Accomplice to the Villain (Assistant and the Villain, #3)(81)

Including Clare’s brother, who was very likely suffering an acute torture at being trapped for a night with a woman he seemed determined not to have.

Tighter.

Kingsley’s sign was followed by the pointing of a webbed foot to the chain around his other foot.

“Alexander.” Tatianna straightened his crown. “It’s tight enough to be effective. I won’t abide cutting off the circulation to your poor little foot.” Tatianna did a double take. The dressing robe she’d scrounged up was miraculously pink. Or perhaps not so miraculous; Clare used to think that Tati could sniff out the color with her eyes closed.

“Clare? What is that?” Tatianna asked, pointing to Lyssa’s discarded letter. This one read, Please come to your father, little Lyssa. Allow him to apologize. Allow him to make amends. The handwriting was deliberate, with strange diagonal dashes over the Ts.

But it wasn’t the words that Tatianna was alarmed by—it was the glowing blobs that had begun to take form underneath the yellow ink she’d splattered on the page.

“Yellow ink reveals secrets.” Clare watched with bated breath as the blobs began to clear, revealing—

Crash.

Kingsley’s episodes decided to make a great return as the frog blinked out of awareness as quickly as he had blinked into it. And in his animal state, all Kingsley seemed to know was that he was trapped to something that held a great deal of weight.

Weight that he used to his advantage.

“Alexander, don’t!” Clare yelled as the frog attempted to jump, the weight on his foot knocking into candles, books, and then finally (and tragically) a large pot of black ink. Black ink had no ability to hold on to Clare’s magic, except in acting as an extinguisher. The letter was bathed in a pool of midnight liquid, and the words were lost to her.

Forever.

Sorrow clawed its way deep within the closed chambers of her heart as she came to terms with the fact that once more, she’d failed her brother. Once more, she’d failed herself.

“Alexander!” Clare raged and was immediately racked by guilt when she noticed how ashamed the prince looked.

Apologetic.

“Another episode,” Tatianna said, sounding far more empathetic than Clare could manage, even though everything that had gone wrong in the last few moments could be traced back to her own foolish choices. “What were those marks?” Tatianna asked as she ran a dainty finger down the edge of the page.

“I don’t know,” Clare replied, using a nearby throw blanket to dab up the black ink, but it was hopeless; whatever clue had started to appear on the page was there no longer.

Kingsley held up a sign, and Clare thought that if she wasn’t a woman of twenty and six years, she might have thrown herself to the floor and wept.

Sorry.

Followed by the most pitiful sound any frog had ever made.

On second thought, she might throw herself to the ground and weep anyway. If any group of people needed such a thing, it was precisely twenty-six-year-old women.

“It’s all right, Alexander. There are more letters back at the manor. We’ll check those when we return.”

“If we return.”

“Tatianna!” Clare chastised, taking a step toward her, but halted when her foot sank into a hidden panel. The pressure against it must have triggered a hinging mechanism as soon as she picked her foot up again, because a stack of shelves against the wall opened to reveal a dark corridor beyond.

“A hidden tunnel!” Tatianna was far too cheery about the discovery. “Finally, something interesting to do. Come! Let’s see where it goes.”

“Are you out of your gourd? There’s no way I’m going into the creepy dark tunnel leading to gods know where! For all we know, it could lead straight to the deadlands itself, and I will not be caught—”

She was cut off by Tatianna. Well…Tatianna and her lips. On Clare’s. Every coherent thought flew out of Clare’s ears, and then there was only sensation. Clare responded with fervor, with passion, and with her hands.

For a glorious two seconds before Tatianna pushed away, leaving Clare hot and cold all over. “I’m going exploring. Come if you wish.” Tatianna winked, flicking a braid behind her shoulder and lifting a candle holder, the light following her to the hidden door.

Clare was moving on shaky legs as she scurried after her ex-betrothed. “Hold on! I-I’m coming, too.”

Scooping Alexander up into her palm, she entered the torch-lined corridor and tried not to feel ill at ease.

Especially when the door behind them slammed shut.





Chapter 52


The Villain


Trystan Maverine was accustomed to the sounds of torture.

Screams of deathly pain, the moans of the hopeless when they realized there was no one coming to their rescue. There were, of course, a few others that were not as pleasant as the first two, but he was used to them nonetheless.

Never in the whole of his life had torture sounded like the splashing of bathwater. “Are you almost finished?” he asked irritably.

“I’ve only been in here for two minutes,” Sage argued. Another splash. Another lash of agony.

“I don’t believe you,” he replied sardonically. He did believe her, but he was beyond reason, his mind—which had never been particularly imaginative—choosing now to conjure up the most distracting, debilitating images.