Page 89 of Ruling the Green

“You mean… aside from all four of us?”

That got a little laugh out of him.

“Touché.” He leaned down, pressing his forehead to mine. “I like how quickly you moved there,” he told me. “There’s a little dark in this princess.”

My mind wandered to the poison steeping under the bed.

He had no idea.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Jet

“What are you doing up here?” I asked when Vishen alerted me that Tove was making his way up the stairs to my quarters.

My father’s advisor was dressed and groomed, despite dawn not even breaking yet.

Tove’s proud jaw lifted, watching me with those eyes I swore always seemed to see more than I was willingly showing him.

“Your father wishes to speak to you.”

“It can’t be later than four in the morning,” I said. “You can’t be telling me that he didn’t sleep.”

Especially on the night before an exhausting, day-long event like the tournament. He was unstable enough when he’d gotten a full night of rest. There was no way he could keep his mad ramblings to himself all day. With a giant audience watching him.

Fuck.

Allowing the people to find out about him was certainly not part of the plan. It wasn’t in Tove’s best interest either. So why the hell had he allowed it to happen?

I didn’t pretend to understand exactly what happened between the two men behind closed doors. A lot of coddling, I imagined, since there was no reasoning with him when he got in one of his moods. The more you agreed with Cass, the calmer he got. Not to the point of rationality, but enough that he wasn’t bellowing out his murderous plans or trying to escape his quarters to tell others to set his plans into action.

I guess some part of me assumed that Tove would occasionally use a sleeping tonic on my father when his mania kept him awake in the late hours of the night, since we both knew he was at his sharpest early in the day after a full night of sleep.

Was this Tove showing his hand? Was he plotting against Cass now, too? Against me? Did he want the throne for himself? Or was he helping someone else?

What other explanation could there be for being so careless on a day that was so important?

Or was Cass simply progressing past any of our known methods of subduing him? Were they no longer working?

No matter what the answer was, it wasn’t good for us.

Tove exhaled hard.

“I am not your father’s keeper.”

He was, though. He’d worked hard to make sure of that.

“Tell Nira,” I told Vishen, who rushed off to wake up the other guard to keep an eye on a vulnerable Serin.

Then the two of us followed my father’s advisor down the steps, then clear across the palace to my father’s quarters. Tove also kept a room there, though he didn’t have the same kind of excuse I did to keep Vishen and Nira close. I wasn’t even exactly sure when Tove moved in from the staff quarters. A year? Longer? I wasn’t always paying as close attention as I had been lately. Back when I thought my father was just being vengeful, not losing his damned mind. How much had slipped by me before I realized?

No.

It wasn’t time for that shit.

We were past that.

We were in the end stage of planning and closing in on execution.