Chapter 9

The Girl With the Tray

She saw Mira three days later, carrying a stack of linens down the servants’ corridor, and it hit her so hard that she actually had to stop walking for a second, one hand against the wall.

She knew that face. Knew it in a way that had nothing to do with the last few weeks of careful watching and everything to do with a single terrible night that hadn’t happened yet, wouldn’t happen for years still, except in her own head where it had already happened twice now, once for real and once every night since in her sleep. Young, dark-haired, eyes that stayed fixed on the floor a beat too long whenever anyone important walked past. The Omega who’d carried a single glass of water to a coronation that hadn’t come yet, set it down like it weighed more than it should have, and vanished back into the crowd before Sera could even say thank you properly.

Mira didn’t recognize her, obviously. Had no idea yet what she’d eventually be asked to do, no idea her hands would someday carry the thing that ended Sera’s life. Right now she was just a girl doing laundry, glancing up at Sera with the same nervous half-bow every servant gave the Voss heiress, and hurrying on past like she didn’t want to be caught standing still too long.

Sera watched her go and felt something cold settle in low in her stomach.

Coerced. She was almost sure of it, thinking back on that night with new eyes  the girl’s voice, wrong, too fast, eyes stuck to the floor the whole time. Nobody hands somebody’s murder weapon to a woman they’ve genuinely got a grudge against and looks that miserable doing it. Somebody had made Mira do it. Whether that was Damian directly or somebody working for him, Sera didn’t know yet. But she knew, with a certainty that settled into her bones the second she saw that face again, that Mira wasn’t her enemy in any of this.

She just hadn’t figured out yet how to get close enough to prove it without giving away exactly how she knew.

She started small. Found reasons to be in the servants’ wing that didn’t look deliberate  asking after a dress that needed mending, complimenting the kitchen on something at dinner loud enough that word got back, small kindnesses that cost her nothing and meant everything to people who mostly went unnoticed by anyone above their station. It took the better part of two weeks before Mira stopped flinching quite so hard whenever Sera happened to be nearby.

Another week passed before Mira spoke first.

“You’re not what people say,” Mira said one afternoon, quiet, half hidden behind a laundry cart in a corridor nobody important ever walked through. “The others say you’re going to be one of those Lunas. Cold. Doesn’t notice the staff at all.”

“I’m trying not to be that.”

“Trying’s more than most bother with.” Mira glanced around before she said the next part, voice dropping lower. “Lady Cassandra’s been asking about you. What you’ve been doing. Who you’ve been talking to.”

Sera’s whole body went still. “Asking who?”

“Anybody who’ll answer, I think. Started about two weeks back.” Mira’s eyes flicked up to hers, something uncertain in them. “I didn’t tell her anything. Didn’t have anything to tell, mostly. But I thought you should know somebody’s watching you back.”

Two weeks. Right around when the King arrived. Right around when Sera had started actually paying attention instead of just drifting through her days the way she used to.

“Thank you,” Sera said, and meant every word of it. “That’s  that matters more than you know.”

Mira gave her a strange look at that, like she wasn’t used to being thanked for much of anything, and hurried off before either of them could linger too long in a hallway where lingering got noticed.

Sera stood there a while after, turning it over. Cassandra was watching her. Which meant Cassandra had noticed something was different, same as Damian had, same as apparently half the household had by now. Which meant whatever careful window she’d been operating in was closing faster than she’d hoped, and she needed to move quicker than her original plan had allowed for.

She found the King again two days later. Didn’t plan it, exactly  or at least that’s what she  told herself, she’d taken to walking the eastern gardens in the early evening, and somehow so had he, and after the third time their paths crossed there in the fading light neither of them bothered pretending it was purely an accident anymore.

“You look like a woman with something on her mind,” Kael said, falling into step beside her without asking, the way he’d apparently decided he was allowed to now.

“I always have something on my mind.”

“Fair enough.” He glanced sideways at her, that same considering look from the courtyard days ago. “Care to share which particular something, or is that above my clearance?”

She almost laughed. Almost told him everything, right there in the gardens with the light going gold and soft around them  told him about Mira, about Cassandra asking questions, about a life she’d already lived once and died in, about a man standing three feet away from her right now who wasn’t even supposed to still be breathing. The urge to just say it, all of it, hit her harder than she expected, like the truth had been sitting behind her teeth for weeks waiting for someone safe enough to hand it to.

She didn’t say any of it. Couldn’t. Not yet, maybe not ever, not without sounding like exactly the kind of madwoman that got locked away for her own good.

“Cassandra’s been asking questions about me,” she said instead, which was true, at least, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. “Around the staff. Wanting to know what I’ve been doing, who I’ve been talking to.”

Something in Kael’s expression sharpened immediately, all the easy warmth from a second ago gone in an instant, replaced by something a lot more like the man who’d questioned her across that desk. “Since when?”

“About two weeks. Around when you arrived, from what I can tell.”

“That’s not a coincidence.”

“No,” Sera agreed. “I don’t think it is.”

He was quiet a moment, working through something, and she watched him do it, watched the gears turning behind those dark eyes with a kind of fascination she probably shouldn’t have been indulging in the middle of an actual investigation. “Cassandra Lowell,” he said finally. “Your friend.”

“My friend,” Sera repeated, and heard how flat it came out, heard herself fail to hide it fast enough.

Kael caught it too. Of course he did. He seemed to catch everything, which was either the most useful thing about him or the most dangerous, and she genuinely couldn’t decide which yet.

“You don’t say that like you mean it,” he said carefully.

“I mean it less every day,” Sera admitted, before she could stop herself, and the second it was out of her mouth she knew she’d handed him something real. Not the whole truth. But a piece of it, sharp enough to cut, and she watched him take it seriously instead of brushing it off the way most people would have.

“Sera.” It was the first time he’d used her given name instead of Miss Voss, and something in the way he said it landed differently than it should have, low and careful, like he was handling something breakable. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

She looked at him a long moment in the fading gold light, every instinct in her screaming at her to say something safe, something that would end this conversation before it went anywhere she couldn’t control. And instead, for reasons she couldn’t have explained even to herself, she found herself saying something dangerously close to true.

“There’s a great deal I’m not telling you,” she said quietly. “Most of it I can’t. Not yet.”

Kael didn’t push. Didn’t demand an explanation the way Damian would have, didn’t get that tight, controlling look Damian got whenever she held anything back at all. He just watched her, steady, patient, like he had all the time in the world to wait for whatever she was ready to give him.

“Then I’ll wait,” he said simply. “But Sera  whatever you’re carrying, you don’t have to carry it alone. Not anymore.”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Didn’t trust her own voice enough to try one. They walked the rest of the garden path in a silence that felt heavier than it should have, both of them very aware of how close they’d just come to something neither of them was supposed to want.

She didn’t know, walking back inside as the last light went down, that Cassandra had been watching the two of them from an upstairs window the entire time  and that within the hour, Cassandra would be standing in Damian’s room, telling him something that was about to change everything.