Chapter 6: Betrayal

They did not take me back to my room.

The guards half-dragged, half-walked me down a different corridor, one I had never been allowed to use. The metal around my wrists bit into the skin every time I stumbled. Blood from my hands had dried in the creases of my palms and pulled whenever I flexed my fingers. I kept my eyes on the floor because looking at the faces around me only made the truth sit heavier.

No one spoke to me.

Orders moved over my head instead. Seal the wing. Fetch the royal physician. Keep the staff out. Send word to the King at once. The words bounced off the stone walls and landed nowhere useful.

They put me in a narrow room with no windows. One table. Two chairs. A single lamp. The door closed behind me with a solid, final sound and the lock turned.

I sat because my legs would not hold me any longer.

The silence after the door shut was worse than the shouting. In the silence I could hear my own breathing. I could feel the places where the drug still clung to the edges of my thoughts. I could still smell the blood and the sweet chemical taste at the back of my throat.

Time stretched.

I tried to count heartbeats and lost track. I tried to reconstruct how I had gone from my own cot to that room with Pernilla and failed. The gap in my memory was clean and total. One moment Jörgen's hand over my mouth and the bitter liquid. The next moment the wrong ceiling and a dead woman.

The lock turned again.

Two men entered. One I recognized as the formal-dressed man from the doorway. The other wore the dark insignia of the Crownlands investigative office. Neither sat. The investigator placed a folded cloth on the table and opened it. Inside were the clothes I had been wearing when they found me. The fine fabric was stiff with dried blood.

"These were on you," he said.

I stared at them.

"There is blood under your nails matching the consort's. Your scent is throughout the room. A half-empty cup on the side table carries both your scent and residue of a strong sedative. The same sedative appears in your blood according to the preliminary test."

He spoke like he was reading a list that had already decided the ending.

"I did not kill her," I said. My voice sounded scraped.

The formal man answered. "The consort was found dead. You were found with her, covered in her blood, in a room you had no reason to enter. The sedative in your system does not erase the rest."

"I was drugged in my own room. Someone moved me."

"Who?"

The names sat on my tongue. Jörgen. Yvonne. Saying them aloud would sound exactly like a cornered woman trying to throw blame at the last people who had seen her. I had no proof. No witness. Only the memory of a vial and a locked door.

"The Beta's heir," I said anyway. "Jörgen Åström. And Yvonne Lindberg. They came to my room. They forced a drug on me. I woke up in that chamber."

The investigator's expression did not change. "Both of them have already given statements. They were in the main hall with multiple witnesses during the estimated time of the consort's death. They reported that you had been unstable for days. That you had spoken of the consort with resentment. That you believed she stood in the way of something you wanted."

The room felt smaller.

"That is a lie."

"They also reported that you left the storage wing in an agitated state three nights ago after an argument, and that your behavior since then had been erratic enough that they had grown concerned."

Three nights ago. The night I found them. They had already begun shaping the story while I was still packing a bag and thinking I could simply walk away.

I pressed my palms flat on the table. Dried blood cracked across my skin.

"I want to speak to someone who will actually listen."

"You will," the formal man said. "The King is on his way. Until he arrives you will remain here. You will not be left alone with any object that could be used for harm. You will not receive visitors."

He gathered the cloth with the bloody clothes and turned toward the door. The investigator followed. Neither looked back.

The lock turned again.

I sat in the quiet and listened to the sound of my own pulse in my ears.

The frame was not messy. It was not rushed. Every piece had been placed while I slept. My scent. My hands. The sedative. The statements already waiting. Even the resentment they claimed I felt had been invented early enough to sound like history.

I thought of Pernilla's open eyes and the way her arm had hung off the bed.

I thought of Jörgen's face when he held my jaw shut and made me swallow.

The lamp flickered once. I watched the flame steady itself and felt the last thin hope that this might still be undone thin out and disappear.

When the door opened the next time, the air in the corridor had changed. More boots. More voices lowered in the particular way people lowered them when power was about to enter a room.

The King had arrived.

I lifted my head and waited for the man whose consort I was about to be accused of murdering to look at me for the first time.