Once again, I had no clever answer ready.
Maybe I was finally learning.
“Korey knew my Mark had been forced into the wrong shape,” she said. “He started looking for a way to change what they had done.”
“Undo a bond?”
“Not undo. Rework. Re-read. Re-bond, if the Council could be made to allow it.”
“Could they?”
Her mouth hardened.
“Korey died before he finished asking.”
I thought of Quill’s office. His warm room. His hands on the black case. The way he had said inheritance as if the word had never had blood on it.
“Quill.”
“Yes.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Not in a way that would survive this place.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because I was there after.”
I shut my mouth.
So she did have proof. Just not enough for whatever Zenith Hall called justice.
But enough for the girl who had been bonded at fourteen. Enough for the young woman sitting across from me now with a Mark pressed into the wrong shape and a dead bond-mate more than twice her age the Council had called a failure.
“Why tell me?” I asked.
“Because they’re going to make Caspian look like the answer.”
Her voice broke on his name.
I had heard people say Caspian Ashford’s name with fear, resentment, admiration, calculation. Cosima said it as if the syllables had been put somewhere inside her years ago and had never stopped hurting.
Oh.
The room seemed to shift around that small, terrible understanding.
“You love him,” I said.
She didn’t flinch.
I almost wished she had.
“Yes. I do.”
The words were plain enough to hurt both of us.
“Does he know?”
