“What are you doing?”
Marietta shrugged. “Looking through her undergarments.”
Women were strange.
“Why?”
“Some women hide things where they think men won’t look. What are we looking for, anyway?”
“Something connecting her to Thorne Worley. Anything unusual. Other than her overabundance of pink.”
It was another ten minutes searching before Marietta lifted a book in triumph. “I found a journal!”
The cold agony of certainty gripped me. “Let me see.”
She clutched it to her chest. “We can look together.”
I didn’t want to look at all. I watched her flip the first page. “The first date was written three years before Octavia’s.It has come to my attention that it would be to my advantage to join a group of women led by Celeste—”
A loud bang. The crash of glass and a spell.Servant’smagic, used to lift and dust.Worley.
“Stay here,” I said. I would make this nightmare end.
~*~
MARIETTA
How Gabriel was going to explain our presence to the servant who had returned and broken the glass, I didn’t know. But if anyone could get someone to do what he wanted, it was Gabriel Noble.
I gripped the book in my hands. A group of women forming a club. I flipped to a random page toward the end.
Estelle and I don’t hold with this new addition. Lord Moreton discusses politics with the boy, for spirits’ sake. Should he say anything we will all be in dire straits. There are too many ties there. Dangerous ties. I wonder if we’ve become too arrogant, too complacent. But it titillates Iris—the thoughts of what we could do. To see him with our avenger.
Estelle Moreton.E.M.Iris. The connections, right there.
To see our avenger’s extraordinary eyes darken to—
A hand covered my mouth and I was pulled against a tall, hard body. “Hand the book to me, nice and slowly,” a voice whispered against my ear.
Everything in front of me turned crystal and cold. Frost crept across the mirror, framing the reflection of a man with a scar under his chin and a knife in his hand. Brisk fingers pried the journal from my fingers. “Thank you, Lady Winters. Couldn’t find this for the life of me, short as it will be. Need the evidence, you see.”
I could make myself invisible all I wanted, but Worley would still have me in his grip.
“Did you kill them for making you a victim?” I pulled the cold up around me.
The hand around my mouth pulled my face to the side. “Never. I am a loyalist. Loyal to any end in service of them. But I wasn’t evergoodenough.” He panted for a few long moments and I hardened the magic. “Kill them? Only if they’d asked. But the one who killed them wasn’tasked. And Nobleknowsit. You need to—”
“Marietta!”
Worley swore and shoved me. I fell face first on the bed. Pitching forward, I threw my body over the other side, cracking my shoulder against the floor. I scrambled to my knees to defend myself, ice sweeping up my skin.
The dark edge of a trouser leg disappeared through the connecting door. Footsteps retreated down the back stairs. I clutched the horrid pink coverlet, twisting it in my hands, shaking from the cold.
“Marietta!” I whipped around to see Gabriel in the bedroom doorway.
“Worley. He grabbed me. Took the journal. Said—”
Gabriel was already running through the connecting door, pounding down the back stairs. I backed myself into a corner to wait, staring at the divots and valleys in the rumpled fabric.
