The Wish Granter (Ravenspire #2)(33)

Ari judged the remaining paces between herself and the stranger and prayed she wouldn’t miss.

“You should’ve enjoyed your last nine years of freedom so that you would never have to see my face.” The man raised the knife.

Ari lunged forward, closed the distance between them, and swung the cudgel at the stranger’s head like she was hammering a nail.

The weapon hit the man with a terrible wet crunch. He dropped to the ground and lay motionless.

Thad fell back, moaning in pain, and Ari raised the cudgel, her body trembling as she waited to see if the man would get up and threaten her brother again.

“Princess!”

She looked up the path, and then Sebastian was there.

“He was hurting my brother.” Ari’s voice shook, and her teeth began to chatter uncontrollably as the man lay silent and still, blood pouring from his head to form a viscous ring around him. “I had to stop him.”

Sebastian crouched beside the man and pressed two fingers against his neck. “You can put the weapon down, Princess. He’s dead.”

“Oh, stars.” Ari dropped the weapon and backed away from the body.

Carefully, Sebastian rolled the man onto his back, and then went still.

“You were right, Princess. This is Daan, Teague’s collector. His top employee.” His voice was hard. “If Teague finds out his collector died here, you’ll be in more trouble than you can possibly imagine.”





FOURTEEN


SEBASTIAN’S MIND RACED as he stared at the dead body of Alistair Teague’s collector. Footsteps crashed through the garden, and he whirled, fists raised, but it was only Cleo, a sack of cookies in her hands.

“Cleo!” The princess stumbled toward her friend. “What are you doing here? Never mind, don’t answer that. Just go.”

“I was bringing a snack to the new boy who works in the stables and I heard a commotion.” Cleo clutched the cookies to her chest, her eyes wide as she stared at the king, still doubled over on the ground, at Ajax with blood spreading across his uniform, and finally at the body of Teague’s collector.

“Is he—”

“Yes,” Sebastian said quietly.

“Cleo, go inside.” The princess’s voice shook.

“You clearly need help, so stop ordering me to leave,” Cleo said, though her voice was just as shaky as the princess’s. “Should we call the palace guard?”

“No,” the king said, crawling to Ajax and pressing his hands against the knife wound in the man’s side. “No guards.”

“We keep this to ourselves,” Sebastian said as he calculated the odds of somehow handling this without Teague learning the truth.

If Teague discovered that the princess had killed his most valuable employee, he’d make her pay for it, and she probably wouldn’t survive. And, of course, Teague would know that his man had been at the palace. His collector didn’t visit anyone unless he’d been sent.

Which meant Teague was expecting Daan to return with an update on his conversation with the king. How long did Sebastian have to protect the princess from the wrath of the most dangerous man in Súndraille?

He looked up. The moon was halfway between the eastern horizon and the midpoint in the sky.

Still early evening. Teague had no way of knowing how long it would take Daan to find a way to confront the king. Surely that bought Sebastian at least until midnight, if not longer.

He’d have to use the time to get the body as far from the palace as possible.

“We have to hide the body,” the princess said as if she could read his mind.

Sebastian met her gaze. Her eyes were wide with the residue of panic and she still trembled with shock, but she wore the tiny frown she got when she was thinking hard.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But not here. Not on the palace grounds. Teague has to think his man delivered his message and left without coming to harm.”

“We could toss him into the sea,” Cleo said. “Just drag him to the south field. It ends in a cliff.”

“If we dump him off the palace cliffs, the body could wash ashore on our beach.” The princess rubbed her arms as if she thought she’d never get warm. “But first, Thad and his guard need medical attention.”

“There are places in the deserts of Akram where he’d never be found,” Ajax said. His left eye was swelling shut, and his speech was slurred.

Sebastian considered his suggestion.

“If we do that, his boss will assume that the last place he was seen was the palace,” the princess said as she stepped closer to Sebastian and looked down at the sprawled figure of the collector. She made a noise of distress in the back of her throat and tipped her head back to drag in a deep breath.

“He can assume all he wants. That’s not the same as proof,” Cleo said as she joined the king to help Ajax up off the ground. The king swayed and breathed in sharp little coughs. Both of them needed the palace physician. Quickly.

“Alistair Teague doesn’t need proof to decide he’s justified in punishing the princess for killing his collector.” Sebastian picked up the fallen cudgel, strapped it to his chest, and tried to put his body between the princess and the sight of the man with the crushed skull lying silently on the dirt.

How was the king mixed up with Alistair Teague? The only kind of business anyone did with Teague was criminal—buying apodrasi, selling it, smuggling stolen goods across kingdom borders, or hurting those foolish enough to try to cheat Teague out of what he was owed.