Page 3 of The False Vow

Noé pushed his mask higher on his forehead. In the darkness, his skin was as bloodless as a spirit’s—so white, it nearly glowed.

“I cannot guess at anything you might do, Tamerlane,” he answered. “You are a woman of impossible mystery.”

He smirked when he’d finished speaking. Somehow, his response was more instigative than another insult would have been—as if he’d deliberately fashioned a reply he’d known would please me, just to watch me squirm.

It undid the last of my patience. Rising, I slipped my reticule from where I’d strung it around my wrist and dropped it roughly in his lap.

“Watch this, will you?” I hissed, and departed the box.

Chapter Two

The Isle d’Eylau’s famous masked opera house was all red—thick ruby carpet underfoot, flocked scarlet walls with gold molding at my sides—so that passing into it was like entering the column of an open throat. Beyond our box, the corridor was set on a curve, circling the building. On my right-hand side, a pair of staircases bracketed a compact bar; on my left, the hallway featured only a row of identical doors, each of which accessed a private box like the one where Noé and I were seated.

I moved past them without hesitating. When I caught sight of the side passage which branched toward the powder room, I avoided it, continuing straight ahead until, finally, I paused in front of a plain crimson door.

From a distance, it appeared the same as the ones which neighbored it. As I approached it, though, certain flaws revealed themselves. The door’s glossy red paint had chipped, and its doorknob was tarnished, rather than the gleaming gold of its neighbors. To the door’s side, a small rectangular plaque announced its identity in rusting gilded lettering: The Emilie Suite.

According to the information I’d been sent, this entrance had once accessed the private box of the wealthy Emilie Macron before she died, an unwed spinster, several years ago. Through some obscure clause in her will, it had not been maintained since her passing, though for my purposes that mattered little.

All that mattered was that it was empty.

Stooping down, I fished in the bottom of my slipper, withdrawing a glowing circular object from beneath my heel. A coin, burning the clean, pure white of magesilk, and the source of the warmth which had speared me earlier. Tapping the metal piece three times, I quieted the enchantment, then stowed the newly dull bronze token back in my shoe.

Taking the doorknob in my hand, I gave it a testing rattle. Locked—just as I’d been told it would be. Good.

I summoned my Wit. My magic jerked eagerly up from its resting place behind my rib cage, stretching outward toward the door in front of me. When I turned the knob again, the lock clicked open, admitting me into the space beyond.

It was pitch-dark, and as silent as a tomb. Unlike the box I’d been seated in, the wall lamps here were unilluminated—not dimmed for the performance but completely burned out—and without their reassuring glow, I could see nothing. The stage and the audience surrounding it were nonexistent; I assumed drapes had been drawn over the box’s opening, closing it in on itself like a clamshell.

I stepped forward just as a pair of arms wrapped around my waist and drew me into the murk.

—

I recognized him by his touch, the same way I’d guessed at his identity from the moment he’d glanced at me in the opera-house lobby, even with his face hidden behind his disguise. It was more than simple familiarity. Each time I encountered him, I was conscious of a connection—a twinning—the likes of which I had yet to experience with anyone else. It was as if we were a pair of matched cards—as if I were designed especially to be played after him.

I bunched my hands in the folds of his suit. “Eliot.”

He caught me, the door to the abandoned box clicking shut behind us. Without the light from the hallway to illuminate it, the compartment fell back into darkness, the shift as rapid as a creature scuttling deeper into its warren. Swearing softly, Eliot reached into his pocket, finding his own coin and tapping it thrice before tossing it on the floor beside us. On cue, I felt the bit of metal wedged beneath my foot flare with heat as its sibling lit up, responding to its summons.

The token had been one of the only pieces of Eliot I’d dared to keep after the final night of the Vainglory, when I’d taken Noé’s hand and, with it, shattered the delicate foundation of the relationship Eliot and I had begun to build. I hadn’t been sure, when I’d first called for him a week or so following the competition’s end, whether he would answer at all. And yet, two days later, a reply had appeared, tucked into my laundry in such a way that I knew he must have been forced to pay an Alaire maid handsomely to ensure its delivery. An invitation to a private salon to be held at the city town house of the Moreau Weaver family the following evening, a hand-inked message dashed on the back of it: B&N confirmed to attend. Carry your coin. I will find you at midnight.

That meeting had been the start. Since then, we had arranged several more like it—always discreet, always spontaneous, sprouting like weeds in the cracks of time we could find. We relied on our coins to signal to one another when we wished to convene, much as we had during the Vainglory, when we’d met to pass off our findings about his sister’s death.

The method was the same. It was everything else—all other pieces of our partnership—which was different.

I was drawn out of my thoughts as, our source of light secured, Eliot shifted, his free hand rising to cup my chin. The cat-faced mask he’d been wearing in the audience was gone—I knew not what he’d done with it—and his bare features were lit by the coin at his feet. It made his expression appear ominous, his hazel eyes hooded, his cheeks as hollow as a skull’s.

His thumb traced the divot below my lower lip. “Were you seen?”

He spoke quietly, as if conscious of being overhead. In response, I leaned into his touch. “No.”

Eliot seemed unconvinced by my reply. His jaw ticked, the brush of his finger against my mouth becoming stiffer, less intimate. “Are you certain?” he pressed. “I thought I felt Noé’s attention on me while I was sitting in the box earlier. If he’s guessed at why I’ve come—”

“He has guessed at nothing besides what might be lying at the bottom of his wineglass,” I interrupted. Schooling myself, I lifted my own hand to tug gently at a curl above his ear. “You know I do not take risks.”

He remained silent, his gaze tracking mine. Relief coursed through me as, a moment later, Eliot nodded. “I do.”

Abruptly, he moved closer. Driven by impulse, I lifted onto my toes—but rather than the kiss I’d anticipated, Eliot’s fingers reached for my vixen mask, outlining its lacy edge. Unlike his, my disguise wrapped nearly all the way round my head, attached to a beaded red caul which had been hooked onto its band. Rubies glinted from where they’d been stitched into the delicate netting, my brown hair tucked away neatly beneath.