“Is Jacin awake?”
“I don’t think so. Are you all right?”
She nodded and whispered, “Just another nightmare.”
His expression was understanding as he turned and headed back to the apartment he shared with Jacin and his wife, along with two other guards and their families, all in about the same amount of space as Winter’s private chambers. He let her inside with a fatherly squeeze of her shoulder before leaving—it was not acceptable for a guard to be late for duty, even if it was the princess herself who came knocking on his door.
Jacin was still asleep, but he was a light sleeper, and his eyes snapped open the moment Winter creaked open the door. His mother’s heavy breathing could be heard from the cot on the other side of the room. “What is it?” he whispered, pushing himself upward.
Winter took a step forward, but hesitated. For years, it would have felt like the most natural thing in the world for her to crawl into bed beside him. After all, he had comforted her more times than she could count after her father died.
But lately she could sense something changing. Jacin was fourteen now, and no longer the slightly gangly boy she’d grown up with. It seemed like he was taller and stronger every day.
There had been recent changes in herself, too, though she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed.
Suddenly, having never before cared about all the court whispers of “propriety” and “decorum,” Winter found herself questioning the meaning of her oldest, dearest friendship.
“Winter?”
“She’s dead,” she stammered. “The servant. She … jumped out a window, into the gardens. She—”
She started to cry.
Jacin’s face twisted and he held his arms toward her.
All her concerns vanished as she scrambled onto the bed and buried her face in his chest. She was an idiot to think that getting older changed anything. This was, and would always be, the only place she belonged.
* * *
“Good afternoon, Sir Owen,” Winter said as she stepped out of her quarters the next morning. She gave a curtsy to her guard, guilty for having made him chase her halfway through the palace the night before, but he neither looked at her nor acknowledged her greeting. Which was the way of the guards. They were there to serve and to protect, and to act as a target and a shield for any intruder that might want to harm the royal family. They were not friends. They were not confidants.
But Winter couldn’t always bring herself to ignore them as they ignored her.
She glided down the hall on her way to her tutoring session and spotted Jacin waiting for her as soon as she turned the corner into an elevator bank. She smiled—an instinctive reaction—though it fell once she took in his expression. A frown creased Jacin’s brow.
He glanced once at her guard, who had followed a respectful distance in her wake, before dipping his head toward her. “They found a note.”
“A note?”
“From the servant. The one that…” He didn’t have to finish. “My dad is on the team conducting the investigation. It was found in the servant’s quarters. Probably won’t be made public, but he read it before it was taken away.”
“And it was a … suicide note?” she asked, her heart pattering. The words chilled her. Suicide was always met with suspicion in their society. Everyone knew, even twelve-year-old princesses, that an apparent suicide could just as easily have been a murder caused through manipulation. That was how almost all of the queen’s formal executions were carried out, after all. Hand the convicted perpetrators a sharp blade and let them drain out their own lives.
But the crown did not have a monopoly on the Lunar gift, much as the queen may have wished it so. No death could ever be proven a true suicide, and few murders were ever solved.
“What did it say?” Winter asked.
“It wasn’t murder. She definitely meant to do it.” Jacin’s voice stayed low as they stepped into the elevator, along with her stoic guard, and he said nothing else until they’d stepped out again and left the guard to follow a few paces behind.
Winter frowned. Much as she’d hoped that it was a misunderstanding, she wasn’t surprised. No one had been manipulating the woman in the throne room before Winter rescued her. Or thought that she’d rescued her. She couldn’t help wondering how many attempts the woman had made to take her life before she finally succeeded.
“But why?”
Jacin’s gaze darted around the hallway. A few young aristocrats wandered by, probably having just finished with their own tutoring sessions, and when they noticed the princess they stopped to gawk at her. Winter ignored them. She was used to gawking.
Jacin scowled every time and seemed relieved when they passed.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
She wasn’t sure at all, but she nodded anyway. What could drive a person to such a decision? What could make them think there were no other options? Especially when there were doctors and specialists who could ensure you never felt sad or lonely or frightened again.
Jacin swallowed hard. “She was pregnant.”
Her feet stalled. Jacin paused with her, his brow drawn tight.
“Pregnant?”
It clarified nothing. She’d only ever known women to be happy upon discovering a pregnancy.
Jacin’s jaw tightened. He had gone from looking sorry to angry in half a heartbeat. His blue eyes, normally so bright, were now shadowed with a fury Winter rarely saw. “The note said that Thaumaturge Park is—was the father.”
She stared.
“Evidently, he’s been manipulating her for a long time.” Jacin looked away, seething. “No one knows exactly how long it’s been going on. Or … what methods exactly he’d been using to…” His face was reddening, his breath erratic and his knuckles white.
What methods.
This was a horror that Winter knew of, yet so few spoke of it. Manipulation of the strong against the weak. You could make a person do anything, and though there were laws against it, with the powerful among the elite and the enforcers, who was to stop them?
She recalled the desperation in the woman’s eyes, the desperation that had gotten stronger over the years.
Winter pressed a hand against her stomach. Her mouth was suddenly stinging and sour and she couldn’t swallow fast enough. She would be sick.
“I’m sorry.” Jacin held her elbow. “I didn’t know if I should tell you or not. I know … I know you have to see him…”
Only in the court. She would only have to see him among the court.
It would still be far too much. “Will they do anything to him?” she asked.
But Jacin didn’t have to answer.
Aimery was a great favorite of the queen. No repercussions would come to him for this crime.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Winter accepted a brief embrace from Jacin before pulling away. He stayed with her for the rest of the walk to her session, but she hardly noticed his presence as her mind sorted through this terrible information.
The woman’s desperation.
The bruises that she sometimes noticed on her arms, only half covered by the sleeves of her uniform.
And Aimery looking down at her from the library. “These things do happen…”
She stopped suddenly beside a potted plant and bent over, heaving into the soil. Jacin and the guard both dropped to her side. Jacin’s sure hand on her back, comforting. The guard asking if he should call for a medic.
She shook her head. “Something I ate,” she said, spitting as daintily as she could. “But … perhaps, if a servant could clean up…”
“I’ll alert someone straightaway.”
Nothing else was said of it, but Winter felt no better. Her stomach was still churning.
She had rescued the woman. She believed she had saved her.
When really she had handed her right back into the grip of her tormenter. She had allowed him to keep abusing her for years, and the woman couldn’t even have fought against it—not when Winter was forcing her to be happy, to be content, to just keep accepting it.