The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(34)

She felt like she was both her body and her shadow, like she was her own ghost.

She had done all this before. Had opened those doors, had crossed these twin gardens.

His sunroom was dark.

She opened its door anyway. Moved past the potted plants. Lamp lifted, she found the door to his suite. The hallway. Her footfalls were silent now, treading plush carpet. A set of silent rooms. The furnishings masculine in a way that didn’t look like what he would have chosen, yet suited him. Or what she knew of him.

Which was little.

The lamp lowered. She wasn’t sure what she was doing. Maybe she wanted to frighten him awake, to rip him out of sleep. Make him feel the way she’d felt when she’d woken minutes ago. She imagined screaming into his sleeping ear.

Or what if she woke him a different way? She seemed to see herself as if looking at a painting of a girl from a tale, kidnapped by a creature who showed his true form only at night. The girl held the lamp over the bed. Crept closer. A drop of hot oil fell to his bare shoulder. He woke.

Maybe Kestrel had come for answers. He had them . . . or pretended that he did.

Maybe this was a very bad idea.

She entered the room that she knew must be his bedroom.

It was empty. The bed was large and neatly made.

The windows, she realized now, were all shut. The air was stale. No one had been in this suite for days.

Her arm was tired. Her whole body was. She set down the lamp, the keys.

She touched the pillow. It was just a pillow. She touched the blanket. A blanket. The bed: a bed. Nothing more and nothing less than the thing she needed now. She sank into the bed. She told herself that she didn’t care what it meant that she did this.

She lay on her stomach because she no longer slept on her back. She pressed her face into the pillow. His scent was there. She was stupid to have come, yet didn’t have the strength to leave.

The ghost of him between the sheets. The shadow of her old self curled into the shadow of him.

Kestrel woke at dawn because she’d always woken at dawn in the prison. She saw where she was. She felt flat. The light was pink and pretty. Insulting.

It was habit, she told herself. That’s why she’d come here last night. There’d been no mystery, no tangle of reasons to untangle. It was simple. She’d gotten used to sleeping next to him on the tundra. She had been cold and he had been warm. Habits die hard. That was all.

But she felt humiliated when she slipped from his bed. This time, she did remember what she had dreamed.

She straightened the sheets and made every thing as it had been. She made sure there was no trace of her presence when she left.

“So you’re his sister,” Kestrel said, some days later.

Sarsine had coaxed her into her suite’s sunroom. Kestrel’s skin looked amber in the light. As the heat sank in, she realized that she wasn’t sore anymore, except in the worst places. She wore the dagger. It rested against her thigh.

“No.” Sarsine laughed. “Nor his lover.”

Kestrel frowned, uneasy. She didn’t understand the laugh or Sarsine’s quick leap to something that hadn’t even been suggested.

“It’s what you asked when I first met you,” Sarsine explained. She blew a cooling ripple into her tea. “ ‘ Sister, or lover?’ I’m his cousin.”

“Where is he?”

Sarsine made no reply—not, Kestrel thought, because she had no intention of giving one, but because she was finding her words, and in that pause Kestrel remembered his empty suite and no longer wanted to know the answer to her question. She shoved a new one into its place. “Why not his lover?”

Sarsine choked on her tea.

“Cousins sometimes marry,” Kestrel said.

“Arin? Gods, no.” She was still coughing.

Kestrel didn’t like her own impulse to keep opening and closing and opening again the subject of him.

“I love him,” Sarsine said, “but not like that. I was an orphan. My mother’s brother took me into his home. Arin’s parents were kind to me. His sister wasn’t. And Arin . . .” She shook droplets of spilled tea from her fingers, then stopped, thinking. “As a child, he was a little world unto himself. A reader. A dreamer. Skinny thing. Whenever I managed to convince him to come out of doors, he’d squint like he’d never seen the sun. But he’d come out to please me.

“I was in the countryside with my nurse when the Valorians conquered this city. My parents had an estate south of here. It was thought that I’d want to choose some of my things to be brought here before the country house was closed. The Valorian general—your father—attacked the city first. The countryside after. My nurse and I had tried to close up my parents’ house and hide inside. The shutters were ripped open.

“I don’t know what became of my nurse. I never saw her again. I was forced to work on my family farm. There’s work even a ten-year-old can do. Then I was sold to another country estate. It hurt to leave, though it had hurt to stay.

“I could make myself do what was wanted. Not everyone can. Arin couldn’t. Never for very long. But I wasn’t tied to a whipping post. I was good and sweet and I did things that maybe, in the end, were worse than punishment. One of my masters decided, eventually, to bring me to the city.

“Before the war, on my last day before I left this house to drive into the countryside with my nurse, Arin gave me a flower he’d pressed. It was pink, spread in a fan. I put it in a locket. I got into the carriage. Later, I lost the locket, lost the flower. But I remember it.”