feel as if I have been chained to a water wheel and given a hard spin. “But why?”
“It is what makes me a good guardian. I enjoy keeping those around me happy. Even churlish, angry people.”
No. I do not believe that. It is yet some game he is playing. “And what of Margot?” We both grow still, her memory sitting between us as palpable as the marble column Count Angoulême leans against.
He eyes me warily. “What of her?”
“How was seducing her keeping her happy?”
A look of annoyance distorts his face. “Sweet Jesu, you are blind. She initiated the flirtation with me.”
“Because the convent ordered her to!”
He outright laughs at that. “Is that what she told you?” He shakes his head, then glances down at his hands, his face growing somber. “She was as unhappy as you were, but for a different reason. She was lonely. Missed her old life. Not the one at the convent that you missed, but the one before that. Before her father found out his wife had been unfaithful—with a god, no less!—and insisted her mother send her away. She missed the luxury of that life. It suited her. She wanted to be a lady, with all the privilege that came with it. She never saw the convent as an opportunity, but a punishment. And for her, it was.”
My heart feels stripped bare as he exposes the depths of Margot’s unhappiness, taking the bones of what I knew and dressing them with all the confidences she’d shared with him. That she never shared with me.
“Being my favorite was as close as she could get to that dream—and I would have let her keep it as long as she liked.”
No. My fists clench. He will not try to paint himself over with kindness. Not when I know how heinous a betrayal he has committed.
“You intimidated her, you know. For all that Margot looked down her nose at you, you made her feel lacking and inferior.”
His words not only rip open the faint scab that has formed over that wound, but pour salt into it. “How?” I whisper.
“Your sense of purpose, duty, your fierce commitment and loyalty. In contrast, she felt none of those things.”
“But she could have felt those things, too, if she chose!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Gen. She was never going to feel that way about anything. When you set a vine to a trellis, it becomes so entwined that the two cannot be separated. So it was with her and her earliest dreams. They could not be removed and replaced with new ones.”
His words make me want to burrow into the earth like a worm and hide from the world. “I do not know any other way to be,” I whisper, stricken.
“Of course you don’t. You were set to a different trellis when you were planted. But that trellis was better suited to the convent’s purpose.”
No, I realize. That trellis was the convent’s purpose. My mother encouraged my own wants and desires to grow along that framework rather than the foundation she could offer me.
Perhaps to pull me from my despairing thoughts, Angoulême looks to the grand salon. “Where is the prisoner?”
His words are so unexpected that it is all I can do not to gape at him.
“Do not look so surprised.”
I scowl and increase the pressure on the knife. “Why do you care what has happened to him? You left him for dead.”
His eyes shift to the ballroom behind me. “I had orders.”
When still I say nothing, he ignores the knife pressed against him and leans closer. “Tell me what has happened to him.”
“So you can report to the regent and she can set new men after him? I think not.”
“Do not be an idiot. She is why I couldn’t act. She was having me watched. Closely. But not you. I knew that her spies would follow me when I left. Why do you think there were no guards on the lower floor?”
“B-because he was in an oubliette that was impossible to escape from.” Heat rushes along my skin, as if my body understands before my mind does.
“Did you truly think I didn’t know where you disappeared to, all those times? In my own holding? I wanted you to free him. That was the plan all along.”
“Why?” I whisper, still not sure I believe what I am hearing.
“Because what they did was wrong. There are codes of conduct that were broken. And if that code does not mean anything, then we are all at