Iris focused all of her energy and concentration on her left hand, which was loosely curled around Keith’s fingers. Trying to make it move felt like she was trying to break a plank of wood with her mind. She was almost at the point of blacking out from sheer effort when her grip slowly and grudgingly tightened just the tiniest bit. She saw Keith’s eyes go wide, so she knew that he’d noticed it.
She hoped she knew what she was trying to say.
Trust me. No matter what I say to him, just trust what I’ve said to you.
She looked at Blake, and all the childhood plays she and Seraphina had once put on came rushing back to her. She did her best to make her eyes enormous and watery. She looked at him like she was a helpless newborn kitten and he was her only hope.
“Keith lied to me?” she said, leaning into the slurring to make herself sound even more distraught. “How? Why?”
A jolt ran through her as Keith traced letters on her palm:G-O-O-D.
How could he move with that much precision? Iris was so doped up that it had taken everything in her just to twitch her hand. Had Blake calculated his dosage wrong?
There was hope. If Keith could move even a little, and both of them couldthinkeven a little, there had to be hope, no matter how awful this seemed.
Blake softened under Iris’s long-practiced puppy eyes—at least as long as they gave him an excuse to pontificate. He settled back down.
“Until we all had dinner together, I was thrilled with the news of your engagement. You’ve changed so much over the last year, Iris, and Seraphina and I have been so proud of you. I was glad that the Council was recognizing that by matching you to atribute, of all people.
“It was the perfect move to ensure our family’s high reputation,” Blake continued. “I’ll be frank. You know what people here expect of an Abbott. You know my ambition to sit on the Council. That spot last year should have been mine, but I can’t look back, only forwards. Another seat would open up sometime, and with the perfect wife and a reformed sister-in-law married to a perfect tribute, what could possibly stand in my way?”
She had thought the exact same thing. So why hadn’t he been willing to kick back and wait for all his dreams to come true?
“But then we had the two of you over for dinner, and you told us you were mates.”
Iris remembered the issue Blake had kept gnawing on that night at dinner. He’d had so much trouble letting it go.
“Why were you waiting a week?” Blake said, striking his fist against the arm of his chair. “It didn’t make any sense. It was strange to do it all, and to do it when you were mates ... I couldn’t understandwhy.”
I did this,Iris thought. She felt sick to her stomach.I knew the story we told them didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t want to tell them the truth. I didn’t want them to know how scared I was, how little I’d changed after all.
Blake said, “I knew something wasn’t right. And then you told me that Lady Marianne hadinsistedthat Keith stay a week. And then I knew: match or no match, the real reason she called Keith here was to act as her investigator. That’s why she insisted he stay. That’s why she was allowing him to invite outsiders in. A wholeteamof them, of human world detectives swarming into Purity and imposing their standards on us!”
Keith said, “But what—”
Blake was too worked up now. He overrode him, spitting out the words so furiously and frantically that he was red in the face.
“I went to Lady Marianne about it that night—”
Of course he had, and of course she had agreed to meet with him. An Abbott could always get a meeting with the Silver Council.
They had wasted their time trying to think of who Marianne might have agreed to see at that hour, and the real answer had been right in front of their nose. Worse, when they’d sent Keith’s team over to talk to Blake, it must have felt like a spotlight was shining right on him.
“—and she denied everything, of course.” Blake raked his hands through his hair. “But things ... got heated. She refused to understand what I’ve done, even though I’vealwaysacted in accordance with the best principles of the Council. You know I have.”
It was getting hard for Iris to even talk now, but she managed to whisper, “Of course you have.”
Hopefully that would calm him down. “The best principles of the Council are kind of garbage” certainly wouldn’t.
She wondered what it was Blake had done that he was so terrified someone would discover. What had he been so afraid everyone would find out? Knowing him, it could be anything from embezzlement to letting Seraphina keep a secret fish after all. He could have a velvet clown painting hidden in the basement and be killing to protect his crime of bad taste.
... No, actually, she didn’t think it was that. She honestly believed Blake meant it when he said he’d always upheld the Council’s values. It was—especially now that he’dpoisoned them—easier to imagine him doing something evil than something silly.
Like she’d thought before, he hated mess.
Whatever she had done, she was past the point of being able to move her lips enough to ask about it. The paralysis had finally sunk in too deep.
And she still didn’t have a plan. All she could do was hope that she had stalled long enough that Keith, who wasn’t quite as frozen as she was, had come up with something.
