Diamond in the Rough - Vivienne Savage Page 0,2

the city watch would emerge emptyhanded.

2

The Chill of Death

When the weredragon returned to his charade, Rosalia had no choice but to watch him leave. She wanted to follow him upstairs to the shop. She ached to lurk in the shadowed alcoves of the storefront and protect him the way he had protected her since the morning of her aborted execution. For him, she would have killed a dozen more slayers in the same manner he would slay hundreds more guards to protect her. Thousands.

Taking a life wasn’t meant to be so easy. Rosalia knew this. Hadrian had verbally whipped the words into her from a young age when he’d put the first dagger in her hand and told her it was never to be used until all other methods of escape failed. If one was to be a thief, they were to become a master of subterfuge and an escape artist of the highest caliber to avoid leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.

While she knew she had failed him in that, there had been no way nonviolent way to discourage the slayers. She could have led them away to safety, but Xavier had relied upon her.

Slaughtering the slayers had no more troubled Rosalia than gutting a fish from the market. That troubled her. That it should prove so easy, and that in lieu of horror and remorse, she felt only a cool satisfaction that the weredragon was safe from the latest threat to endanger him.

The whole while that she held Xavier cradled against her lap, Rosalia waited for the emotion to catch up to her. She waited for the guilt to crash down, and she waited for the moment she realized blood would forever stain her hands.

Throughout her youth and years of stealing, she’d avoided bloodshed aside from the expected nicks and slices incurred during training at her former mentor’s behest, but she never took a life.

Over and over, Hadrian warned her that day would come, though he reminded her they were not assassins frequently. He had not trained her to murder, but he had instructed her in forms of combat designed to keep her alive. Sometimes, murder became a byproduct of survival.

For Xavier, she would do it again. After all, he’d murdered countless guards and many others for her on the morning of her scheduled execution. She imagined he’d slaughtered many more over the years of his long life. If the elvish queen was to be believed, her own mother had taken more lives than could be counted.

She had assassin’s blood in her veins.

Within minutes of being left to her own devices, she was pacing the underground and wondering what to do next. She needed a plan of action. She needed to map out her next moves because one wrong step could bring it all crashing down upon them again. It couldn’t have been by chance that the dragon slayers found his lair, and she had to believe there was the potential for others to come searching for them.

The answer to Rosalia’s quandary came on a sizzling bolt of insight, lancing into her thoughts with the force of a crossbow bolt: Adriano. She needed to catch up to him, not only to confirm that he was safe, but to uncover the navy’s next step and determine if the war with Ilyria had been properly crippled by Xavier’s mischief.

As she considered the route to the docks and how she would gain access to her friend, it occurred to her that her dragon lover would disapprove of her plan and speak of how unwise she would be to travel the streets in daylight.

It’d be more foolish to sit on her ass and wait for everything to be handed to her. Xavier knew that, too.

Which was why less than an hour later, she’d donned an ankle-length frock and veil to venture into the city under the protection of silk and a prayer that the propriety of the city watch would be enough to protect her identity. Typically, veiled women were courtesans or women in mourning. Without her wristbow, armed only with a single knife concealed under the layers of her fine dress, she felt naked and exposed.

No matter how much he would have preferred she wait until he returned to full strength, Rosalia could not hide forever within the dragon’s subterranean hoard. She also couldn’t travel indefinitely via the underground network; her body was too large to squeeze through most of the Sewer Rats’ outlets to the surface. Those were