Then I swing the tray.
It hits her across the side and she goes down hard and I step over her, and I feel terrible about it and I tell her so.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry?—"
She groans and I spot the key on the chain at her waist and I unhook it and she finds her voice and starts to scream and I pull the door shut behind me and turn the key and I am in the corridor.
No guards. I stare at the empty hallway for half a second and then I run.
The corridor branches and I take the wider one because wider means more used, which means closer to an exit and I push through a door and find another corridor and I am moving fast now, looking for stairs, for signage, for anything that suggests a way out and I come around a corner and I hit something and I stagger backward.
He looks down at me. He is wearing a white shirt, half open at the collar, and dark trousers. No jacket for once.
Those green eyes find my face with an expression that is not surprise because I suspect very little surprises him and it is not anger yet but is heading there.
I scramble to my feet.
His hand closes around my arm and he swings me up and over his shoulder like I weigh nothing, which I suppose to him I might, and I kick and I hit and I tell him to let me go, I tell him multiple times at volume, and he carries me back down the corridor without a word and through the door and into the room where the maid is still on the floor crying and he sets me down on the bed.
He looks at the maid. "Out," he tells her. "You're done here. Don't come back!"
She scrambles up and runs.
"Why was she fired? She didn't do anything, I attacked her, that's not fair?—"
"I'd worry less about the maid," he replies, and his voice drops, "and considerably more about yourself."
He takes one step toward the bed.
"Best believe," he murmurs, "there will be a punishment for this."
The word lands somewhere at the base of my spine. My eyes drop without permission to the open collar of his shirt, the triangle of skin below his throat, and I pull them back up and swallow.
He leans forward, one hand on the edge of the bed, bringing his face closer to mine.
"If you had made it past that corridor," he says, "ten men were waiting." He pauses. "Do you want to die, princess?"
I stare at him.
He means it. That is the thing about him I am still adjusting to, the complete absence of theatre when he says something like that. It isn't a threat designed to frighten me. It's information.
I breathe.
I need to think, brute force is not going to work, the maid is evidence of that, the corridor is evidence of that, and the ten men I apparently nearly walked into are evidence of that. He is not going to be moved by my anger.
But he is a man.
I look down at my hands. "I'm sorry. I was just — I haven't been alone this long before. I got scared."
I look up at him through my lashes.
He is watching me with those still, pale eyes and I can't read him, I have not once been able to read him, but he hasn't moved away.
I lean forward slightly and reach out and find his hand where it rests on the bed and I run my thumb across his knuckles slowly, and I look up and I hold his gaze and I ask, quietly, "Could I just — spend a little time with you?"
The silence stretches.
I feel his eyes on me, moving over my face with that systematic attention, and my heart is going very fast and I keep my expression soft and I keep stroking his hand and I tell myself he is just a man, just a man, I can do this, I can find a way through him if I can just?—
