“Come back to me, Richard.”
I love you, he wanted to tell her. Don’t let me go.
“Come back.”
He pushed away. The darkness broke. The torn shreds of its tentacles burned into his skin, long black marks. He knew they would be there forever. He kicked his legs and swam into the light.
His eyes opened, and he saw Charlotte leaning over him, her eyes luminescent. She had saved him. He wanted to tell her, but pain claimed his mouth, pooling in his jawbone.
She took his hand and kissed his fingers. He realized that the restraints were gone.
Dekart leaned against the cart with instruments. He looked ill.
Richard fought through the pain. “How did it go?”
“My finest work,” the surgeon said. He pushed from the cart and bowed to Charlotte. “It was an honor.”
“For me as well,” she told him.
Dekart turned on his foot and left the room.
Charlotte bent over him. He saw tears in her eyes and opened his mouth. She put her fingertips on his lips.
“Be quiet,” she whispered, and kissed him. He tasted tears and desperation on her lips. She held on to him for a long moment and let go, pulling on her composure like a mask. He almost wished she hadn’t.
“Would you like a mirror?” Charlotte asked.
“Yes.”
She nodded at the hand he was gripping. “You have to let me go.”
“No.”
She smiled back at him and sat in a chair. Ten minutes later, he finally decided she wouldn’t dissolve into nothing and released her hand. She brought a mirror. A strange man looked back at him. He could still see the old shadows of himself. His eyes were the same. Possibly his eyebrows, and even his forehead. The rest belonged to Casside.
“It’s not me,” he said.
“That’s what you wanted,” Charlotte reminded him.
“Does it bother you?”
“Your new face?”
He nodded.
She sighed. “It bothers me that you risked your life for it. But I don’t care whose face you’re wearing, Richard.”
He realized he loved her, painfully, intensely, with the desperation of a dying man eager for every last moment of life.
TWELVE
WARM lips touched her mouth.
Charlotte opened her eyes. She had fallen asleep on the couch next to the fire pit. The marathon healing session had taken its toll. Fatigue blanketed her body. She had the absurd notion that it covered her like a blanket, draining her life force with each breath she took.
Richard was looking at her. She reached over and touched his new face, probing for any sign of infection. He was clean.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
Dekart was truly an artist with the knife. What they had accomplished together was nothing short of a miracle. Richard’s face matched Casside’s with uncanny precision, but where the other noble’s eyes were guarded, Richard’s intelligence shone through, giving the blueblood’s features a dangerous air. Casside himself looked morose and melancholy, his expression pessimistic. Illuminated by Richard’s intellect and will, that same face became fierce—not just handsome, but masculine and strong, the face of a warrior and a leader. It was a pity Casside had done so little with the gifts nature had given him.
“You must try to look less like yourself,” she told him, caressing Richard’s cheek with her fingertips. He was still hers, no matter whose face he wore.
He caught her fingers and kissed them. “When the time comes, I will. Do you feel up to walking?”
“Depends on how far.”
“To the back door. I have someone I would like you to meet.”
“I think I can do that.”
Charlotte pushed off the couch and followed him to the back, past the table filled with precisely organized stacks of paper and crystals. Days of peering over the documents had paid off. They knew the Five, as they had come to call the slaver bluebloods, better than they knew themselves, and they had formed the plan. Richard’s face was the first part of it. Her part involved befriending Lady Ermine. She would do it with pleasure, Charlotte reflected. She would become her best friend and confidante; all for that moment when their scheme came to its conclusion, and she could snuff her out like the flame of a foul candle.
“Once I become Casside, I can’t watch over you.” Richard paused at the back door and took an orange from the fruit dish on the kitchen counter.“I’m hardly helpless,” she told him.
“Yes, but you can’t use your magic in public, or you’ll risk an arrest. And you don’t have a fighter’s reflexes.”
Charlotte didn’t argue with him. He was right. She could easily kill on a massive scale, but an average fighter would cut her down. Her reaction time wasn’t honed enough. Her trek through the island had demonstrated that.
“A bodyguard would be a welcome addition,” he said.
“I can’t be a part of blueblood society with a bodyguard,” she told him. “It isn’t customary and more importantly, the presence of a trained fighter among them would set the Five on edge, including Brennan.”
