Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 205594 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1028(@200wpm)___ 822(@250wpm)___ 685(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 205594 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1028(@200wpm)___ 822(@250wpm)___ 685(@300wpm)
“I didn’t say that.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and spins me around. “Ten steps ahead of you are the stairs down. You should go. You don’t belong on this floor.”
I brace my feet, my stubborn nature rising. “I’m not going anywhere until you give me back my knife.”
He tries to guide me forward, but I push back. Nemeth clearly wasn’t expecting that response, because I smack into his bare chest again, and he grabs my shoulders, pinning me in place so I don’t topple in the darkness. It’s like he’s pinning me against his body, and I breathe hard, thinking about the naughty questions I asked the knife. If Nemeth touched himself to me. If Nemeth touched himself to me often.
Yes, and yes.
“Is this all a ploy to get me here to your chambers?” I ask, voice wobbling. “Are you so lonely that you can’t simply ask for company? You have to resort to stealing?”
With a disgusted sound, he pushes me away from him. That warm presence at my back is gone, and I’m adrift in the endless black. I automatically put my hands up in front of me, trying to find a wall. “You flatter yourself,” Nemeth says. “And I didn’t take your paltry knife.”
“Fine,” I call out. “No need to be nasty about it. Prick.”
I take a step forward, only to be lifted off my feet as if I weigh nothing, and then am set back down again, facing a different direction. A low, silky voice murmurs in my ear, “You’d fall down the stairs if you kept on as you were.”
Oh. My skin prickles with awareness at his kindness in moving me, at the easy way he hauled me into the air, but most of all, that deep, decadent voice in my ear.
Then he ruins it. “A smart woman would be looking for her lost belongings with a candle lit, instead of accusing her neighbor.”
Disgusted, I make a face at the shadows and find the wall, leaving with as much dignity as I can.
Chapter
Seventeen
Isearch all day and still don’t find my knife. I give up at bedtime, a candle for the briefest of moments so I can administer the injection of my medicine, and then blow it out again. That quick glance shows me that I’m low on my potion, and I’m going to need to make a fire. I’m going to have to burn my sled, and then I’ll be out of wood, just as I’ll be out of candles.
Things are getting desperate.
I lie in the darkness and contemplate my options. Balon won’t help me. He’s made it clear that he’s going to show up when he pleases, talk of nothing but court gossip to me, and then leave again. I have to make things last until the solstice next year, when new supplies will be delivered.
And as I check the root cellar for the dozenth time in the last few days, I come to the realization that I don’t have nearly enough supplies. Either I’ve been deliberately sabotaged or whoever is in charge of supplying me needs to be removed from their post. That, or I’ve managed my supplies so very poorly that I’ve gone through a year’s worth of goods in a season. It doesn’t matter. What matters now is that I need to take action.
I can run out of everything and starve. I can let my potion run out and die. I can bargain with Nemeth for some of his supplies.
Or I can kill him, just as Erynne suggested, and take everything.
The thought sits with me all day. I don’t think of myself as a murderer, but I also don’t immediately dismiss the idea. I don’t like the idea of starving while he sits all pompous in the shadows, but he’s got a name. We’ve had conversations.
It’s hard to kill the enemy. It’s doubly hard when you know their name.
I don’t have many options, though. I feel naked without my knife, even though there are other blades in the kitchen. It’s that my knife was my consultant, my companion, my advice giver. I search for it all over again the next day, and I think about Nemeth and how I would kill him.
I don’t have the supplies for poison. I don’t have the strength or stealth to take him by surprise in his bed.
Maybe a seduction? He’s dismissive of me, but he also watched me bathe and didn’t seem in a hurry to leave. I could seduce his goods out of him, I decide. And if that fails, I can invite him to my bed and then kill him.
Then I’d have no problems with food or wood to last me through the year…but I would be sharing the tower with a dead body.
For the hundredth time a day, I want to just get up and walk out of the tower. To somehow get the doors open and unbricked, and race out into the fresh air. Damn the favor of the Golden Moon Goddess. Damn the crops that would surely be destroyed if the goddess is angered. Damn it all and just take my freedom.