Page 6

I’d prepared for this. Prepared for her. Memorized the files.

But the files only had words.

They had her height and her reach, her scores, and her accomplishments. They had a physician’s note about a wrist she broke at fourteen during a training incident.

They had a sketch of her face. The sketch was useless. It showed the shape of a face but nothing about the person behind it.

Ruby looked too young and too small to be an assassin. She stood a foot shorter than me, but average height for a human woman. She was twenty-four, trained to be a blade for eighteen years. She had light freckles across her nose and over her cheekbones. Her chestnut hair was braided at one side of her face, mostly under her red wool cloak, but I could see the glimmer of red reflecting in the sunlight.

Her eyes were the gray of a rainstorm, wide and assessing. And completely unlike the others.

I’ve been hunted by the Order for twelve years. I’ve been looked at by a great many people who wanted me dead. Every one of them had some emotion burning in their expression. Appetite, or fear, or a bright little thrill about killing a wolf at the Crown’s hand.

She had none of that. No, in her eyes was a question.

A question I had answers to.

But with her arrival came many more questions for me, which I didn’t have the slightest clue how to answer.

My curiosity must have reflected her own.

She looked cold, exhausted. An urge to wrap her in my arms and warm her up rose, and I struggled to ignore it.

I put my hands where she could see them and stepped back out of the doorway. Then I invited her inside, unsure if she’d accept.

She came in.

Her scent was more pronounced inside with the door closed, which made everything about this already uncertain, challenging encounter with my would-be assassin even more difficult.

To give myself something to do, and give us each a moment to regroup, I walked over to the kettle. She could use a cup of hot tea to warm up after days on her feet in the cold. I could use distance from her scent, despite the near-overwhelming urge to return to her and inhale it more deeply.

I sniffed the mint with its strong fragrance. We’d harvested it for tea near the riverbank, where it grew wild in abundance. One of the things that flourished in our lands, without being destroyed by the Order.

Ruby took the chair against the wall. She laid her blade on the table where I could see it. She either considered it a courtesy or a threat, probably still gauging which.

Then I did the cruelest thing I could have done to her.

I spoke in her grandmother’s voice.

I’d learned Elisabeth Mays’s voice at Wetherel twelve years ago, standing in a crowd with my hood up, listening to a small gray woman read a sentence out over what was left of my father after the silver had impaired him. She has a lovely voice that completely belies her cruel nature. It goes up at the end of a sentence as if she’s telling you something pleasant.

The voice of a cold-blooded murderer. One who’d trained her granddaughter to be her blade.

“Where’s my grandmother?” Ruby jumped up from the chair with the knife in her grip. “What did you do to her?”

I didn’t flinch. I knew the voice would affect her, but this was the first time she’d shown a crack in her resolve. While she pointed the blade at me, I tracked her movements. “We haven’t touched her.” I let out a low snort.

“What?” she demanded in an exasperated tone.

“You needn’t worry about your grandmother. She takes damn good care of herself.” I shook my head and muttered, “A shame she doesn’t do the same for you.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not at all true,” she sputtered.

“Is it not?” I prodded.

“She’s family. The only one I have. She ensured I was housed and fed. Trained me herself.”

“And yet…”