Page 130 of Beds and Blades

The door was not locked.

I should have registered both of those things before I opened it.

***

They had bound him to the council chair, the massive seat at the head of the table built to project authority and now repurposed as a restraint.

His wrists were tied to the chair’s armrests, and a short length of rope bound his ankles together. A gag had been pulled tight across his mouth.

His armor was gone. His shirt had been cut open.

What remained beneath it was the record of hours spent hurting him.

Shallow cuts crossed his arms and chest in precise lines, each one placed to cause pain without weakening him beyond use. Between them, darker marks mottled his skin. Burns. Blistered at the edges, red and raw where heat had been pressed against him and withdrawn before it could do permanent damage.

Something inside me tore open.

For one terrible second, I could not breathe. The room narrowed to the blood on his skin and the ropes around his wrists. To every mark they had put on him while I was somewhere else, unable to reach him.

Grief struck first. Rage followed so quickly it burned the grief clean.

I wanted every person responsible for this dead. Fucking dead.

But Skip was still alive. That mattered more.

I forced air into my lungs and made myself look at him instead of what they had done to him.

His face was pale. His eyes were not. They found mine the instant I entered.

Gaius moved left, sweeping the room with his hook raised. Flavia slipped right, checking the shadows behind the council table and the narrow passage beside the hearth.

Nothing moved.

I crossed half the room before the warning reached me.

The warning did not arrive through the bond. It arrived through Skip’s eyes.

He was not relieved. He was trying to stop me.

Gaius glanced toward the rafters. Flavia turned toward the door we had just entered, sword coming free in one smooth motion.

The room was too still. The entrance had been too easy.

The ropes around Skip’s wrists were too visible. The chair had been placed too perfectly in the center of the room.

A display. A lure.

I stopped.

A voice came from the shadows at the back of the hall. Quiet. Almost contemplative.

“The one with the red hair.”

The words carried through the silence as if the room itself had been waiting for them.

“Morvanna described her,” it continued. “The red hair. The ring that glows.”

Two figures stepped into the light.