Chapter 4 The Mark of the Key

The carriage lurched to a halt as the last slivers of sun bled out of the sky, leaving the northern woods a jagged mess of charcoal shadows. Outside, the world was silent save for the wind howling through the pines. A lonely, hungry sound that reminded me I was no longer in the manicured safety of the south.

"We stop here for the night," Alaric said, not looking up from his correspondence. "The 'Black Boar Inn.' It is not the Ashford ballroom, but it is defensible."

Defensible. Not comfortable. Not welcoming.

The door opened, and a blast of frigid air hit me, cutting through my silk skirts like a knife. Alaric stepped out first, offering no hand to assist me. I did not wait for one. I gathered my heavy skirts, the bloodstained ledger tucked firmly against my ribs, and navigated the steps myself. My boots hit the mud with a wet thud.

The inn was a low-slung building of crooked timber and grey stone. It looked as though it were bracing itself against the earth. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of roasting fat, stale ale, and the unwashed heat of men.

Alaric spoke to the innkeeper in low, clipped tones, gold changing hands with a practiced anonymity. "The upstairs suite. No one enters. My men will stand the landing."

"Of course, Your Grace," the innkeeper stammered, his eyes darting to me with a mixture of pity and morbid curiosity.

We were led up a creaking staircase to a room that smelled of cedar and cold. As soon as the door clicked shut and the heavy bolt was thrown, Alaric turned to me. The flickering candlelight cast long, distorted shadows across his face, making the scar on his jaw look like a jagged crack in stone.

"Take off your bodice," he said.

The words weren't a request. They weren't an invitation to intimacy. They were a command given to a subordinate.

I froze, my hands tightening on the ledger hidden in my skirts. The internal monologue of the man who had died in poverty flared up, hot and defensive. I've been pushed around by enough bastards in my life. I did not die and wake up in a dress just to be handled like a piece of meat.

"I beg your pardon?" I said, my voice dropping to a dangerous, low vibrato.

Alaric took a step toward me, his grey eyes devoid of heat. "Do not play the blushing maiden with me, Elowen. We both know the Ashfords did not raise you with a shred of dignity. I need to see if they lied about the Seal."

"The Seal?" I countered, refusing to move. "Is that the 'key' you were discussing in your letters? Am I just a lock to you?"

His expression shifted a brief flicker of surprise that I had used his own words against him. He closed the distance between us until I could feel the cold radiating from his traveling cloak. He reached out, his gloved fingers gripping my shoulder with a strength that was terrifyingly controlled.

"You are a Duchess to be who is currently under my protection and my coin," he whispered. "If that mark is not where it belongs, you are useless to me. And if you are useless, I have no reason to keep you alive when Vane's assassins come looking for the Ashford blood."

The threat was clinical. Practical.

I looked into his eyes and saw no mercy, only the cold calculus of a man who had survived by never taking a risk. I realized then that my survival depended on proving my value. In the warehouse, it was my speed; here, it was my skin.

"Turn around," I said, my voice trembling with a rage I had to swallow.

He turned his back, standing by the hearth. With shaking fingers, I began to undo the dozens of tiny silk covered buttons that ran down the back of my dress. The corset beneath was a nightmare of laces. I loosened it just enough to let the fabric slide down to my waist, the cold air biting at my bare skin.

I stood there, exposed and shivering, in the center of the room. "Look," I spat.

Alaric turned. He did not look at my face. He did not look at my form with a man's hunger. He held the candle aloft, moving it close to the small of my back, just above the curve of my hip.

His breath hitched.

"There," he muttered.

I craned my neck, trying to see in the cracked mirror above the washstand. There, etched into my skin in a faint, silvery white pigment that looked like it had been branded with moonlight, was a symbol. It was a geometric knot, intricate and sharp, swirling around a central point that looked like a keyhole.

It was not a birthmark. It was a brand.

"What is it?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

Alaric reached out, his thumb still gloved tracing the edge of the mark. A jolt of something like static electricity shot through my spine, making my knees buckle.

"It is the map to the Ravenshollow Vaults," Alaric said, his voice sounding distant, almost haunted. "The Ashfords stole the bloodline of the architects centuries ago. You are not just a bride, Elowen. You are the only living map to the King's hidden treasury."

He pulled his hand away as if burned. He looked at me then really looked at me and for the first time, I saw a flash of something other than coldness. It was dread.

"Your father did not just sell you for money," Alaric said, his jaw tightening. "He sold you because as long as you breathe, the Crown Prince will never stop hunting you. And now, neither will I."

He turned and walked toward the door, his cloak swirling behind him.

"Dress yourself," he commanded. "We leave at dawn. And Elowen, if you ever try to run, remember that I do not need your heart to open a door. I only need your skin."

The door slammed shut, and the bolt slid home from the outside. I was a prisoner again.

I slumped against the bedpost, clutching the silk of my dress to my chest. I looked at the ledger I had dropped on the floor, the bloodstained book that mentioned my own death as a 'pruning.'

I was not a girl. I was not a man. I was a map. I was a key. I was a target.

I reached back and touched the cold, raised skin of the mark. The man who had died in the rain would have been terrified. But the woman I was becoming felt something else. A cold, sharpening clarity.

If I'm the key, I thought, staring at the locked door, then I'm the one who decides what gets opened. And I'm going to start with the throat of anyone who thinks they can own me.

As Elowen tries to sleep, she hears a scratching sound coming from inside the walls and a voice through the floorboards whispers a warning: "The Duke is not the only one who knows how to skin a map."