The Curse Between Us

Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

Seraphine's POV

The room Caelum had given me was nothing like my room back at the Vale manor.

My room at home was cold. Stone walls, a small window that let in more wind than light, a bed that had never quite felt like it belonged to me. I had spent years making the room look comfortable, filling the shelves with books and covering the floor with rugs I had bought myself because nobody else thought to.

This room was warm.

I stood in the middle of it for a moment after the maid closed the door behind her.

Then I crossed to the window, sat down on the cushioned seat, and pulled off both my gloves.

I did it slowly, the way I always did when I was alone and certain nobody was watching.

I held both hands out in front of me, palms up, and let the cool air from the window gaps move across my bare skin.

Outside, the Ashford gardens were quiet and dark, lit by a row of low iron lanterns along the stone path below.

I breathed in.

The air here was clean. Sharper than home, with a coolness to it that i liked. I hadn't expected to like anything about this place. I had prepared myself to find it ugly, or cold, or at least easy to dismiss.

It would have been more convenient if I had.

I let my head rest against the window frame and closed my eyes for a moment.

And then, completely without my permission, my mind went straight back to dinner.

The way he had watched me across the table. Those gold-flecked eyes moving to my face every time I looked down at my plate, steady and unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be and nothing more interesting to look at.

And then when I looked up and caught him watching me, the way he looked back down at his own plate so calmly, like he hadn't just been staring.

I felt warmth creep up the back of my neck.

Seraphine. What has come over you?

I sat up straight and pressed the back of my hand against my cheek. It was warm. I was actually blushing, sitting alone in a bedroom in the enemy's house, blushing over a man I had arrived here specifically to destroy.

I stood up, went to my bag, and started unpacking.

The clothes took up almost no space. My father had been serious about travelling light, so I had three changes of clothes, a pair of boots I had tucked in along the side, and underneath all of it, taking up most of the actual room in the bag, my books.

There were six of them, all old, all heavy, all held together with care because some of the spines had started to crack from years of being opened and closed and opened again. I had been collecting them since I was seventeen.

They were all about the same two things. The war and the curse.

I stacked them on the shelf nearest the bed and ran my fingers across their spines. These books were the most honest friends I had. They didn't lie to me, they didn't protect me from difficult truths.

Then I remembered the necklace.

I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket, which was folded across the foot of the bed, and pulled it out. The thin chain pooled in my palm, the small pendant catching the firelight.

I had looked at it a dozen times since Daemon pressed it into my hand in the dark corridor two nights ago, and every time it looked slightly different depending on the angle and the light.

I turned the necklace over in my fingers and thought about him the way I always thought about him when I was somewhere new and uncertain. He had been my closest friend since we were fourteen years old, which was the year he arrived at the Vale manor as a newly recruited guard and I threw a book at his head because he walked into the library without knocking.

He had picked the book up, read the back cover, and handed it to me with his opinion on it. We had been arguing about books ever since.

His story was a complicated one. His mother was a Vale woman who had left the clan before he was born. His father was an Ashford. He had grown up not knowing either of those things properly, just knowing that he had the touch, the same quiet, dangerous ability I had, though his version was less lethal and more like a slow illness that spread through contact.

People hadn't suspected he was an Ashford because of it. They assumed his touch came from Vale blood through his mother and left it at that.

When they found out the truth, they wanted to kill him.

I thought about that night, the way I had heard the noise from the guard post and ran across the courtyard in the dark, the way I had put myself physically between Daemon and the three guards who had been sent to deal with him. I had taken my gloves off that night too. The guards had backed away. My father had been furious and also, I think, quietly impressed, which was the closest thing to approval he ever showed me.

He exiled Daemon instead of killing him.

That was the compromise I had fought for and won, and I had watched Daemon walk out through the Vale gates with one bag and no goodbye from anyone except me.

He had turned back once at the gate and looked at me for a long moment. Then he had nodded, just once, and walked away into the dark.

I had not seen him since. Until two nights ago in the corridor, appearing out of nowhere the way he always did.

I looked down at the necklace and noticed for the first time that the pendant wasn't just a pendant. There was a seam around the edge of it. Thin, nearly invisible, but definitely there.

I pressed my thumbnail into it.

It clicked open like a tiny locket.

Inside was a small piece of paper no bigger than my thumb. I unfolded it carefully. On it, drawn in very fine ink, was a symbol. A heart shape, but not a simple one. More like two curved lines folding into each other and meeting in the middle, with a small mark at the center that looked almost like a lock.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I put the necklace down on the bed and sat very still, because something in the back of my mind was making a quiet, insistent noise.

I had seen that symbol before.

I was sure of it. In this manor.

While walking around the ground floor earlier while Caelum dealt with the council aftermath, I had moved through a section of the east wing that I hadn't been able to properly map yet, and I had passed something on a wall, or a door, I couldn't remember exactly, and my eyes had moved over it and then moved on because there had been too much to take in at once.

I picked up the necklace again and looked at the symbol.

I needed to find it.

I put my gloves back on, tucked the necklace around my neck under the collar of my dress, and left the room.

The east wing at night was a different place from the east wing in the afternoon.

The guards that had been posted at the corridor junctions during the day were fewer now, and the ones that remained were stationed at the outer doors rather than the inner passages. I moved quietly, keeping close to the wall, taking the route I had memorized during the day.

The hallway I was looking for was at the far end of the wing. The floor was different here, older stone, rougher, like this part of the manor had been built before the rest of it and never fully renewed. And the paintings here were strange.

I slowed down, looking at them properly. They lined both sides of the corridor, dozens of them.

I stopped in the middle of the corridor.

The floor beneath my feet gave a small, low shudder. The ground shaking slightly,

I flinched but then comported myself immediately.

I kept walking.

The door was at the very end of the corridor. I stepped closer and held up the open locket.

The symbol matched perfectly.

I reached out and wrapped my hand around the door's edge, looking for a way to open it, and my fingers found the seam and pressed it inward and the door shifted slightly under my hand.

I closed my fingers around it properly, my heart beating faster than I wanted it to.

"What are you doing there?”