Chapter Ten
There are exactly three seconds between Rook saying those words and me moving.
Caden catches my arm.
Not hard. Not restraining. Just his hand around my wrist and the particular steadiness of someone who needs me to hear one thing before I do what I am about to do.
"She is not hurt," he says. "Rook. Tell her."
Rook looks at me. "She walked in on her own feet. She is in the main hall. Aldric has not touched her."
I breathe.
"Yet," I say.
"Yet," Caden agrees, and I appreciate that he does not dress it up. "Which means we have a window. But Sara, we walk in there right, not right now. Ten seconds. Give me ten seconds to think."
I give him ten seconds.
He gives me thirty seconds of actual thinking compressed into ten, which I can see happening behind his eyes. The calculat
