Page 35

For one treacherous second, I forgot entirely why he had come. Then I remembered I was Robin of Locksley and not some Omega losing her wits because an attractive Alpha had wandered into her forest before breakfast.

I raised the arrow another inch. "Maybe you're close to dying."

"Perhaps."

His gaze dipped to my mouth before returning to my eyes. "But I don't think that's what you're worried about."

My heart kicked and I hated him for it. I was becoming increasingly concerned that I didn’t hate him nearly enough.

"You said you'd take the seal back," I reminded him. "You said tomorrow."

"This isn't about the seal."

"Then what is it about?"

His amusement disappeared. "Fitzwalter knows someone has been looking into your father's conviction."

Everything in me went very quiet.

"Someone," I said.

"Me."

I did not lower the bow. "And why would the Sheriff of Nottingham suddenly care about my father?"

"Because he was innocent."

The forest kept making its ordinary morning noises, and I stood there with my fingers on the string and my heart going like a bird against a window. I couldn’t get a breath past the thing lodged in my throat.

Six years.

Six years of being the traitor's daughter, of hearing it in market squares and from the mouths of men who had eaten at my father's table. Now here was the Crown's own sheriff saying the opposite in my forest at dawn with no witnesses.

"Don't," I said.

He frowned. "Don't what?"

"Don't use my father to get close to me." My voice came out wrong, thinner than I wanted it, and I hated that he heard it. "You want the Ghost. Fine. Chase me, trap me, hang me if you ever manage it. But you do not walk into Sherwood and use him for bait."

"I'm not."

"Then prove it."

So…he did…

He gave it to me pretty plainly. The Crown's case hadrested on a meeting at a manor near Lincoln on the night of the eleventh of October. That a garrison dispatched from the Mansfield watch commander placed my father fifty miles from Lincoln on that same night, standing in the flooded Maun pulling families out of two hamlets with his own tenants and his own horses. Six soldiers named in the dispatch as witnesses. And on the reverse of it, a clerk's notation recording that the document had been withdrawn from the trial materials by the authority of Lord Edmund Fitzwalter.

I knew about the flood. That was the worst part. I’d been sixteen years old and furious at being left behind. My father had come home three days later gray with exhaustion and let me fall asleep against his shoulder by the fire.

I’d wanted to believe him so badly that my hands shook with it.

Which is precisely why I didn't.

"That's a very good story," I said.

"It's a record."

"Then show me."