But he didn’t invade my space as unCavendish had. He didn’t touch me or leer at me. He was the consummate professional.
How unCavendish should’ve behaved.
Good gods, I should’ve known he wasn’t the real spymaster. The realisation crumpled inside me as I described the time he’d shoved me against a wall.
I could feel his fingers on my chest and shoulders. Every hair on my body strained to attention like it wanted to escape the mere memory of his touch.
My hands squeezed together until my knuckles ached.
I should’ve known.
Shifting in my chair, I tried to erase the ghost of his thigh pressing between mine. I swallowed back the bile in my throat, focusing on the words, on the simplicity of forming sentences, relaying every detail like I was watching it all from the outside.
It was only when I reached the end of that encounter and Bastian asked no questions that I pulled my gaze up from the surface of his desk.
His pen had fallen still in his white-knuckled hold, and a terrible stillness gripped him. His chest barely moved with his breath. Above his collar, the pulse leapt in his throat. Otherwise, he might’ve been a statue.
But his shadows?
They surged from his shoulders and thrashed over the desk, reaching for me.
I didn’t pull away. Maybe with how violently they moved, I should’ve.
Before they got halfway across the desk, Bastian’s jaw twitched, and the shadows crashed to a stop like waves hitting a cliff face. He sucked in a deep breath and they retreated, spilling into his lap and out of sight. His voice grated as he continued his questions.
I had no idea how long we sat there for. I spoke myself hoarse, and Bastian brought chilled water from a cabinet and offered me tea and coffee, but his questioning didn’t relent.
At last, I reached the wedding and the realisation that unCavendish was not who I thought and his death at Bastian’s double’s hands. I sank back in my chair when his questions stopped.
My head pounded and my heart weighed in me, but there was also a kind of relief, like in voicing it, I’d handed it all over to someone else.
I still felt foolish for not realising sooner. I still felt foolish for trusting Bastian.
But I had spilled all those horrible moments I’d kept secret and festering inside me. That poison, at least, was gone.
Bastian flicked back through his notes, a thoughtful frown between his eyebrows.
The moments after unCavendish’s last breaths continued in my mind. He hadn’t asked about those, since he’d been there, but it was like my brain had been set on a course and couldn’t stop.
“You’re not allowed to die yet. That thing is dead, but it was working for someone else.”
The movement. The pain. The strange wheeling of the world round and round and round.
“I still need you.”
At the time it had felt true, like he needed me. But now I knew better. This was what he needed—my information to help him trace unCavendish’s plot back to its source.
This was what I got for letting my feelings run away with me.
The worst thing was, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to uncover the truth. It endangered his court, his queen, his country, and mine.
So I swallowed down my foolish feelings and asked, “Who do you think he was working for?”
Bastian exhaled, brow furrowing more deeply. “That’s not for you to concern yourself with. You’ve dealt with that world enough.”
“Have I?” I gritted my teeth. “I feel like I barely scraped the surface while so much more was going on underneath, and that’s how I ended up here.”
After a pause, Bastian closed the notebook and placed it on the desk, hand spread over it. He watched me for a moment as if weighing me. “It’s my job to work all that out. I just need you to stay safe. All you need to know is that someone didn’t want us forming an alliance with Albion.”
Even though this person was responsible for unCavendish upending my life, he wasn’t going to tell me. State secrets. Or just that he didn’t trust me. It amounted to the same outcome.
He grunted, mouth twisting in a sardonic smile. “And they got their wish.”
When I’d told Bastian about the wedding, he’d explained how Queen Elizabeth had called off her marriage to Asher. Thanks to the return of Excalibur, she had magic of her own now and didn’t require a husband—human or fae—to shore up her rule.
Must be nice to have a choice in such things.
His fingers tapped on the notebook’s leather cover as his gaze turned distant, thoughtful.
“You don’t know, do you?” The realisation burst out of me. “All that time in Albion and the week back here, and you still haven’t uncovered them.”
His gaze shuttered. “I’m still gathering information.”
“But we could have more information, by now, couldn’t we? If you’d told me you were trying to lure out the person spying on you, I could’ve helped. If you’d told me you’d taken the antidote—”
“You mean, like you told me about your spying? And about the poison?”
His words were a punch in the gut.
And for a moment—the blink of an eye, really—I caught a glimpse of something wounded and bloody behind the Business Bastian exterior.
The hurt cut both ways, didn’t it?
On a different day, I might’ve found that funny in a bleak kind of way.
Instead, today, I cleared my throat and looked away. “I’m sorry, Bastian. I wanted to stop, but then he threatened Ella, and I couldn’t find a way out. I never wanted—”
“Tenebris is not like Lunden, Katherine.”
I jerked, back straight like I’d been rapped across the knuckles. I’d overstepped the lines of formality he’d drawn between us.
“Different rules apply here. Rules you’d do well to learn.”
He wasn’t wrong. Didn’t rules keep you safe, after all?
His jaw turned solid. “Especially with Dawn so close.”
“Close?” I glanced at the door. “I didn’t see anyone from Dawn on the way here.” None of the corridors had been decorated in a way that marked them as Dawn rather than Dusk—at least not as far as I could tell.
“You wouldn’t. You remained in our territory.”
I squinted at him. “So… they have one side of the palace. The east or—?”
“Not like that. Not so mundane.”
Of course not. This was faerie.
“Two versions of the palace overlay each other.” He gestured as if that explained everything.
I cocked my head.
He blasted a sigh. “You need to understand this, Katherine. As a guest of Dusk, you have some protection, but if you inadvertently walked into Dawn…” Head shaking, he scanned the desk. “Take this piece of paper.” A wisp of shadow pulled one from a pile with a soft rustle. “It has two sides, both identical, divided only by the thinnest barrier, right?” The shadow passed the paper to him and he showed me its edge.