*Isla*
That was certainly not what I was expecting!
After a lovely dinner and dancing with the handsome king, he had invited me back to his room so that we could get to know one another better.
I had fully expected this to be the night when I began to fulfill my duties.
Now, I am back in my own bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the mirror above the dresser across from me, trying to process what I’ve just seen.
What the hell happened to Zabrina?
All I know is that she said something about the maid. But I don’t know what she’s talking about.
From the looks of all of that blood, I’m imagining that someone had to have been hurt pretty badly.
Poppy opens the door between our rooms and walks out slowly, peeking around the door like she’s afraid the king is in here and she’s interrupting something.
“Hi,” I say to her in a solemn voice. I’m not sure why I’m so upset. It’s not as if I wanted to breed with the king anyway. I need to remember that. The longer I can put that off, the better I’ll be.
Right?
“Well?” Poppy says, her eyes wide. “Did you… have fun?” She wiggles her eyebrows at me, and I know that she is implying something.
“I had fun,” I said with a shrug. “But… we didn’t have fun, if that’s what you mean.”
She laughs, and I don’t know what to say. “But did you have fun?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “We had fun, but then something happened, and he had to bring me back here. Well, Beta Seth had to bring me back here.”
Poppy comes over to the bed and sinks down next to me. “Why?” she asks, and it is as if we are just two girlfriends, not a maid and the woman she is helping. It’s still difficult for me to think of myself as anyone important, but I do kind of find it odd that Poppy is having the same problem.
Still, she has asked a question, one I should probably try to answer.
Somehow.
“Well, we were headed… down the hallway when we saw Zabrina, and she was having a problem.” I purposely left out the part where we were going back to King Maddox’s room to do… whatever we were going to do.
Poppy’s eyes widen. “A problem? Like what? Keeping herself out of other people’s business? Avoiding interrupting people? Trying not to sabotage another woman’s date?”
I want to laugh at her because I know she’s in a tizzy, but when I tell her what happened, or at least, what I saw of what happened, I know she will lose her mind.
“No, she was covered in blood,” I explain.
Poppy’s eyes widen. “Blood?”
“Yes.”
“Covered?”
“Yes.”
“Covered… in blood?”
I look back and forth from one side of the room to the other a few times. “That’s right.”
“Wait!” Poppy leans forward and puts both of her hands on my knees. “Zabrina was in the hallway… covered in blood?”
“This is what I am telling you.” I can only stare at her.
She stares back for several seconds before she gasps loudly and covers her mouth with both of her hands.
It makes me jump a bit.
“Miss Isla!” she shouts. “Why in the world was Zabrina covered with blood?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But she said something about a maid. Now, I don’t know if it was the same maid that was accused of slipping something into the king’s drink or not—”
“Well, it would have to be!” Poppy leaps up off the bed, pacing back and forth. “This is… unbelievable!”
The only reason I know much at all about the maid is because Poppy has a very good ear for gossip and comes back often to tell me everything. King Maddox didn’t tell me nearly as much about the situation with Zabrina’s hired girl as Poppy found out from the rest of the staff.
Not that I necessarily trust everything Poppy tells me. I am fairly certain that the maid who works in the office in the dungeon doesn’t really have three eyes, a hump on her back the size of a camel, and a total of fourteen toes.
But then… we are shifters. Perhaps she got mixed up coming back to her human form….
“This is unbelievable!” Poppy declares again.
“I heard you the first time,” I tell her.
“I need to go find out what has happened.” She is already headed to the door without me saying it’s okay if she goes.
“It’s okay if you go,” I call after her.
“Really! I wonder if Trudy and Anastasia know about this!” She is out the door before I can answer.
That doesn’t stop me from responding. “If they don’t, I’m sure they will soon enough.”
Trudy is the maid who cleans Beta Seth’s room, I am told, and Anastasia is responsible for King Maddox’s room. They didn’t like Poppy until recently because she was a simple housemaid, but now that she is taking care of someone “important” like they are, she is in their inner circle.
If I have done nothing else since I arrived at the castle, I have at the very least elevated Poppy’s social standing.
Perhaps that makes missing my family and being put into the situation where I am supposed to carry the king’s child all worth it?
Somehow… I don’t think so.
I decide to prepare for bed. It has been a long day, and I am tired.
I go to my dresser and pull out a pink silky nightgown that looks comfortable and the matching panties that go with it. In the bathroom, it takes me several minutes to get out of the dress since the zipper is nearly unreachable, but after some contorting, I finally manage to get it down.
By now, I am exhausted. I finish all of my bathroom rituals—now that I belong to the king, I have to take better care of my skin, Poppy says—and then go to bed.
And all I can see is Zabrina’s bloody hands and the way the crimson liquid covered her dress.
I don’t know what happened to the maid, but it can’t have been good.
In the back of my mind, I have to wonder… is Zabrina capable of killing someone?