“Not this one.” Richard opened the door.
Sophie stood on the lawn. She wore loose blue pants and a white shirt. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face into a neat ponytail. A sword in a sheath hung from her hip.
“No,” Charlotte said.
Richard threw the orange at Sophie. The girl moved, too fast, her strike a blur. The four pieces of the fruit fell onto the grass. Sophie flicked the juice off her blade.
“No,” Charlotte repeated.
“Just as a precaution,” he said. “It’s typical for you to have a companion. Why not her?”
“Because we’re playing a dangerous game, and I don’t want her to get hurt.”
Sophie didn’t flinch. Her face remained placid, but hurt pulsed in her eyes. She was used to being rejected, Charlotte realized.
“Why don’t the two of you discuss this?” Richard said, and stepped into the house.
Oh great.
The child on the lawn looked at her with an almost canine expectation, like Sophie was some half-starved puppy and Charlotte held a steak in her hand. Charlotte stepped down onto the grass, fighting the slow burn of her aching muscles. “Shall we walk?”
* * *
RICHARD watched Charlotte and Sophie walk away into the forest. The dog with no name trotted after them.
The faint sound of steps came from behind him. He recognized that walk.
Kaldar came to stand next to him, his face thoughtful. “Very pretty, both of them. The two women you care about most.” There was a slight hint of disapproval in his tone.
“I suppose you came by to inform me I’m making yet another grave mistake.”
“No.” Kaldar grimaced. “Yes.”
Richard sighed and motioned to him with his hand.
“I checked on her,” he said. “Do you know who the first ten are?”
“The first ten blueblood families who arrived in Adrianglia.” The cream of the crop.
“They took Charlotte from her family when she was seven and brought her to Ganer College, where she met Lady Augustine al Ran, a direct descendant of the Ran family, who just happen to be one of the first ten. The Lady adopted her.”
“Mhm.”
“Richard, you’re not listening. She formally adopted her. Charlotte’s full name is Charlotte de Ney al-te Ran. If the king hosts a dinner, she can sit at the first table, right next to the royal family.”
Richard turned to him.
“They didn’t publicize the adoption, probably to give Charlotte a fair chance at a normal life. It isn’t even on her marriage license—she signed it as de Ney. I don’t think that moron she married ever knew. But it is in her Mirror file. Do you have any idea how many men would kill for a chance to marry into a first-ten family?”
He had a pretty good idea. “Your point?”
“Princesses don’t marry swineherds in the real world,” Kaldar said. “When people hear her name, they stand up. You’re an Edger, a swamp rat.”
“I remember,” Richard said. “But thank you for reminding me.”
Kaldar ground his teeth. “Let me remind you of something else: when Marissa left, you drank for two months straight, then tried to drown yourself.”
“For the last bloody time, I didn’t try to drown myself. I was drunk and out of wine, and I walked out onto the pier because I remembered I had left a bottle in the boat.” And then he’d slipped and discovered that swimming while drunk was a lot more complicated than it seemed. He’d made it to shore and passed out on the bank from exhaustion, where Kaldar had found him. For some reason, everyone in the family insisted it was a suicide attempt, and nothing he said could convince them otherwise.
“You’re the only brother I’ve got,” Kaldar said. “If you follow through with this plan of yours, she will enter society without you. I’m not faulting your plan—you can’t keep her locked up, and she would have to dip her toe into those waters sooner or later. The reality is, she’s unattached, beautiful, and has the kind of name that will turn every head. The moment she’s announced, they will start circling around her like sharks. These are people who have never in their lives had to worry about where their next meal was coming from. They can rattle off ten generations worth of ancestors at the drop of a hat. They’re a different breed. Someone young, handsome, with the right pedigree and the right amount of money might catch her eye.”
“You are really worried about me.”
A muscle jerked in Kaldar’s face. “When Marissa left, you were still young. A part of you knew you still had your whole life to live. You’re older now, and you’ve lost your head over her. You don’t fall for women often, but when you do, it’s all or nothing.”
“Since when did you become an expert on my love life?”
Kaldar waved his arm around. “It’s obvious. You watch her. You try to make her laugh. If she leaves you, it might break you, and I might not be here to hold your head above the water. I just want you to consider the possibility now, so it doesn’t shock you when it comes.”