Page 10 of The Assassin's Promise
The wordchildwas a blade in my heart.
“I’m not a child.” I took a deep breath to regain my calm, but that small act almost caused my breasts to pop out of my dress. In the six months I’d been here, I’d grown two inches taller and quite a few inches wider in certain places. Thorn’s eyes never dropped to them, though.
Goddess, hedidthink I was a child.
“You’re not that much older than me. We could… be together.” Honestly, I had no idea how old he was. His unlined face didn’t mark him as over thirty, but his eyes were heavy with the years he had lived.
“You’re sixteen.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m your teacher.”
“You’re my friend,” I replied. “You’re the only one who knows what I am, knows I’m broken, and I lo—” His hand was over my mouth.
“You are not broken, Roya. But you are overstepping right now. You need to leave.”
Quickly, he bundled up the rest of the stew and potatoes and put it in the bowl, pushing me out the door with it still steaming in my hands.
I couldn’t eat anything; my stomach was filled with a hot mix of embarrassment, disappointment, and unrequited lust. I made it back to the barracks, where the one trainee who ever spoke to me kindly, Niall, was alone in the boys’ room.
“Here.” I thrust the bowl of stew at him.
“Where’d this come from?” He was suspicious, as he should be. Some trainees “practiced” their new herblore on each other as pranks, careful to use non-lethal plants, of course. Any killing would result in immediate execution.
“I made it.” He gobbled it down. I had never been one to prank, and our friendship, while not deep, was solid.
That night, I was hauled into the Guildmaster’s office on suspicion of poisoning Niall and Thorn. My red peppers had been fine, but the leaves of that bush were toxic.
Niall never forgave me.
When he recovered from eating my stew, Thorn kept quiet about my truncated declaration of love.
But he never let me live down the stew.
I took shallow breaths of sour mash, wishing I had truly poisoned him back then. If I’d known how he would betray me someday, I would have done it without hesitation.
Well, maybesomehesitation.
“Thorn? What are you doing in Verdan City?” I recognized the harsh voice; it was a man named Ash, one of the leading Guild assassins. His throat had been half-slit in Mirren years before.
“I was given an assignment by the Guildmaster,” Thorn replied. He wasn’t speaking as quietly as he could, and alarm bells started ringing in my mind. He wanted me to hear this. “Before her last test, the Guildmaster asked me to take Roya to a warlord named Wulfram in Starlak after graduation. She fled before I could do so. I’ve been trying to retrieve her, but your trainees have been making a hash of it all. The Queen of Death is displeased, and has set her crew on any Guild in the city.”
“I heard you fled, Thorn. That you refused to do the task.”
“Why would I?” Thorn scoffed. “There’s no girl in the world worth my life.”
Ash’s voice got closer, and I knew he was looking for any sign of me. “Was it a mission, for the girl? I trained her in bladework myself. She was quick, clever.” His voice got lower. “You can’t fool me, Thorn. I know you covered for her in the forest. I saw the signs.”
Thorn’s answer was almost too soft to make out. “You know I can’t tell you what my mission was. But what would you do if you got an order not to kill a trainee, but to sell them into slavery? To deliver a graduate of our Guild, in exchange for money, knowing that student would be imprisoned, forgotten, expunged from the Guild’s records, and brutalized for the rest of her life?”
All I could hear was my own heart thumping wildly. Thorn had sabotaged my test to get me away from the Guildmaster’s plan? He had failed me… to save me?
Ash’s voice came from directly above my head. “Then I would say it’s time for you to step up, Thorn. Haven’t you thought about being the Guildmaster for years now? There are many who’d support you.”
My heart stuttered. Was Ash talking about overthrowing the Guildmaster because of me?
I regretted all the horrible thoughts I’d had about the Guild now. Maybe they weren’t all rotten. If Thorn and Ash were both on my side, maybe there was a hope I could find my way back into the fold.
My heart had just started to slow when I heard Thorn’s reply. “But you were never one of those, were you, Ash? You’re the Guildmaster’s puppet, through and through.”
Oh, Goddess. Thorn was in danger. I was on the verge of standing, ready to push the lid of the barrel off with brute force when suddenly, I could see in the dark.
