Oh, bloody hell, she’s going to…
She parted her beautiful lips and popped it into her mouth before moaning and closing her eyes with pleasure as she chewed.
A guard behind us vomited onto the stone floor, which started a chain reaction of others following suit. My father knocked his chair over and staggered away from the table, running from the room without another word. The guards and servants followed, rushing to be free of the stench of vomit and the sound of Sigrid chewing.
Now that they’d gone, I fully expected her to spit it out, but she looked straight at me and swallowed before daintily wiping her mouth with the napkin.
I looked from her to my father’s empty chair and back again, at a complete loss for words. “You just…beat him at his own game.”
Her blue eyes were cold and distant. “Your daddy was cruel to you growing up to make sure you feared him. Mine was cruel to make sure I feared no one. If your fuck of a father wants to scare me, he’s going to have to do better than parlor tricks. I’ve already seen them all.” She tossed the lid from my plateback, revealing a severed finger that held Father Benedict’s ring. “Pity,” she mused. “The priest is still alive.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the king would’ve put his head on a platter if he’d had that option. ThefunI could’ve had with that…” Her eyes flashed like she was relishing this, but I could see it for what it was.
“You don’t scare me, Sigrid,” I said softly but with certainty.
She gave a half-hearted snort of laughter. “I couldmake youfear me. Someday soon I’ll be reconnected with my berserker, and she’ll whisper to me exactly which threads to pull.”
“You don’t need extra senses. Do you want me to tell you what scares me?”
Losing you.
“As usual, I want you to put your fucking feelings back in a box and focus. Dear old daddy lost face just now. He’s run away to lick his wounds, but he’ll find a way to lash out and restore his reputation. There’s only a brief window before that happens.”
She pushed back from the table and glanced with disgust at the vomit all over the floor.
“But how will we free your berserker without the relic?”
She laughed. “That knife doesn’t have any power.”
I slid my chair back, carefully avoiding the mess. “Then why did you send Father Benedict to retrieve it?”
She pinned me with a pitying look that said I was being naive.
I could only blink at her in awe for a moment. “You set him up. Set my father up to turn on one of his most trusted advisors. How do you know he won’t punish Layla for it?”
“This was personal, and he’s just cruel enough to want to handle it himself.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SIGRID
“Do you ever simply sit still?”
The disdainful comment, delivered with the uniquely crisp Saxon sneer, came from behind me.
I turned to find Eleanor still sewing, perched with perfect posture in her light-purple gown. I’d been convinced she was only pretending to sew, but a look over her shoulder earlier in the morning had revealed an elaborate floral design with hundreds of precise ladylike stitches.
But the way she poked the needle through the cloth was completely unladylike.
Rage embroidery was what she was doing, sewing tiny bright flowers that would forever be imbued with her annoyance.
Itwasactually unlike me to fidget and pace like this, but I couldn’t shake a sense of dread.
Something is wrong.
It was a ludicrous thought, since in that moment more things were wrong than right, but my instincts were screaming. Thefeeling had sent my berserker into a frenzy, and I couldn’t let her get as bad as she had the day before. I worried what would happen in a real fight.
