She glared. An overwhelming desire to lash out at him seared through her, followed by one to run. But he was right. She was trapped. “I’m not a thief.” She wasn’t up for trade.
The seneschal reached into the drawer beside them and drew out the letter she’d left in his desk. Nim’s resolve crumbled. There was no coming back from a written threat.
The letter was addressed to him. With her seal. In her hand.
He cracked the wax seal then flicked open the parchment with one hand.
Nim’s eyes closed for a long moment, the words echoing through her mind: If you want to see your watch again, meet me on the square beneath the banners at midnight.
“Extortion,” he said, making no effort to pin down the beginnings of a smirk. “From a woman who doesn’t make bargains.” He dropped the letter onto the desk beside the timepiece. “Take the watch. It doesn’t matter to me. It won’t be enough to draw me out.”
Her gaze flicked to the timepiece, but she didn’t make a move. It was a trick. It had to have been.
“Do you know why they want something personal?” he asked.
Her eyes came back to his. His jaw was square and shadowed, his mouth a solemn line. She did not know. She wanted to know.
“It’s how they work the theurgy to draw someone back.”
“Back,” she heard herself say. “Back to the Trust. You’re saying…” She shook her head, shifting as far as she was able from him and from the watch. “If they would use that thing to try to bring you to them, why would you give it to me?” Why would you give up your freedom?
He leaned toward her. “Because it won’t work. I’ve never become attached to material things. None of it matters.”
She gestured disbelievingly to the room, a space filled with rich treasures, artwork, sculpture, and trinkets from far-off lands.
The seneschal’s hand shifted on the desk beside her, trapping her from edging any farther away. “Gifts to a man of the king. All for show.” His tone echoed the import: none of it matters. “That watch will not give your keeper what he wants. This will not end tonight.”
Heat rose to her cheeks, and she turned her face from him. Her keeper, he’d said. Because Nim belonged to the Trust.
“He wants you to think you’ve done this on your own. That you’ve decided to accept his tasks to buy your freedom. But you suspect, deep down, that there’s more,” Warrick said.
Her gaze snapped to his.
“He’s been training you, I’ll wager. Giving you tasks that fit so well with what you needed to reach your mark tonight—such a high and dangerous post surrounded by guard and law.” The blood drained from her face. That much, she’d considered, but she certainly hadn’t expected to hear it from her mark. “How long?” he asked her. “A year? More? How many incidents in the kingdom were created simply to cover your tracks? Fires, deaths, floods, all to hide any trace of a thief in training. Of a lady meant to spoil the seneschal of Inara.”
Nim’s stomach dropped. “You’re lying,” she whispered. Her gaze fell to his waist in an accusation. He’d stolen the key from her and was teasing her with discussion of her keeper, trying to tie her to a bargain when he was the very man who held her trapped. “You’ll never let me free.”
He straightened. “Lying is for cowards. I have nothing to fear.” He let his fingers slide from her waist but gave her no space beyond the sliver of moonlight between them. “You can take nothing from me. Why would I need to lie—to cover anything of myself? I’m bare to you, my lady.”
She stared at him, incredulous.
He held his hand wide. “The bargain. I hand you to the king, or you become my agent.”
Chapter 6
Nim stared at the man, certain she’d lost touch with her senses, as any sort of reasonable existence seemed to have floated well out of reach. “A bargain,” she said, apparently out of touch, too, with a word that she’d so often despised. There was a possibility that the whole thing was some elaborate trap, but she could not fathom how or why Calum could have maneuvered an agent of the king to be involved. Nim wasn’t important enough to warrant attention from a king, not even for her ties to the Trust. She was trapped, well and truly, but not by the Trust’s deceit. She was caught by a man of flesh and bone.
He stood only inches from her, his gaze intense, his presence enormous. He’d snatched her wrist with the speed of a viper, and she could still feel the pressure of it, how easily he could have snapped the fragile bone. But he hadn’t. He’d only kept her still. And though he’d released first her wrist and then her hip, he still had her pinned beneath his gaze—beneath the pressure of his threat.
A bargain. The words she’d written in her letter echoed again. She’d been a fool to think that she might persuade him, that she could have outmaneuvered a man of his station with threats and trades. Calum had known she would never retrieve the watch without being caught—and somehow, she’d landed in a mess more tangled, because the seneschal’s offer was not the sort of trade that dealt with material things.
If she accepted it, she would again be contracted for her freedom, no longer solely from her bindings to the Trust but from the threat of imprisonment. Or worse, the seneschal’s words reminded her.
“What are your terms?” Her voice was stronger than she expected, but she felt no pride in it. She’d lost everything. It was only a matter of dealing with consequences.
He crossed his arms. “You do everything I say, and I don’t hand you over to the king.”
She stared up at him. “Those are entirely appalling terms.”
One of his sturdy shoulders lifted in a shrug, and Nim wondered at Margery’s description of him being graceful. Beneath dark hair, he was all sharp angles, the lines of his body more power than grace. It was hard not to be entirely aware of him with the man so near. “I don’t make bargains,” she said again, “and certainly not open-ended ones.”
“So you choose the king’s punishment.” He straightened, adjusting the sleeve of his shirt as if preparing to call for the king, despite there being no cuff or jacket present at his wrist.
Nim pressed her eyes closed for a horrible moment. “Of course I don’t choose the king’s punishment.”
“There is no third choice. It is the king or it is the bargain.”
Her anger flared. “Do you always speak with such condescension?”
“Yes. How else is one to know of my superiority?”
Nim gritted her teeth. “Your fancy dress, perhaps. I hear you’ve jeweled buttons and metal pins to cover your jacket and robes. A silver coronet upon your head.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, and he mock-bowed toward her in his flimsy undershirt. It brought him too close.
“How can you expect me to bargain with a stranger?” She knew practically nothing of him. He could have been worse than Calum. “How could I possibly trust you?”
His expression melted into something entirely solemn, his voice low. “I’m bare to you. I vow to only speak the truth to you.”
A strange surety accompanied his words, a sensation that told her as plain as a pikestaff that the seneschal was no mere man. He held power beyond his station—he had magic. Like the Trust. Nim’s fingers were suddenly scrambling for purchase as she tried to back away from him over the top of the desk. She was half across when her feet, caught in the tangle of her cloak from the floor, resisted her frantic jerk to get away, and she lost her balance and tumbled over the other side. The seneschal did not save her.