Chapter 31: The Morning After Everything

Ava's POV

I woke up with a plan.

The plan was simple, clean, and entirely survivable: pretend nothing happened, be extremely busy, and under no circumstances allow my face to do anything interesting in the vicinity of Ryker or anyone who knew Ryker or anyone who had ever been in the same building as Ryker.

I sat up, assessed the plan, decided it was excellent, and got dressed with the focused efficiency of someone who had somewhere very important to be and absolutely no feelings about anything.

Leta was in the corridor when I came out, carrying a stack of fresh linens and looking at me with the specific expression she used when she had noticed something and was deciding whether to say it out loud.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning," I said, and kept walking.

She fell into step beside me, which I had not invited but also did not have the energy to address at seven in the morning with the bond doing something new and inconvenient in my chest, lower and warmer than it had been before, like something had shifted frequency overnight and nobody had asked my permission.

"You look well rested," Leta said pleasantly.

"Thank you."

"Interesting, because I don't think you slept much."

"I slept fine."

"Mm." She adjusted the linens in her arms. "The east wing is your assignment today."

I stopped walking.

She took three more steps and then stopped too, turning around with an expression that was working very hard to stay neutral.

"The east wing," I said.

"Head maid's assignment. I didn't choose it."

"The east wing where Ryker's office is."

"And several other offices and two sitting rooms and a very large library that genuinely needs attention." She tilted her head. "Is that a problem?"

I looked at her for a moment and she looked back at me and the corridor was very quiet and I was absolutely not going to explain anything to anyone this morning.

"No," I said, and kept walking.

I considered faking my own death briefly while collecting my supplies, just as a conceptual exercise, just to understand what the logistics would look like, and then I picked up my mop and my cloth and my bucket and walked to the east wing with my head down and my plan firmly in place.

The east wing was beautiful and enormous and I hated it immediately.

I started at the far end, the sitting rooms, which were the furthest from Ryker's office and gave me the longest possible time before I would have any reason to be near that corridor at all, and I worked with the focused intensity of someone who was absolutely not thinking about anything except the job in front of them.

The bond hummed, low and warm and relentless.

I scrubbed a perfectly clean windowsill for four minutes.

By nine thirty I had worked through both sitting rooms and the small reading room adjacent to the library and was running out of legitimate reasons to stay in this half of the wing, and the clock on the wall said ten was approaching and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that his office door had been closed all morning.

I moved to the corridor outside the library with my mop and told myself I was working and not listening and certainly not counting anything.

The bond shifted slightly, warmer, closer, and I put my back to the far end of the corridor and mopped.

His door opened at exactly ten.

I did not look up, I was very busy, there was a section of floor near the window that required significant attention and I was giving it that attention fully and completely.

His footsteps came into the corridor.

I counted them without meaning to, the way my body had apparently decided to start doing things without consulting me, twelve steps from his door to the corridor junction, and then instead of turning toward the main hall they continued straight, which meant they were coming in my direction, and I kept mopping and did not look up and was extremely fine.

Eleven steps closer.

I found a new section of floor to focus on.

Eight steps.

The bond was doing something embarrassing in my chest, warm and certain and deeply inconvenient, and I pressed my lips together and kept the mop moving in steady circles.

Five steps and then they stopped.

He was beside me, I could feel his presence the way you felt weather changing, a shift in the air that the rest of your body registered before your brain caught up, and I kept my eyes on the floor and my hands moving and breathed very carefully.

He didn't speak.

I didn't speak.

The corridor was extremely quiet for a moment that lasted slightly too long to be accidental.

Then I heard something small hit the floor near my feet and I looked down before I could stop myself and the cloth I had apparently been holding in my left hand without noticing was on the stone floor between us.

Ryker bent down and picked it up and I watched him do it in my peripheral vision, unhurried, no comment, no expression that acknowledged the cloth had done anything unusual by falling, and he held it out to me and I took it from his hand without looking directly at his face.

"Ryder's informant is still in this palace," he said, his voice even and quiet, the way he spoke when he was being careful with something, "we haven't found them yet."

Then he walked away.

I stood there with the cloth in my hand and looked at it and listened to his footsteps go back down the corridor and turn toward the main hall and disappear.

The bond settled back into its new frequency, low and warm and steady.

I looked at the cloth.

He had picked it up without mentioning it, without making it a thing, without looking at me with anything that required me to respond to it, and he had said what he came to say and walked away and left me standing here in the east wing corridor with a cloth in my hand and my plan in pieces and something moving through my chest that I had no clean word for.

We.

He had said we hadn't found them, and the way that single word had landed, so ordinary and so certain, like I was already part of the sentence, like I had been inside it for a while and he had simply stopped pretending otherwise, made my hands shake so badly I had to grip the cloth with both of them.