The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(49)

His expression seemed to shrink and tighten. “I won’t.”

She hitched the basket into the crook of her arm. “I must go. The cook needs these supplies.” She was mortified to hear her voice break.

Arin’s face changed. “Kestrel, forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care.”

He shook his head, eyes not leaving hers. He was wholly altered now, quiet with surprise, alive with some new idea. He touched fingertips to her cheek, traced the path of a tear. “But you do,” he said wonderingly.

She broke away.

“Wait.”

She kept her back to him as she hurried, basket banging against her hip. “Don’t follow me.” She wiped her dirty wrist across her face, heard her breath escape in an ugly sound. “I will never speak with you again if you follow me.”

He didn’t.

Kestrel turned down the lamp and climbed into the high bed next to Sarsine. She could have slept on a divan in another room in the suite, but Sarsine wouldn’t hear of it, and Kestrel, though shy, had been touched.

Sarsine turned beneath the light blanket and studied Kestrel, her loose hair and lashes and brows very black against the white pillow. She was looking at her in a way difficult for Kestrel to name, though maybe only because her own emotions were such a mess. Sarsine looked too much like Arin.

Abruptly, as if changing a conversation, Kestrel said, “I used to share a bed with my friend Jess.”

“I remember her. You saved her life.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I was there. She’d been poisoned. She would have died if not for you.”

But all Kestrel could recall was Jess’s accusation of betrayal. She tried to explain to Sarsine, but didn’t have enough pieces of the story for it to make sense. Sarsine listened, then said, “Maybe you both changed too much. Or you’ll see her again one day, and things will be clearer between you. But I saw what you did for her. How you loved her.” Sarsine pulled the blanket up over Kestrel’s shoulder.

Protective. That was the word for Sarsine’s furrowed brow, her gentle mouth.

“Does something else trouble you?” she asked. “You can talk to me. I can keep a secret.”

Kestrel felt her eyes glitter. She started and stopped and finally said, “I don’t know how to say what’s wrong. I don’t know anything.”

“I’m your friend. That much, you can know for certain.” Sarsine touched Kestrel’s cheek, letting silence be a comfort. Then she blew out the light.

But Kestrel couldn’t sleep. Sarsine was an eerily quiet sleeper. Kestrel was used to Jess, and remembered how her friend would kick. Jess muttered as she dreamed. Kestrel missed her, remembered and missed her at the same time, which made her wonder if memory is always a kind of missing. The pillow was hot and damp beneath her cheek.

Kestrel imagined a melody. A tight rhythm, each note crisp and clean. She imagined how she’d play it. The control. Little bright pops of sound. She focused on that, because if she didn’t, she knew where her thoughts would go next . . . though as soon as she glimpsed what she’d have to avoid, it rose up within her in full being.

Jess’s rejection. It had been in Jess’s townhome in the Valorian capital. Fawn-colored curtains. Kestrel couldn’t remember all the exact words, but she knew now why the friendship had broken. She heard herself quietly saying the very things that Jess would never forgive, saw her former self choosing against her own people, her friends, her father.

He has done this to you, Jess had accused.

No one has made me change.

But you have.

Kestrel turned onto her other side. Arin had been in the queen’s city then. She knew that now.

She sat up, flung the sheet aside.

It was not natural. It wasn’t possible that she’d given up so much. And for what?

She was ready to believe in enchantments. How else could it be that her body still felt the pull of Arin, seemed to remember him all too clearly when her mind didn’t, and sent her to his empty bed, sealed her between his sheets, made her care where he went and what he risked and what he did and with whom?

She reached for her set of keys.





Chapter 17

She went swiftly through the dark house, her feet bare and noiseless on the tiles, the carpet, the steps. Up one flight, hand skimming the balustrade. At the landing, her palm spun around the newel. She went left. She knew Arin’s home well.

Knew it now, knew it then. She felt time layer. The present slipped over the past.

She’d never taken this path before. But she’d thought about it.

She flipped through the keys, found the right one, set it into the outermost door of Arin’s suite, and opened it.

She stepped into white light. It startled her, seemed hallucinatory, impossible, as if she’d dropped into a silver pond. But then she glanced up and saw a skylight above the entry way. The moon hung low and large. Though the oil lamp sconces were unlit, the hallway was almost as bright as day. At the other end of it: darkness.

A brief clinking sound came from the recesses of the suite.

She drew closer to the shadowed end of the hallway, passed through a dark receiving room. She barked her thigh against a console table and swore under her breath.