Chapter Thirty

“Cece, you don’t truly know her,” Andrei pled, still stuck on the stairwell because Colvin had not released Bryn and, as horrible and selfish as he was being, Andrei couldn’t ignore his friend’s plight. “I know what she’s capable of. You are clinging to a murderer!”

“What murder?” Cecily frowned. “Are you talking about your awful little friend? If so, then I know more about him than I would have ever wanted to and I’m not sorry he was executed!”

This time it was Andrei’s turn to look at Cecily like he’d suddenly been confronted by a stranger with a friend’s face. “He was a child!” he said, totally aghast. “A playful child who didn’t deserve to lose his life to a capricious and evil girl because he played a couple of pranks on her!”

Mira needed to stop this, but the burning black sword in Colvin’s hand kept drawing her entire focus away. Her heart was pounding in her chest as her long suppressed hopes gave way to a new certainty.

“Playful?” Cecily’s lip curled and she stepped a little closer into Mira’s side. Any closer and she’d start to look like a small dog barking through their owner’s legs. “You call leaving dead animals in someone’s room a prank? Or the threatening notes he wrote on her mirror? Deliberately spooking a horse so it would throw her? I won’t even speak of what he did to her face!”

Dead animals? That phrase successfully diverted Mira’s focus as she got a brief flash of a dead squirrel laying on a lavender bedspread and the words ‘snooty bitch’ scrawled across a vanity mirror in what might well have actually been the animal’s blood. Gross. How had she not gotten that with the earlier download?

“Cece,” she said quietly as she placed her hand over her sister’s where Cecily was latched onto her. “That’s enough.”

However, Cecily wasn’t hearing it. Either she’d gotten too much momentum or she’d been sitting on this feeling for too long to stop now. “You think I wouldn’t ask around after hearing someone died? Violet wasn’t even his only victim! There were four girls in town that he was harassing when you weren’t visiting her and he wasn’t even disciplined when their families complained!”

“That’s not true,” Andrei took a step back, a little up the staircase. “I would know.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“You want to talk about evil?” Cecily told him. “What’s more evil? The man who commits the crime or the fool who ignores him?”

“E–even if that were the case,” Andrei countered even though Mira could tell that he was badly shaken. “Violet had no right to have him killed. He should have had a trial!”

“Violet didn’t have your valet killed,” Vesper said, drawing everyone’s attention to where she’d just come in through the front door. She was flanked on either side by the knights who usually escorted her home from the Crown Princess’s offices. They did not look any happier than she did, but they weren’t automatically moving to defend Andrei or Bryn either. “I did.”

“You?” Andrei said, stunned.

“Your servant attacked my baby sister in full view of my stepmother, two of my servants, and even admitted to it in front of the guards who arrested him,” Vesper said as she pulled her gloves off, finger by finger. “I had already given your household one chance to save the child’s life that very morning when he was overheard threatening her outside her bedroom after dark and they squandered it. Your steward chose to lock him up in a closet rather than send him back to town under guard, but someone…” she dwelled on the word someone with enough force to make it clear that she knew who, “…let him out and he decided to retaliate against Violet by assaulting her in our family’s private garden. If you think that I would let a second incident pass then you are shamefully naive, your highness.”

Vesper glanced at the royal guards. “Gentlemen, please take the fourth prince and his escort into custody. His sister wishes to see them both within the hour.”

Colvin dropped Bryn’s arm and kicked him over onto his side in front of the royal guards. One knelt down to help him up, but the other two converged on Andrei like a pair of stone-faced bookends. He didn’t look much like a prince anymore as they frogmarched him out of the house, but then again he wasn’t putting up much of a fight. Too much of his focus had turned inwards.

Cecily started crying the second the door closed behind their unwanted guests. She just planted her face in the back of Mira’s shoulder and started sobbing as Mira tried awkwardly to pet her hair from a terrible angle, while not looking in Colvin’s direction for fear she’d say something she couldn’t take back in front of outsiders.

Ginger came and peeled Cecily off Mira while Anna took charge of Mira. Colvin hovered close, but Mira couldn’t find words for him until they’d reached the top landing.

“If our manservant sleeps outside of the house, there must be a way for the girls to alert him if they need help inside,” she rasped just as Anna was about to usher her into her bedroom. She glanced in Colvin’s direction, but could only make her eyes go as high as his shoes. “See to it, please.”

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“It will be done, my lady,” Colvin said quietly. His tone was impossible to read. Earlier today she would have sworn he didn’t know what shame was, but now—well, maybe he did. Mira was certainly ashamed of her lack of foresight. She’d lived through enough violence that she should have known better.