chapter nine

Constance

I didn't run back to William's chamber. Running would have drawn eyes, and Ferdinand had just taught me that eyes were the one thing I couldn't afford.

I walked instead, steady and unhurried, past corridor after corridor, my hands folded in front of me the way a proper candidate's should be. My father had never explained his debts to me. He'd come home some nights smelling of whiskey and said nothing at all, and other nights he'd said too much, muttering about ledgers and creditors and men who wouldn't return his letters. I'd always assumed it was carelessness. Bad luck. Ferdinand's question had cracked that assumption open without giving me anything to put in its place.

Julian let me into William's chamber without a word, his eyes searching my face for something as I passed him in the doorway. I didn't stop to explain. I waited until the bolt slid home behind me before I let my shoulders drop.

William was already sitting up, no pretense of sleep, his gold eyes fixed on me the moment I turned around. "Well?"

"He knows I'm hiding something," I said. "He didn't say it outright. He didn't have to."

"Tell me everything. Word for word, if you can manage it."

I sat on the edge of the bed and told him. The warm room, the fire, the wolf pelt, the way Ferdinand had spoken of his nephew's coma with what sounded, horribly, like real grief. The assignment as William's companion, made official in that same breath, Julian named as my chaperone going forward. And then the order underneath the order — report anything strange directly to me, not to Julian, not to the guards, to me — and the way he'd wrapped it in the language of protecting William instead of what it actually was.

William's jaw tightened with every sentence, but he let me finish before he spoke. "He's recruiting you."

"I know."

"And you agreed."

"What was I supposed to do, William? Refuse the regent to his face and confirm every suspicion he already has about me?" I heard my own voice rising and made myself lower it, aware of how thin these walls might be even with the bolt thrown. "I said yes. I don't have another option that doesn't end with both of us dead."

Something in his expression eased, not agreement exactly, but the recognition of a hard truth he didn't like any better than I did. "No. You're right. You did the only thing you could." He was quiet a moment, turning something over behind his eyes. "What else did he say?"

I hesitated. I hadn't meant to hesitate, but the pause happened anyway, long enough that William's gaze sharpened on me like a blade catching light.

"Constance."

"He asked about my father," I said finally. "About his debts. He said they seemed to accumulate rather suddenly." I made myself say the rest before I lost the nerve. "He was testing whether I knew something about it. I could feel it, the way he watched my face while he said it. Like he already knew the answer and just wanted to see if I did too."

William went very still. His whole body had simply stopped. He looked like a man who had just realized the room he'd been searching wasn't the room he thought it was.

"What?" I asked. "William, what is it?"

"Your father's debts," he said slowly, "are not the first time I've heard that word used strangely in this keep." He rose from the bed, restless suddenly, crossing to the window and back, a caged energy in him I hadn't seen before, not even during the guards' search the night before. "There are ledgers. Old ones, from before my father died, that my uncle keeps under lock in the west archive. I was never permitted to see them as a child. I assumed, the way children assume things, that it was simply pack finance, boring and irrelevant." He turned to face me. "I have not thought about those ledgers in years. Until just now."

My pulse picked up. "You think there's a connection. Between whatever's in those ledgers and my father."

"I think," William said carefully, "that my uncle does not test candidates about their families unless the family matters to him for a reason beyond the Selection. And I think it would be a remarkable coincidence if the reason he cares about your father's debts has nothing at all to do with why you, out of every eligible woman in this territory, ended up standing in that chamber touching my wrist."

The floor seemed to tilt under me the same way it had in Ferdinand's study. I hadn't let myself think it through that far, hadn't let myself imagine that the two halves of my life — my father's ruin and my arrival at this keep — might not be separate tragedies at all, but pieces of the same design.

"That's insane," I said, even as some cold, quiet part of me was already turning the thought over and finding it fit far too well. "Nobody plans a girl's whole life around a Selection that might not even happen for years."

"No," William agreed. "Not if they were sane." He held my gaze, steady. "Which is why I don't want us deciding what this means before we have proof. Suspicion isn't the same as knowing. I've made that mistake before."

"That's insane," I said again, quieter this time. "Isn't it?"

He didn't answer that.

He crossed back to the bed and sat beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him, close enough that some traitorous part of my chest loosened just from the nearness of him. "But my uncle has spent thirty years learning how to wait for the right moment, Constance. If there is even a chance he engineered something involving your family, I need to know. Not for the Selection. Not for the politics. For you."

I looked up at him, and for a moment the careful distance he usually kept, prince and surrogate, protector and secret, fell away entirely, and there was just a man looking at me like I mattered for reasons that had nothing to do with a binding spell or a bloodline.

"How do we find out?" I asked. "You can't exactly walk into the archive yourself."

"No," he said. "But you can."

The words hung between us, heavier than either of us wanted to name out loud. He was asking me to become exactly the kind of danger to myself that he'd spent two chapters' worth of warnings trying to keep me out of. I understood, watching his face, that it cost him something to say it. And I understood, feeling the cold certainty settle into my own chest, that I was going to do it anyway.

"Tell me where to look," I said.

"Not tonight." His hand found mine, careful, deliberate, thumb brushing once across my knuckles in a gesture that felt more intimate than it had any right to. "Tonight you rest, and tomorrow you play the companion my uncle believes he's created. We move when the risk is smallest, not when the need feels most urgent. That is how people survive long enough to win."

"You sound like you've had practice losing people who didn't wait."

His hand went still over mine. Whatever answer lived behind that silence, he wasn't ready to hand it to me yet, and I'd learned enough about William Blackwood in three days to know pushing would only close the door further.

So I let it go. For now.

Instead I turned my hand over beneath his, lacing our fingers together, a small, unspoken agreement that whatever came next, we'd be walking into it together. His eyes met mine, and for one long, unguarded moment, the mask he wore for the entire rest of the world simply wasn't there.

"Get some sleep, Little Bird," he murmured. "Tomorrow, we start pulling threads."

Somewhere beyond the shuttered window, a bell tolled the hour, and neither of us moved to break the quiet that followed it.