“He said Henrik looks like the type of boy who likes to be taken apart quietly. That he was born to be bent over, not to rule.” A breathy sigh of understanding escapes her. “I didn’t warn him. Didn’t check if any cameras were watching. I hit him. Shattered his nose with my ring. Security pulled me off before I could go for the ribs.”
It feels weird to say the truth aloud, not the script that my father wrote out. There’s no spin. No damage control. Just the plain truth and the faint pressure in my chest from the memory.
I think of the message I shot off.You’re both vermin and I hope you die.It’s practically a love letter, the way I say it. That’s our language: dry, bitter, and layered on the outside. But it can never encapsulate what we mean.
The truth is, I’d kill for both of them. Crown or not.
Even Kai with his porn disaster and Henrik with his piercing and irritating stare. Even when I’m tired. Even when they piss me off so badly I want to toss myself out the window.
Francesca looks up at me with compassion, and that’s way worse than the judgment I usually get. Because I didn’t follow her to be understood. She clocks my discomfort, then wordlessly turns to the case. Unlocks it. The parchment she pulls from within is yellowed but well preserved, and she holds it as one would something dangerous.
When she unfolds it, she looks up at me for a beat, then reads, “If you cannot stomach the fire beneath my skin, thenturn your gaze away. I am made of flame, of desire, and I will not beg for your water.” Carefully, she offers it to me. There’s more to it than what she read, but I don’t think she expects me to read the rest. So I don’t. “We like to joke that it’s about sex, but I don’t think it is, not really.”
I catch the words‘moist cock’but decide to amuse her anyway. “How so?”
“She loved her poet, or at least, I’d like to believe so. She wrote this letter knowing it would be made public to shame her, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was what mattered to her, like the poet. And daring to let the world see the truth of it.” Francesa’s eyes lock with mine, and my lungs suddenly feel too big for my ribcage. “You hit that manchild to protect your brother. I wouldn’t call that losing control. I’d call it loyalty.”
Something inside me shrivels up, and I nearly wrinkle the parchment as my fingers itch to curl into a fist. She just told me exactly what I expected to hear from my father.
Praise, of a sort.Acknowledgement. Maybe even appreciation. And I’m getting it from this fucking stranger.
I’m compelled to say something witty, something that could potentially ruin whatever this moment is. I could point out that Athena was still an adulterer, but I have a strong suspicion Francesca would see right through it. She takes the letter and places it back where it belongs.
Her hands don’t shake as she seals the box.
But as I slip them into my pockets, mine do.
They fucking tremble.
To distract myself, I realise the portrait I’ve been zoning out on looks vaguely familiar. Francesca sees where I’m looking and provides context. “Duchess Priscilla, my great-grandmother.”
“She looks exactly like Duchess Sylvaine.”
Francesca steps aside and traces the woman’s smile with a finger. “Don’t let her hear you say that. Gran lost her motherwhen she was only sixteen and paid for her inheritance with grief.”
A common currency in Sheffolk, it seems, but the words hide beneath my tongue.
Something tells me she hears anyway, because her mouth twitches into an amused little grin. The next portrait she leads me to depicts a severe-looking man with a high forehead and unsettling black eyes. His doublet is stained crimson, and in his left hand he holds a dead raven, the reason for his grin, I presume.
Francesca nods towards him and says, “A great uncle of mine. Bastien Sheffolk. In 1533, he set sail for a land he claimed to have seen in his dreams. They found his ship close to Athens, and the entire crew was slaughtered. Bastien wasn’t aboard.”
The longer I stare, the more I feel the wrongness of this painting. Bastien’s onyx gaze swallows me whole, and I wonder what lingered behind those depths to send him off on such a perilous journey. I imagine him before me, giving life to the image until I convince myself I can ask him. Though the mere idea is impossible, I hear the answer anyway.
Bastien wantedout, and they thought him mad for it.
From Bastien, we move onto a different frame, cracked with age, and within it is a scarlet-haired girl, no older than twelve. Francesca brushes dust from the canvas, stroking across the girl’s solemn face with a faraway look.
“Lady Thomasin Sheffolk. She should’ve beenDuchessThomasin. Historians can’t agree who it was that convinced the entire estate that it was under siege. Guards then tricked Tommy into hiding in the undercroft cupboards. Whose command? We’ll never know. Once the farce was over, they searched everywhere besides the place she was ordered to hide.”
Her fingers lower to Thomasin’s delicate hand. “Years passed, and the title skipped to her younger half-sister. At least,that’s what records say—half of them are fragments too, with dates left blank and pages torn out. We don’t even know when she was born; archivists placed her in the mid-to-late 1400s solely because of the ink, style and vellum matching others used here in that period. They filled the gaps with what theythinkhappened.”
The girl’s sad gaze bores into mine, and the painting fucking blinks. I stare harder, but the brat has the audacity to look bored. Retinal fatigue, I decide, then rule that shit out because that’s even more absurd than oil paint coming alive. Francesca waits for a reaction, but I’d rather let the canvas strangle me than give her the satisfaction of seeing me ruffled again.
“Hard to imagine Redford just misplacing its heir.”
“Misplace.” She snorts somewhat bitterly. The realisation comes seconds too late, and my mind jumps to the article about Luciana Lanorythe. Another line of succession rerouted by tragedy. “Or did Redford just not bother to protect her?”
I’ve no answer for that, and I doubt she expects one. If Lady Redford herself is listening, she doesn’t react to her heir’s words.