How badly would she have to hate someone to slash them up with a knife?
I suppose a person would have to hate another person an awful lot to do such a thing to them.
That makes me wonder… how much does Zabrina hate me?
My breath catches in my throat, and I feel a nervous tension growing in my stomach.
I don’t know how much Zabrina hates me.
But I can imagine… it’s quite a lot.
* * *
*Maddox*
“Why in the world did you let her down here in the first place?” I ask the guard who was on duty when Alva died. I have been questioning him for about ten minutes and haven’t really gotten anywhere. It is as if the last few hours are all a blur to him.
He is crying. “I don’t know, Your Majesty,” he says between sobs. “I messed up. I messed up so bad!” He bursts into another fit of tears, and I look at Seth, shaking my head.
We are in the office in the dungeon, a place that the head jailor usually does his work in, though he’s gone home hours ago now. He only works during the day. At night, it’s our rule to have one guard per prisoner and then two near the bottom of the stairs leading to the dungeon and two at the top.
All five of these guards should’ve been able to stop Zabrina, but the other four said she had a convincing story that she’d gotten permission from me to visit her maid.
This one has said the same thing, but he is the last protection the prisoner had, so I’m not sure why he would think I had changed my mind and it was okay for her to have a visitor.
He could’ve used the mind-link to ask me but did not.
My wolf is restless; he smells a rat.
“Larry, for the love of the Moon Goddess,” Seth says, handing the man a tissue from a box on top of the desk, “you’ve got to stop crying so we can get this over with. No one is saying you’re in trouble yet, but if you don’t stop blubbering and answer the damn questions, Alpha King Maddox is going to throw you in the cell you were watching!”
That gets Larry’s attention. His eyes widen. “The one with the blood all over?”
I sigh. “Yes, that one.” Shaking my head, I look at Seth again. We’ve had the blood cleaned up. Grunda, the dungeon maid, wasn’t too happy to get out of bed to do it, but she hobbled out anyway. Poor old dear… such a fright, what with her unsightly wart in the middle of her forehead, her hump… and all of those extra toes. But she’s a good worker.
Larry breathes in deeply and finds a way to control his tears. “She said that she had your permission.”
“You’ve told me that,” I remind him. “But why did you believe her?”
“She was very convincing,” he says. Then, he clears his throat and says, “And… well… she has… boobs.”
My forehead crinkles. “What’s that now?”
“Boobs!” he shouts. “She has them! And they’re big and bouncy, and well, when she leaned over to tell me that she had your permission to go in, I saw… most of them.”
“The way you say that, it sounds like she has more than two.” Seth is staring at him the same way that I am.
“No, no, just two… big, round, juicy ones, with hard nip—”
“All right!” I say. “So she flashed you? That’s how she won you over?”
He shrugs. “I was… distracted. And she promised me dessert. I didn’t know if she meant food from the basket or… something else.”
I inhale deeply, hold it for a few counts, and let it go. “Larry, she is the daughter of an Alpha, and you are a prison guard in the dungeon of a castle. Did you honestly think that she was interested in you?” Larry is not a bad-looking young man, I suppose, but he’s not strikingly handsome, and I know Zabrina. She would never want to have anything to do with Larry romantically.
All he can say is, “But… boobs.”
“So a woman is dead because you haven’t seen a pair of tits up close recently?” Seth blurts out.
That sends Larry into a fit of crying again, and I am done. “All right,” I say. “I will leave your complete punishment for breaking protocol to Reginald when he returns to duty in the morning. In the meantime, Beta Seth please escort Larry to one of the holding cells.”
“You’re locking me up?” he shouts, sniffling back more tears.
“For the time being, yes,” I say. “All of the guards that were on duty and fucked this up are locked up.” I stand.
“But King Maddox!” Larry begins.
Tired and irritated that my night has gone so awry, I say, “Don’t bother, Larry. I have my reputation for a reason.”
He shuts up very quickly when he remembers all of the rumors he has heard about my cruelty.
Most of them aren’t completely true….
I check the time on my watch and head upstairs. It’s past 1:00 in the morning now that I’ve spoken to all of these people, and it’s far too late for me to call on Isla. Disappointment settles around me.
I was looking forward to getting to know her even better.
The memory of touching her skin while we were dancing, of kissing her neck, floods me with want, and I feel myself begin to stiffen up despite the gory scenes I’ve seen tonight.
I head down the hallway, back to my quarters, deciding I can figure out more regarding the maid tomorrow. But for now… it’s clear to me that Alva did not slit her own neck.
And since there were only two other people present, it was either Larry—or Zabrina.
He is locked up, and her room is heavily guarded. I have told her it is for her own safety, but that’s not the case.
I hope she doesn’t find a way to beguile those guards and get out of her room.
I’ve seen enough blood for one night.
Besides, I can’t think of anyone else Zabrina hates enough to kill.