“Do you think this could be real?” I said. “Did Vincent tell you about it?”
Because surely, if he was going to entrust knowledge of a secret, powerful weapon to anyone, it would have been Jesmine, his Head of War—right?
But she was quiet, a regretful expression passing over her features—like a distant reflection over glass.
“Your father,” she said finally, “was a very secretive man.”
I wasn’t expecting this shade to her voice—sad, and a little vulnerable.
“But he trusted you,” I said. “Didn’t he?”
She laughed, short and humorless. “Trusted me. Yes, perhaps. As much as he trusted anyone.”
I was confused by this. Because when he was alive, I had envied Jesmine and Vincent’s closest advisors. I had envied them because they had a level of respect from him that I thought was beyond my reach. At least, until I won the Kejari and bound myself to him, matching his strength with a Coriatis bond.
My confusion must have shown on my face, because her brow quirked. “This surprises you.”
“I just... I always thought that you two had a...”
I wasn’t sure how to word it.
“You thought because I was his Head of War, and because he was fucking me, he told me things.”
I wasn’t going to put it that way, exactly, but…
“Well, yes,” I said.
A pained flinch, there and gone again in less than a second. “Me too,” she said. “For a while.”
The tone in her voice was so uncomfortably familiar. I’d always assumed she’d gotten some part of him I never could—not the sex, of course, but the trust. It had never occurred to me that she was chasing him, too. Hell, it had never even occurred to me that she had even cared enough to want that intimacy from him.
The question slipped out before I could stop it. “Did you love him, Jesmine?”
I half expected her to laugh at me for asking. It seemed like far too personal a question. But instead, she seemed to actually consider this.
“I loved him as my king,” she said at last. “And perhaps I could have loved him as a man, too. I did in some ways. Maybe I wanted to in more. But he could not have loved me.”
Why? I wanted to ask. Because Jesmine seemed like the epitome of everything a man like Vincent should love. Beautiful. Brilliant. Deadly. Powerful. If he had ever chosen to marry, I couldn’t have imagined a better match for him.
A tight smile flitted across her lips.
“Loving someone else is a dangerous thing,” she said. “Even for vampires. More dangerous still for a king. Vincent knew that. He was never going to open himself up to more weakness. And he already had exposed himself enough with the love he had for you.”
The words struck deep, and I wasn’t prepared. My jaw tightened. A raging monsoon of emotions knotted in my chest, all of them contradictory.
I so desperately craved to hear that Vincent had loved me.
And yet, I was so angry to hear it, too. Yes, maybe he had loved me. But he had still lied to me. He had still isolated me. He had still hurt me.
Maybe he had loved me. Maybe I got what Jesmine wanted and never could have. Was I supposed to be grateful for that alone?
What if I couldn’t be?
I just said, “Well. You said it. He was a secretive man.”
Jesmine nodded slowly, in a way that said, shamefully, she understood.
Then she cleared her throat. “So no,” she said. “He never talked to me about this... god blood. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have it. On the contrary, I think it seems like exactly the sort of thing he would do. If it existed, he would have found it.”
“If that’s true,” I said, “then I sure as hell hope he hid it well. Somewhere Septimus and Simon can’t find it. Even if the pendant—”
I winced, as I did every time I thought of that damned pendant, cursing myself for ever letting it leave my sight.
Jesmine’s lips thinned, clearly imagining all the same terrible scenarios that I was.
Defeating Septimus and Simon would already be a challenge. If they had any surprises for us, we would be fucked.
“Vincent was a very cautious person,” she said. “Especially when it came to weapons. If he had it, he never would have left it accessible by a single key, no matter how well-hidden that key was. And even still, I think he would have multiple failsafes. Split it into multiple locations, for example.”
Goddess, I hoped so. At this point, I wasn’t even holding out hope of finding this god blood—if it existed—myself. I just wanted to make sure Septimus didn’t have it.
“Here’s hoping he hid it well,” I muttered, and Jesmine laughed bitterly.
“Men and their secrets,” she said. “We spend a lifetime trying to unravel them, and once they’re gone, we’re still at their mercy. Yes. Better hope Vincent hid his well.”
In-fucking-deed.
51
RAIHN
I could not fucking wait for a bath. It was hard to play the convincing role of the confident Rishan king to a bunch of my greatest enemies while coated in two-week-old shit.
Jesmine’s second, a straight-backed, wary-eyed woman who looked like she was debating whether to stab us with every step, showed us to the springs. It was amazing that such a thing could exist out here in the desert—I had to admit that the House of Night, for all its many faults, was a place of great natural wonder. The springs were located deep in the tunnels, where the dry air turned damp and steamy. The water was a perfect teal blue, illuminated by shocks of bright light running up the cave walls—which seemed far too beautiful to just be minerals and algae. The caves separated down here, running into many little offshoots. Convenient for privacy, which I think everyone was glad for after so much nonstop travel together.
“Well,” Mische sighed, the moment our guide left us, “this is amazing.”
She stretched out her arms, as if already imagining diving in.
I watched her out of the corner of my eye. I knew Mische, and I knew that something had been wrong since we left Sivrinaj. Hell, I could tell from the moment I saw her in the dungeons—those big eyes practically bursting with tears. Not a hint of those, of course, during the journey. It would be easy to mistake Mische’s outgoing attitude for emotional openness. She may be chatty, but she was damned good at hiding all the things that mattered.
Oraya had told me about the Shadowborn prince—that Mische had been the one to kill him. It was a diplomatic headache, but one I could put off dealing with for a while. I was more concerned about what Oraya didn’t tell me. And I knew there was something. Her stilted, “You should talk to Mische, when you can,” said that well enough.
But Mische made sure I never got that chance. We had been moving so fast that I’d barely gotten a private moment with her since we fled, and every time I tried, in our rare moments of rest, to speak to her alone, she’d run off with some harried, half-baked excuse.
Now, I turned to her. “Mische, before you go—”
“Later,” she said, without so much as looking at me. “Bath now.” And she was gone into one of the caves before I had time to argue with her.