Page 40 of The Demon Prince

They’d all heard stories about towns who didn’t have that. Washing their clothing in the water was a risk that so few of them could afford to take. Unfortunately, that meant most of those towns had a lot of illness.

This castle definitely had a laundry room. It had to.

Squaring her shoulders, she marched through the eastern wing of the castle. She hadn’t been in this part very much, considering her own was in the western wing, and she chose to work in a clockwise search. Although she wasn’t nearly finished with any of the wings. This castle was so large it would take her more than a few days of exploration to see even one.

But she knew the kitchen was in the east wing. Which meant maybe that wing was meant more for servants than for visitors.

“This is the right way to go,” she muttered to herself.

And that was the other part of her problem. She was so lonely.

Gluttony didn’t speak to her in the middle of the night. He was just there when she woke and then gestured for her to move with a single flick of his fingers. She could see the hunger in his eyes, but that was for her blood. Not for her.

Then he left. With no thank you or how are you feeling, nothing at all. He just disappeared into the shadows of his castle and she was always so tired she never thought to follow him.

Strangely, it had left her feeling rather achy with a spot on her chest that refused to stop hurting, no matter how many times she rubbed at it.

The eastern wing was not as quiet as her own. She picked up on the crackling sound of a furnace hidden somewhere, likely the reason why the entire castle wasn’t as cold as a tomb. And there were a few scratching noises that she assumed were rats. Perhaps there was a room full of food, where Gluttony collected her meals only to place them in front of her door and race away before she could see him.

Rolling her eyes, Katherine adjusted the weight on her shoulders and continued forward until she heard the faint sound of bubbling.

She’d know that sound anywhere. Perhaps she was mistaken, but those sounded like burners and bubbling concoctions that she’d worked with in the almshouse. At least, a little. And there, that was absolutely the sound of glass clinking against glass.

Why would those sounds exist here? She couldn’t imagine he had a place for healing in this house of blood sacrifices, so...

Katherine changed her searching direction and went instead to the sounds. It took her a few times of pressing her ear against a door before she was relatively certain she had found the correct one. And then, gently, she eased the door open so no one would hear her.

It wasn’t an almshouse. It was a laboratory.

Jaw falling open, she stared into the room full of glass jars, beakers, winding glass tubes that rose and twisted through each other in intricate knots of bubbling, colored liquids that funneled and wove around each other.

The room was lit by electricity, much like Gluttony’s office. Naked bulbs hung from the ceiling and illuminated the entire room with very clear precision. It glinted off the glass of the tubing, and she wondered why there was so much of it.

She supposed he might have an alchemist working for him. Though she couldn’t imagine a reason for an alchemist to even be here. Gluttony had made it very clear that he didn’t think he could be cured. So there was no reason to have an alchemist on the premises.

Decorum entirely forgotten, she strode into the room with curiosity burning through her veins.

Katherine set her laundry on the floor so she didn’t knock into any important glass pieces, and then strode over to one of the nearby tables. There was more glass on this one, she thought, perhaps rejects of the research going on here.

At least, she could only assume. She had watched over the shoulder of the two alchemists who came into their almshouse to replace all the potions necessary to heal their patients. She had watched them avidly, wanting nothing more than to become like them.

The beakers on this table were full of a tar-like black substance that clearly was an experiment gone wrong. Those were usually thrown into the moors or the muck in the almshouse, so she was rather surprised to see them preserved here. In a jar, of all things.

Humming underneath her breath, she made her way from table to table, in the room that easily could have fit an entire crowd of people. Had he converted a ballroom into this space? But why?

And then, as she got closer to the back, she saw him.

Not an alchemist at all. But Gluttony himself.

He’d taken off his vest and dropped it on the floor as though the hand embroidered piece wasn’t worth the cost of an entire town here. He’d rolled his sleeves up, revealing long, pale forearms that flexed with each of his movements. Graceful fingers danced between the beakers, lifting one, letting a drop of liquid roll out before carefully placing it back where it had come from.

She could only stare at his broad back and tapered waist where he sat on a small, uncomfortable looking stool as he worked. Even now, the black waterfall of his hair had not a strand out of place.

But at least she’d seen it with dust covering that darkness. It made him seem a little more... real.

Swallowing hard, she told herself not to look at the veins on his forearms or the way their dark color seemed to ripple underneath his skin.

Katherine didn’t try to hide her presence. She didn’t have to. Her booted feet were loud, and the tell-tale thud, slide of her bad leg announced her presence even when she wanted to hide herself.

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