Page 19 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

I’d just gotten the friendly soldier, whose sole purpose was to whittle my defenses down—to make me feel an ounce of comfort—and now, I was dealing with the bastard who was going to break me for fun.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re the warden here?”

He smirked. “In a way, yes. And I have a plethora of questions for you, Miss Wynn, but I’ll start with one I could not fathom your answer to.”

“Okay,” I intoned.

Given the state of my memory, I hoped this man was prepared to be disappointed.

“These are the most banal crown forgeries I’ve ever seen. Weather. Sightseeing. Clothing.” He scoffed as he unfolded the cloth parcel and tossed a stack of letters onto my cot. “Why were they found in your belongings?”

“Forgeries?” I stared at him before I snatched the pile and thumbed through them. As I thought, they were the letters I had packed from King Callum, my dreadfully betrothed, which begged the question of where the rest of my belongings were. “They were sent to me in Odessa, from Callum.”

The man cocked his head at me before he huffed, “When?”

“Over the last few months. My brother, the King of Odessa, arranged for my…” Goddess, I felt sick trying to say it, “betrothal, to…to your⁠—”

He held up a hand. “It didn’t take a genius to decipher what pretense was driving their contents.”

I nodded slowly, because what the fuck else was I supposed to do?

With every passing second, I was growing more and more confused, and I wasn’t confident this wasn’t just the depths of some messed-up dream. It didn’t help that my head still ached, especially when I tried to recall much of anything, and this warden was looking increasingly amused with me.

“And this…betrothal,” he said slowly, like he was rolling the word around on his tongue. “Is that why you were found farther away from Odessa than any of your god-touched people should ever be?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Yes, it was…”

He tutted as he leaned back on his meager stool, working his shoulders as if they were bothering him. “And she speaks of her trespassing with such nonchalance.”

He was officially out of his fucking mind.

“Trespassing? We were doing nothing of the sort.” Despite how my stomach had churned again, I sat up a little straighter. “The Wastes are unruled.”

A patronizing smile spread across his face. “Yes, they are, Miss Wynn. A fair argument, if the remnants of your camp hadn’t been spread across a lovely little intersection of the Wastes, Lastlight, and Grimmoria.”

“That’s not right,” I muttered, more to myself than anything, as I pressed my palms to my eyes. “No…we never…”

While my memory didn’t feel reliable, I did not have a single recollection of spending any substantial time in the Wastes, never mind nearing Grimmoria or the fucking woods. I knew for a fact any route we mapped would have been clear around that terrifying expanse.

When I dropped my hands, he was watching me, his dark, angular brows raised in expectation.

“We didn’t cross the Wastes. I’m sure of it.”

He huffed, but it rolled into a half-hearted chuckle as he shrugged. “I’m not sure how else I can spell it out for you. The sprites found you—still smoldering, I might add—crawling through the roots of the ashclaws on the edge of the woods in Grimmorian territory without an escort. Conveniently, you were at one of the only sections our border wall does not extend through, which makes you a trespasser, Miss Wynn.”

Flickers of knotted and warped black boughs lit up in my mind, but I had more pressing concerns. “Where is the rest of my party being held? They’ll tell you the same thing I am.”

I felt uneasy asking about the fate of my travel companions, especially after how my first jailer dodged that question as if I’d come at him like a bat from a mountain cave. But if anyone could corroborate my recount or shed more light on my struggling memory, it would be them, especially Streja.

“Well…” He clearly hesitated, all but validating fears I had not yet fully defined, but he didn’t get to elaborate. The steel door from earlier gave another grinding protest only a breath before noise echoed off the stone walls.

It garnered all my warden’s attention.

“Oh, no. No. Absolutely not,” came a masculine and incredibly annoyed rumble.

Something came next that barely sounded like words, just a high-pitched jumble I didn’t catch, but it made my warden huff a laugh, and the low richness of that noise echoed off a strange place in my chest.

“Eilir,” the male voice bemoaned. “I say this with all the care in Irica, but please, fuck off for a bit?”