Chapter 198: The Journey 1

LYSANDER

Delta abandoned me at the mouth of the corridor with a short nod and a promise to see the last of the trunks loaded, then took the service stairs before I could think of anything to answer. She ended conversations the way other people ended letters. Once she had decided one was finished, it was.

The corridor ran longer than I remembered. Sun came in sideways through the tall windows on my left and laid pale bars across the runner, and past the fourth door a wedge of light spilled into the hall from a room left standing open. No voices. No footsteps. Not even the small clink of a brush set down on porcelain.

I slowed for no reason I could name. Then I stopped altogether, which was worse.

After punching in the code, I pushed the door the rest of the way with two fingers and stayed in the frame.

She was at the window with her back half turned, one hand lifting a curl off her nape and letting it drop again. The dress was deep green, cut close through the shoulders and falling loose from the waist, and the light sat along the length of it as though it had been poured there. Her hair was pinned high. A few silver-white curls had been left loose at her collar. The pearls at her throat caught the sun every time she breathed.

Then she turned, and my mouth stopped working.

For a while I simply stood there. The cars outside could wait. The escort could wait. The entire kingdom, for once, could wait.

Her eyes found mine and held, and then something in her expression shifted, and she looked away first, which almost never happened.

"You are staring," she observed.

"I am aware."

She waited. When I still offered nothing, she reached up and turned one of the pearls at her throat, once, twice, and glanced down the front of herself as though she might have missed a stain on the way in.

"Is it bad?" she asked. "The Omegas you sent over chose it, and Delta said it was nice. I would have told her it was too much, but she would have just ignored me."

"And Delta would be right to ignore you."

"Is that supposed to be an answer?"

I crossed the room. My boots sounded too loud on the boards, and I took the last few steps slowly because there was no reason to hurry now, and because I wanted the picture in front of me to stay exactly where it was a little longer. She was still fussing with the pearl when I stopped close enough to smell the lavender off her skin, layering the sweet honey that never left.

"It is the best thing I have seen in a week," I said. "Possibly a month. And I have seen a great many things this week."

Her chin came up. "That is a very practiced line."

"It is an honest one."

"Those can be practiced too."

"Are you determined to argue with me or just take the compliment?"

"I am determined to know whether you mean it."

I let my eyes travel once, slowly, from the shoes to the pearls to the loose curl at her jaw, and let her watch me do it.

"The green suits you," I said. "The cut suits you. The hair suits you. If I had been asked to guess an hour ago what you would look like walking out of this house today, I would have been wrong in every particular."

Color climbed her throat and settled high on her cheeks. She tried to hide it by turning toward the window again, which put her in profile against the light, and that made everything worse for both of us.

"Fine," she decided, in the voice of a woman conceding a point she had no intention of conceding. "Fine. It is a good dress."

"It is a good dress on you."

"Now you are pushing your luck."

"I am a Regent. I believe I am allowed."

She made a small sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, and turned back to face me with her arms folded, and I watched her try to rebuild her own composure one brick at a time. She was failing at it. That pleased me more than it should have.

"You have things to do," she reminded me. "You cannot stand in a doorway all morning making remarks."

"I can do both."

"You cannot."

"I absolutely can."

She opened her mouth to fire back, and I reached out and took her hand before she could, threading my fingers through hers and holding on like a man who had finally found the thing he had been looking for in a crowded room.

"But... we are running late," I said.

Her fingers tightened around mine. She looked at our joined hands, then at my face, and something quiet passed through her that she did not bother to hide this time.

"In that case, we should probably go," she murmured.

The satchel by the trunk was mine. It looked like most of what Bonnie would be needing was already down. I picked it up without letting go of her hand, which was impractical and worth it, and walked her out into the corridor.

We took the long way to the front, past the portraits and the tall windows and the smell of polish and old wood, and she matched my pace without ever once asking me to slow down.

The doors opened onto a morning gone bright and hard and cold.

The courtyard had been transformed since breakfast. Eight cars stood in a slow curve along the drive, all of them black, all of them polished until they threw the light back double. Sentinels lined the steps on both sides in their formal uniforms, their spines straight and their hands behind their backs. The nearest car had already been pulled forward, and its rear door stood open, with a driver waiting beside it.