This time when the words threatened to burst out of her, Rune squeezed her hands into fists as she held them back, trying to think of something—anything—else to say instead. Something less damning, but still true.
“There’s no time to have a dress made! My seamstress is booked until next month, but the dinner is next week.”
Rune threw him a pitiful look that wasn’t entirely false. She’d gone hot all over and her heart beat painfully fast.
“Hmm. That is unfortunate.”
But the spell wasn’t finished with her. It snaked up her throat, threatening to choke her.
Tell him, it prodded. Tell him the rest.
“And …” The words itched. She tried to swallow them but couldn’t. “They’ll want me to talk about Nan.”
She had his full attention now.
He was staring at her, his gaze piercing. “And you don’t want to.”
She shook her head no, eyes burning with the tears that were building. She was terrified of blurting out the rest. Rune reached for her throat, prepared to squeeze if something worse tried to escape.
As a hot tear slipped down her cheek, Gideon visibly softened. “I’m sorry. It must have been hard to be raised by a witch.”
It wasn’t a question, so Rune didn’t have to answer. Her chest still rose and fell with her rapid breaths.
He glanced over her shoulder. She followed his gaze. Between the translucent cerulean canopies of her bed, which were drawn back and tied to each of the four posts, an enormous portrait hung on the wall.
Kestrel Winters took up most of the picture’s frame. She wore a black velvet dress with lace trim, and she’d pinned her curls back, allowing the artist to catch every ridge and crease of her solemn face. She was close to sixty in this rendering, and her beauty often reminded Rune of a mighty oak.
It was the child on Nan’s lap, however, that drew the viewer’s eye. She wore a crisp lace dress with pale blue ribbons—but that was where her elegance ended. Her cheeks were bright red from running, and her strawberry blonde hair, which had been painstaking combed not long before this sitting, was a messy tangle.
A grass stain spoiled the knee of one white stocking, and though Rune had been told to sit still, the artist couldn’t paint over her fidgety energy. Her eyes were bright and full of mischief, as if she badly wanted to laugh, but held it in, for propriety’s sake.
It was Rune’s favorite painting. She always felt like it was trying to tell her a secret.
Keeping a portrait of a witch you’d betrayed wasn’t illegal, but it might rouse Gideon’s suspicions. “I almost got rid of it after they purged her,” she said softly. “But I didn’t want to forget that evil lurks where we least expect it. So I kept it, to remind me.”
Gideon could interpret this to mean the evil of witches like Nan. But for Rune, the evil was in her own actions, in what she had done to the person she loved most.
“You were very cute,” he said, studying the child in the painting.
Rune glanced sharply up at him. The wine hadn’t worked, but perhaps her tears had?
Is that your weakness? she wondered. Girls who cry?
Either way, she hadn’t lost this game yet. She needed to retake control before the spell forced an even deadlier truth from her.
“I was cute?” she teased. “Am I not anymore?”
She couldn’t coerce the truth out of him with wine. But there were other ways to get information. Methods she’d used on plenty of unsuspecting young men.
The thought of using those same tricks on Gideon snarled her stomach in knots, but she’d run out of options. If she wanted to save Seraphine, she needed to find out where the Blood Guard was keeping her. Wherever that was, Gideon had likely put Seraphine there himself.
He turned the full force of his attention on her, and she shivered beneath the weight of it.
“Cute? No.” His eyes gleamed in the candlelight, taking her in. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”
She ran her fingers lightly down the edge of his lapel. “How would you describe me, then?”
Gideon stayed silent, watching her fingers.
Rune hated this part of the game. The flirtatious touching—which inevitably led to kissing—was always the last, most desperate step in obtaining information.
But it was a necessary evil. And Rune would do whatever was necessary to save more girls from sharing her grandmother’s fate. A fate Rune had delivered her to.
Gideon still hadn’t given her an answer.
“Well?” She pressed her hands to his chest, preparing to run them over his shoulders. “Surely, you—”