Notes in the Margin

The Grand Duke did not look like a male lead up close. He looked tired, and cold, and like a man counting the exits.

"Duchess," he said. He did not bow.

I had a list of everything he would say to me over the next eleven chapters. I had, in the carriage of my own panic, decided to do the one thing the original Seraphine never did.

I told him the truth.

Not all of it. Just enough to move the plot off its rails before chapter twelve could arrive on schedule.

"There's going to be a fire in the granary district," I said, "the night of the harvest festival. Three hundred people. It isn't an accident, and it isn't me, though everyone will say it was me." I watched his face. "I can prove it. But you have to not arrest me for the next nine days."

Silence. Snow ticked against the windows.

"Why," he said at last, "would I believe the woman the whole capital calls a viper?"

Because, I didn't say, I edited you. Because I know your sister's name and the thing you did at the river and the reason you can't sleep. Because I have your whole arc in a black clip in my desk and I am so tired of watching good people burn for someone else's tidy ending.

"Because in nine days," I said instead, "you'll wish you had."

His eyes narrowed, and behind me, in the locked escritoire, I heard the soft, dry whisper of pages turning by themselves.