. “My team will solve this. I promise.”
“I bet they’ll still be able to talk to you about it,” Iris said hopefully. “Maybe we could come up with something that might help them, like background info.”
“I’m happy to try.” He led her over to the sofa and they sat down together, their knees touching. “What are you thinking?”
She wasn’t sure, so she had to mull it over for a moment.
“Motive,” she decided. “It might be easier for us to guess that. Why would anyone want to kill Lady Marianne?”
Keith frowned, thinking.
“We already agreed that it doesn’t seem all that plausible that anyone would do it just to open up a Council seat, but let’s say it’s a possibility. Then there’s what you said about someone rummaging through the Council House and getting interrupted. That would make sense. But—” His frown deepened.
He had already thought of something! Iris knew the two of them could do this.
“But there aren’t any files in the reception chamber,” he went on, speaking slowly, like he was feeling his way through a dark room. “Maybe the killer heard Marianne coming in and ran down the hall to hide? And she went after them?”
It didn’t sound right to Iris, but it took her a second to work out why. Then she remembered how the draperies in the hall had swallowed up the sound of her footsteps, and she shook her head.
“The reception chamber echoes,” she said. “Anyone who’s been in it knows that. It’d be the worst place to hide. But it would be almost impossible to hear someone dart down the hallway; it’s a lot more muffled.”
“Marianne could have seen them.” Keith drummed his fingers on his knee. “But—”
“But the turn-off for her office isbeforethe long hall,” Iris finished.
“You’ve worked with her. Is there any reason you can think of she’d go down the hall first thing in the morning? Or last thing at night?”
Iris forced herself to give it some real thought, because she could already tell that it would be easy to get swept up by her theory and stop paying attention to the facts. But she didn’tthinkshe was bending them to suit her idea.
“She makes coffee and teainher office, not in the kitchenette. She would’ve been either coming from her quarters in the residential wing of the Council House orgoingthere, so she probably wouldn’t need the bathroom—but even if she did, she had one attached to her office. She keeps all her private files with her. She might have gone down the hall if she needed a general Council file, I guess.”
“And there are no doors down on that end of the hall,” Keith said. “No back door at all, from what I remember. So even if she was locking up for the night, she wouldn’t have gone down there. The individual offices aren’t locked?”
Iris shook her head. “Just the main door. You’re right, there’s no back exit.”
“Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that means the Council House is in violation of a bunch of safety codes. Not that enforcing that is my top priority right now, but still. Having only one exit is a bad idea.”
