Emmett leans forward on his elbows. “I’m making progress there. I just need a little more time.”
I look to him in surprise. “You are?”
Emmett glances sideways at Rhion, suspicious. “I won’t give details, not with him here.”
I’m so sick of not knowing, especially when it feels I’m finally getting close to what I came here for. This was always my plan: find a way to defeat Bram, and bring Lydia and Emmett back to an England that is safe from him.
I stand and reach for the doorknob. Both men look at me with surprise.
“Where are you going?” Emmett asks.
“Your room,” I answer without breaking my stride.
Emmett stands to follow, then levels me with a glance, his hazel eyes as clever as ever. “My, Ivy, this is hardly the time to be seducing me.” His voice is weak, though, and my heart hurts to see him trying to thaw the ice between us after the last disastrous few days.
I roll my eyes and point to Rhion. “Send for Queen Lydia. She’s needed in Prince Emmett’s room,” I instruct. Rhion nods wordlessly and takes off down the stairs.
“Why my room?” Emmett asks once we are alone.
“Because you need to not be naked while we’re having this conversation and I assume that’s where you keep your shirts.”
Emmett sidesteps me to unlock his door and I follow him inside.
“That’s not fair.” A hint of humor sneaks into his voice. “I’m only half-naked.”
I take a seat on the bench by the roaring fire, and it’s only thenthat a ripple of discomfort goes through me. It takes me a moment to identify why. It’s because it looks so lived in, soEmmett.
There’s a pile of leather-bound journals on the floor next to me. In the center of the room is a large desk, constructed of white stone with veins of lilac quartz. Atop it sits a stack of books from the human world, bound in leather with thick, uneven parchment, all from before Queen Mor shut the door between our worlds. One is opened to a handwritten copy of the Vulgate Cycle. There are other papers and dried-up inkwells scattered around it.
The blanket on the armchair behind the desk is the same color green as his quilt back at Kensington Palace. I half expect Pig to emerge, bleary-eyed, from beneath it.
There are a few cabinets that reach to the ceiling, but not much else in the way of decor. The bench by the fireplace is the only place long enough for Emmett to lie down, which might explain the blanket and embroidered pillow on the floor by my feet.
It’s not a bedroom, I realize. It’s an office.
Emmett crosses the room to his wardrobe and pulls a loose white shirt from one of the cabinets, then settles down in the window seat, adjusting himself on the silk pillows to face me. “I’m sorry about last night.”
Involuntarily, my fingers drift up and brush against my bruised lips. “Don’t be.”
“Let me be, please,” he whispers. “I would never...” He trails off and tries again. “I’d rather die than do anything you didn’t want me to.”
“I did want it.”
“Not like that. Never like that.” He pulls a hand through his hair. “I fixed it though.”
“Fixed it?”
“Bram won’t hear about it.”
It hadn’t yet occurred to me to be terrified of that, but of course, I should have been. “How?”
He looks so sad as he answers. “I called in a few favors.”
He notices the way my eyes are roving around the room. “It’s not Kensington,” he says, like he’s eager to change the subject.
“You never liked it much there, either,” I offer.
“Not until you arrived,” he says softly.
