Every thought narrows to those words.
Rhianelle never speaks of what happened in Tavan. The night she crawled back to my tent with broken ribs, her face pale with pain. Someone did that to her.
Someone put their hands on what is mine.
This emotionally constipated assassin knows who.
“Tell me.” My voice drops to something inhuman, something that’s made brave men soil themselves.
“No.”
Shadows writhe along the walls, eager and hungry. “I could torture it out of you. I will peel your thoughts from your skull.”
“You could try,” he echoes my earlier words back at me with infuriating calm. “But the guild has trained us to resist torture. My mind would break before it opened. You’d get nothing but screams and madness.”
He’s not bluffing. The Grimsbanes undergo conditioning that makes them nearly impossible to crack. It’s part of what makes them such effective killers.
“Torture requires time and privacy.” He tilts his head slightly. “By the time you break me, if you break me, the threat to your queen may have already acted.”
Damn him.
“You know who they are,” I say.
“I know everything that threatens the Wiolant family.” His pale eyes study my face for reaction. “I’m their hired guard after all.”
“Then tell me.”
“After you agree to my terms.”
I cross my arms and lean against the stone wall, signaling willingness to listen. “What do you want?”
Something flickers across the visible half of his face. Not quite embarrassment, but close.
“I want...” He pauses, and the hesitation is so unlike him that I actually lean forward. “I want you to teach me.”
“Teach you what?”
“To read.”
The corridor falls silent except for the distant sound of night birds calling to each other through the darkness. I stare at the assassin, certain I’ve misheard.
“You want me to teach you to read?”
“Yes.”
“You are an assassin.” I study his face, searching for signs of a joke. “You cannot read?”
“No.”
I study him more carefully now. There’s something almost desperate in those strange grey eyes.
He wants to read?
“There are tutors in the city,” I point out. “Scholars who would teach you for far less than the information you offer.”
“Knowledge of my limitations would become a weapon in the wrong hands,” he says evenly. “I cannot afford that.”
I begin to understand the true nature of his request. An illiterate assassin faces disadvantages that could prove fatal. Unable to read contracts, correspondence, or written intelligence that might reveal traps.
