Page 41 of Gilded Curses
“What’s with the town?” she asked. “Why the houses and the sliding figures?”
“Just another part of the game,” Clive said. “I bet it’s creepy when you don’t know what’s happening.”
“It is,” Sahira said.
She crossed her arms over her chest as she contemplated everything they’d revealed tonight. She didn’t trust these three. This could all be a new game they were playing, one the Elites were aware of, but she didn’t see what other options they had than to try to find those stones.
“Are they listening to us in the castle? Are there symbols in the rooms?” she asked.
She’d done a cursory search for trapdoors and hadn’t seen any symbols in the process, but she hadn’t taken as much time as she should have to examine every centimeter of her room.
“No,” Alda said. “The Elite all live within those walls; if they start spying on each other, it would be revealed, as there’s only one place where you can listen to everything happening throughout the towns. The symbols are all interconnected.”
“Could Sheree have put the symbols in there when you readied the rooms for us?”
“No. It would have taken too long to carve them and connect them to the system. Plus, she watched over us like a hawk, and I never saw her move out of any of the doorways.”
Sahira wanted to believe the woman, but she would tear her room apart the first chance she got and tell all the others about this development.
“Okay,” Sahira said. “Then we’ll try to stay on Desmond’s good side, and hopefully, he’ll decide to keep us around for a little longer if we do.”
“It’s not Desmond you have to worry about; it’s her,” Clive said. “She’s the one with all the power, and the only Elite left who helped establish this realm. She’ll do everything she can to keep us here and under her control.”
“Who, Sheree?”
“Yes.”
Sahira hadn’t expected this revelation. “But Desmond acts as if he rules this land. Did she cede some of her power to him when they married?”
Aurora released a bitter laugh. “They’re not married.”
“What?”
“That must have been something they came up with to tell you, another mind game to play,” Clive said. “But they’re not married. She’s the one with the true power and the only one who knows where those stones are.”
“Sheree is the true evil here,” Alda said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Sahira climbed the ivy and returned to her room. Once there, she worked as quietly as she could to search it. She pulled all the clothes out of the closet, ran her fingers over the wall, and examined the white brick.
She looked under her bed, lifted the mattress, and examined the floorboards before doing the same to the bathroom. Once satisfied that she’d covered everything, including the sparse furniture, she went to the door separating her room from Orin’s.
She undid the bolt on her side of the door and hesitated before knocking. According to the clock on the wall, she was only in the garden for less than half an hour. She’d spent another hour going over her room.
He’d stayed up late with the dagadon and was drinking when she left him. He was most likely sound asleep, but that’s not what stayed her hand.
She didn’t care if she woke him… she cared there might be someone else in the room with him.
He hadn’t been with anyone else since she arrived in the Cursed Realm, but that could change. If he opened the door to reveal another woman in there, she might lose it.
She’d had about all she could take in this realm and couldn’t handle that blow on top of everything else. However, she had to tell someone about everything she’d learned, and since Zeth and Elsa were across the hall, and the brownies were on the other side of Orin, that left only him.
Plus, he was the one she wanted to discuss this with. She cared for all the others, but he was something more to her.
She couldn’t analyze what it meant that he was the first one she sought to turn to with this information. The first one she always wanted to turn to.
She was aware of what it meant for her. The only problem was, he was so fucked in the head, it would most likely end in disaster for them.
