I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know why you think I’m obsessed with your wings. I’m not! You’re the one who keeps bringing them up!”
“Then why are you here?”
“I was thinking about yesterday.” I found a light switch on the wall and flicked it.
Once my eyes were adjusted to the light, I was surprised by the normalcy of his room.
It was nicely decorated in hues of dark blue and silver. He had his bed, a couch and leather chair, a TV, and lots of locked chests that I was betting held some of his personal armory.
Whiskers disappeared through a door that I was pretty sure led to the bathroom.
I wandered over to the couch and plopped down.
When I realized Rigel was staring at me, I sat up straighter. “Sorry, would you prefer if I stood?”
“I’d prefer to find out why you woke me up at this hour.”
“Sorry—I actually assumed you’d already be awake,” I said. “Sleeping doesn’t seem very assassin-y like.”
“I’m open to any suggestion you might have that would entail surviving without sleep,” Rigel said.
“I meant sleeping at night. I would have thought that’d be a good time to go out and get your stabby on,” I said.
“Five in the morning is too early.” Rigel stared down at Steve, who had wandered up to his bedside. “Early morning shift workers are already up—and they’re annoyingly alert, as you appear to be. A target is better taken off in the late hours of the night—when most are sleeping or too inebriated to be proactive.”
“Okay, that took a dark turn,” I said.
“You asked.” Rigel slid off his bed. He must have a hidden pocket or something for weapons, because he pulled a dagger seemingly from nowhere and tossed it on his nightstand. “What about the shadow creatures brought you stomping into my room at five in the morning?”
“You’re really hung up about the hour, huh?”
“Leila.”
“Okay, okay. Sorry.” I made a wheezing noise when Muffin decided to join me on the couch and used my stomach as a landing pad. “Wasn’t it kind of weird that the shadow monsters waited to attack until we were away from the crowd?”
Rigel folded his arms across his chest. “Because it would have been easier for the monsters to get you in a large crowd—particularly since you would be overly concerned about your Court and the humans present?”
“I hadn’t thought about that part—it just occurred to me we wouldn’t have had as much room to maneuver in a crowd. But you’re right. I would have been easier to kill because I would have been worried about the public.” I held my breath as Muffin purred and breathed in my face—her breathstank.
“You think this lack of foresight implies whoever sent the monsters after you is stupid?” Rigel asked.
“Maybe?” I frowned sharply enough to make my forehead wrinkle. “I don’t know what it could mean—I was just hoping you’d confirm it’s weird. Chase wasn’t able to uncover much yesterday, even though he swept the area for magic. He thinks the attacker stood on the rooftop seating area of a restaurant across the street—there were traces of magic there, anyway. But even the shades weren’t able to find a scent to track.”
“Does he think the attacker is from your Court?”
“Chase refuses to make any sort of guess without more evidence—he tells me I’m constantly jumping to conclusions. I think he’s just too nice, because this is almost certainly the work of one of the other monarchs. Probably Fell—he’s enough of a puke to try something like this.”
“Gaining the upper hand over the other monarchs and increasing the Night Court’s power should be your primary focus,” Rigel said. “If you manage it, and if you are right about your guess, it will solve the assassination attempts as well.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “I told you before, I don’t want to win the power games you fae play—I want toendit.”
“Itmaybe possible for you to end political strife in the Night Court—at least during your reign,” Rigel said. “But the idea that you’ll ever be in a position to stop the other Courts from inciting fights and struggling to top one another is folly.”
Rigel, obviously, didn’t share my aspirations to end the infighting.
In fact, before we’d gotten married he’d told me that he was marrying me just so he could more easily kill me if I ended up being bad for the fae.
He’d relaxed on that vow—or at least I was assuming he had since he’d protected me in two different assassination attempts. Maybe he realized I wasn’t going to purposely bring ruin down on everyone?
