Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 77730 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77730 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
“You mean… aside from all four of us?”
That got a little laugh out of him.
“Touché.” He leaned down, pressing his forehead to mine. “I like how quickly you moved there,” he told me. “There’s a little dark in this princess.”
My mind wandered to the poison steeping under the bed.
He had no idea.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jet
“What are you doing up here?” I asked when Vishen alerted me that Tove was making his way up the stairs to my quarters.
My father’s advisor was dressed and groomed, despite dawn not even breaking yet.
Tove’s proud jaw lifted, watching me with those eyes I swore always seemed to see more than I was willingly showing him.
“Your father wishes to speak to you.”
“It can’t be later than four in the morning,” I said. “You can’t be telling me that he didn’t sleep.”
Especially on the night before an exhausting, day-long event like the tournament. He was unstable enough when he’d gotten a full night of rest. There was no way he could keep his mad ramblings to himself all day. With a giant audience watching him.
Fuck.
Allowing the people to find out about him was certainly not part of the plan. It wasn’t in Tove’s best interest either. So why the hell had he allowed it to happen?
I didn’t pretend to understand exactly what happened between the two men behind closed doors. A lot of coddling, I imagined, since there was no reasoning with him when he got in one of his moods. The more you agreed with Cass, the calmer he got. Not to the point of rationality, but enough that he wasn’t bellowing out his murderous plans or trying to escape his quarters to tell others to set his plans into action.
I guess some part of me assumed that Tove would occasionally use a sleeping tonic on my father when his mania kept him awake in the late hours of the night, since we both knew he was at his sharpest early in the day after a full night of sleep.
Was this Tove showing his hand? Was he plotting against Cass now, too? Against me? Did he want the throne for himself? Or was he helping someone else?
What other explanation could there be for being so careless on a day that was so important?
Or was Cass simply progressing past any of our known methods of subduing him? Were they no longer working?
No matter what the answer was, it wasn’t good for us.
Tove exhaled hard.
“I am not your father’s keeper.”
He was, though. He’d worked hard to make sure of that.
“Tell Nira,” I told Vishen, who rushed off to wake up the other guard to keep an eye on a vulnerable Serin.
Then the two of us followed my father’s advisor down the steps, then clear across the palace to my father’s quarters. Tove also kept a room there, though he didn’t have the same kind of excuse I did to keep Vishen and Nira close. I wasn’t even exactly sure when Tove moved in from the staff quarters. A year? Longer? I wasn’t always paying as close attention as I had been lately. Back when I thought my father was just being vengeful, not losing his damned mind. How much had slipped by me before I realized?
No.
It wasn’t time for that shit.
We were past that.
We were in the end stage of planning and closing in on execution.
“What’s this?” I asked as we passed three redcaps being carried out of the castle on stretchers by members of the royal guard.
They were pale as parchment, their eyes glassy and far away.
“Who knows,” Tove said, shaking his head. “They’re always eating something they shouldn’t.”
My father’s quarters were roughly twice the size of mine, and he filled some of the space with a built-in office, complete with scrolls and books on ancient magic thought long gone.
He sat at the giant desk, piles of books and papers strewn all about, his hair wild and standing on end from running his hands through it.
As I suspected, his eyes were puffy and red. If he had slept, it wasn’t nearly enough.
“Father,” I greeted him as I closed in on the desk, reaching for a piece of paper to find his slanted handwriting filling the whole page. The only problem? It didn’t make sense. All there was to be found were open-ended ramblings of a deranged man.
Was this new?
Or had it been this bad for a long time?
What did the official documents look like?
Was this shit falling into the hands of important, powerful people?
Or was Tove stepping in and rewriting it all?
I didn’t know which possibility was the most upsetting.
I folded up the paper and discreetly shoved it in my pocket to show to Vishen when we were in my study.
“Jet. We need to do something about this,” he said, shoving something in my direction. I reached for the notepad, finding more scribbling. But instead of nonsensical sentences, all I found were random words scrawled across the top sheet.