Heartless Hunter (Crimson Moth, #1) (47)

Did Noah and Bart notice?

More gentle than his tone, Alex turned her toward him and started tugging the glove off her fingers, one by one. The thin silver ring on his smallest finger glinted in the firelight. “How did this happen?”

“Laila shot me,” she said, watching the silk slide down her arm to reveal the makeshift bandage, which was good and soiled. “Or shot at me. I was lucky; she mostly missed.”

Alex went quiet. It was so rare for him to get angry. But she could feel the anger in him now, coiled tight like a spring.

“And why was Laila shooting at you?”

“I was at the old Seldom mine, looking for Seraphine. Your brother set me up.”

Alex’s gaze narrowed behind his lion mask. “What do you mean, he set you up?”

Taking the ruined glove, Rune threw it onto the fire, destroying the evidence. She slid off the second one and burned it too. Hopefully Verity had worn gloves tonight that she could borrow. Otherwise, she’d need Alex to escort her home with his coat over her shoulders—and that would certainly make people talk.

Boys who let girls wear their coats home were making their intentions known.

But if they’re busy talking about Alex and me, thought Rune, they won’t be wondering about when I arrived.

Rune told him everything that had happened in the mine, leaving out the part beforehand, where she went alone to Gideon’s tenement building, stripped down to her underwear, and let him take her measurements. That was irrelevant information, she decided.

As she filled him in, Alex crouched down and lifted the hem of her dress, reaching for the knife he knew she kept strapped to her thigh. They’d been in this situation so many times, working like cogs in a clock that had run smoothly for years, that Alex knew exactly where the knife was sheathed.

“Gideon intentionally misled me,” she said as Alex drew the knife from under her dress and used its sharp edge to cut a long strip off her cotton shift. “If he didn’t suspect me before, he does now.”

If he noticed blood on the blade, he didn’t remark on it.

When he rose to face her, Alex handed her the makeshift bandage to hold while he untied the bloody one from around her arm.

While he focused on his task, Rune studied him. Alex’s golden mask ended at the tip of his nose, cutting across his cheeks and revealing lips that were pressed tight at the sight of the gash in Rune’s pale skin. The wound wasn’t deep, but it was still bleeding freely.

“I asked you to end this thing with Gideon,” he said, throwing the soiled bandage into the flames, then wrapping the fresh cotton strip around the wound.

“He contacted me,” she said, defensive. “He wanted to meet.”

Alex’s elegant fingers secured the bandage and tucked the ends underneath. “And you had no choice but to obey?”

“He’s my best chance of finding Seraphine.”

Alex breathed in deep. As if Rune were a child testing his patience.

“I need an alibi,” she said, changing the subject. “Can we say I came to this party with you tonight?”

Her wound freshly bandaged, she turned her focus to the map over the mantel. From here, it looked like a series of circles within circles.

Before Alex could answer her, she moved to Octavia Creed’s massive desk in the center of the room, piled high with records. Grabbing the heavy desk chair, Rune dragged it back to the fireplace, climbed onto it, and pulled out the tracing paper and pen from inside her bodice. She set both down on the mantel.

“We could say you came with me tonight,” said Alex, watching her. “If you’ve agreed to my offer.”

Rune, standing on her tiptoes, was about to cover the upper left-hand corner of the map with the first piece of tracing paper.

“What offer?” she said, glancing over her shoulder. Her fox mask obscured her view of him. She would have pushed it back off her face, except both her hands were occupied.

“My offer to help you rescue Seraphine,” he said from where he leaned against the prison warden’s desk, looking at her. “I said I would help, if you agreed to come with me to Caelis for a month.”

Rune bristled, gripping the fountain pen hard in her hand. “Two weeks, we said.”

“It will take us three days to sail there, and three days to sail back. So: no. You’ll have to come for the full month.”

Why is he so adamant about this?

It wasn’t like him.

Rune returned to the map, pressing a little too hard on the tracing paper as she followed the lines showing through from behind. “You know I can’t leave. I have—”

“What happens when you succeed, Rune?”

“What do you mean?” she said, still tracing. There were seven concentric circles, each depicting a section of the prison. She was on the second section.

“What happens after you rescue every last witch from the purge?”

If Rune were honest with herself, deep down, she didn’t believe she could save them all. She hoped to save Seraphine, and more witches after that. But eventually, Rune expected to be caught. She was only one girl. And there were hundreds of witch hunters.

“I can’t rescue them all,” she admitted, staring at the untraced lines showing faintly through the translucent paper.

“For this exercise, let’s say you can. When it’s over, will you still hide yourself in plain sight, pretending to be what you despise? Resenting everyone around you? They will never change their minds about you, Rune. Don’t you want to be free of them? Of all of it?”