Page 16 of The Truth-Teller's Bargain
Her heart raced with the implications of how he’d even cometo possess that knowledge. The only ones who knew about her exchange with Goran were the minister and a handful of guards.
“I’m listening,” Nakir said calmly, unruffled as he poured himself a small glass of amber liquid from his bedside table. He sipped at it lightly, his eyes never leaving her face.
Something about the stillness of him made it impossible to look away.
“I saw him when...” She searched for the words to speak on the subject without activating her curse. Alethea could not lie—a fatal flaw in her mother’s eyes. She had learned to speak in vague half-truths so she wouldn’t accidentally betray her queen with knowledge she shouldn’t have, but in this moment, it was proving a difficult feat. “When he was convicted of treason.”
“Treason.” Nakir spat the word out like poison, and Alethea tried not to flinch. “Treason is dictated by the whim of the ruling sovereign. What happened to my parents was also treason,” he continued, his words heavy with bitterness.
She remained silent, his accusations landing heavily in her core.
Nakir took another sip of his drink, still trained on her. “How did they do it?” he asked over the rim of his glass. “The execution.”
“Beheading,” she told him, barely above a whisper.
“Did you see it?”
She shook her head, avoiding his probing stare. “I wasn’t there.”
“Why not?” His question was sharp, laced with an intensity that caught her off-guard. Why did he care?
She chewed the inside of her lip, her heart racing. “I was... unwell.”
“But it was a court-attended event, as is every execution.”
She failed to see the point in his line of questioning, her confusion evident in her furrowed brow. This was so differentfrom how the Crimson Queen ran an interrogation. She scrambled to keep her wits about her.
“Yes.”
Nakir watched her intently behind a cool, calm mask. “What does your mother know about our plans?”
The question startled Alethea, and she quickly searched for a way to answer it without committing treason herself—a task that seemed impossible given the circumstances. The only option she had was silence. Answering questions about Goran Arranil was one thing, but any more and she ran a dire risk of exposing her mother’s secrets—or her own.
The silence stretched unbearably. She was dimly aware of muffled activity from the camp outside, murmured conversations, the faint crackling of fires burning into the night, but she didn’t dare look up. Instead, she fixed her gaze firmly on a spot of carpet beside Nakir’s leather boot, as if that small patch of woven threads was the only safe place left in the world.
When the silence dragged on and it became clear she wasn’t going to fill it, he only gave a small, indifferent shrug and lifted the glass to his lips, the sip slow enough to feel intentional.
“Very well,” he murmured at last, his tone light on the surface but threaded with a note she couldn’t quite decipher.
Alethea frowned, which seemed to amuse him further.
“Something troubling you?” he finally asked.
Her brows knit tighter. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. “You aren’t going to... keep asking me what I know? F-force me to answer your questions?”
He remained maddeningly calm, his cool demeanor disarming. “I’ve no interest in brutalizing an innocent young woman.”
But Alethea was hardly innocent. She was the reason Goran was dead; the reason Philip Rodion was rotting in those dungeons; the reason her father?—
“But I know things,” she said, confusion pulling her mouth into a hard line.
“I’m certain you do.” Nakir’s smirk deepened as he regarded her over the rim of his cup, something glinting in his eyes that unsettled her further.
“Aren’t I... your enemy?”
Enemy.Funny, how the word rang hollow when she couldn’t stop tracking the glass at his lips or the thoughts that came unbidden with every swallow.
“Are you?” His tone didn’t waver.
