Reborn as the Villainess's Doomed Maid, I Keep Getting Caught by Her Knight Brother novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Sugar Tin
At midnight she pours the poison out of the larder sugar tin and he catches her, and the larder shelves take both of them.
Verena Sevrin took her chocolate in bed, and she looked at Mio over the rim of the cup.
"You have grease behind your ear, Tilda."
"I'm sorry, my lady."
"Don't be sorry. Be clean." Verena set the cup down. "The Saint's carriage rolled out at dawn, did it not?"
"It did, my lady."
"Without incident?"
"The groom says the axle ran like silk."
Something crossed Verena's face, too fast to name.
She was twenty, tall and slender, with honey-gold ringlets and violet eyes.
In the novel she had been the vain, cruel villainess who hated the Saint.
In person she was sharp, bored and strangely tired.
"Good," she said. "I would hate for the Saint to break an arm in my carriage."
She said it lightly, and her hand was shaking on the saucer.
Mio put it down for her.
"You may go and sit, Tilda," Verena added. "You look as though you did not sleep."
It sounded like a kindness, and Mio realized it was the nicest thing a mistress had ever said to her.
Mio went, a little dazed.
All day she watched the house.
Caspian was in the yard at noon, shirtless to the waist, with a practice sword, and the grooms found reasons to stand around.
Mio found a reason to carry a bucket.
He did not look at her once, and she felt it.
The Saint's carriage came back at dusk.
The Saint herself stepped down, whole and rosy and unhurt, and thanked the footman in a voice like a small bell.
The first crime was dead.
But Mio could count, and the novel had three.
The second was the foxglove.
In chapter twelve, the Saint's cup at Verena's tea was laced with foxglove tincture from the Sevrin larder.
The Saint was ill for a month.
The tea was tomorrow afternoon.
At midnight, Mio crept down the back stairs in her stockings with a candle.
The larder was a cold stone room off the kitchen.
Shelves of jars rose to the ceiling, and a big oak table stood in the middle.
The sugar tin sat on the second shelf, a round tin with a tight lid.
Her hand went to it before she had decided anything.
She lifted the lid.
Under the first layer of white lumps, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, lay a small brown bottle.
She pulled it out and held it to the candle.
The label had been scratched off, but the bottle smelled green and bitter, and her pharmacy-trained brain identified it instantly: digitalis.
Foxglove.
Whoever had put it here had done it neatly.
They had tucked it under the sugar, where it would only be found when someone made the Saint's tea.
Mio pulled the cork and tipped the bottle into the stone sink, and she ran the tap until her hands were numb.
Then she rinsed the bottle and the cloth, and she burned the cloth in the candle flame.
"Do you always do your cleaning at midnight?"
She spun around.
Caspian leaned in the larder doorway with his arms folded.
He was in shirtsleeves and trousers, with the shirt open at the neck, and his hair was damp.
His grey eyes took in the sink, the burnt cloth, and the empty bottle in her hand.
"That is a poison bottle," he said.
"It was a poison bottle."
"And you emptied it."
"Yes."
"Into my sink."
"I washed the sink, too."
"That," Caspian said, and walked toward her, "is the second time in two days I have caught you destroying evidence."
"Of a crime nobody has reported."
"I'm not destroying evidence," Mio said. "I'm destroying the crime."
"Explain the difference."
"If I'd left it, somebody would have been poisoned."
"Who?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Then what can you tell me?"
He stopped in front of her, so close that she had to put her back against the table.
The candle between them made his scar jump.
She should have been afraid.
She was not afraid at all.
She had spent all day thinking about his hand on her thigh.
Her whole body had hummed ever since.
"I can tell you I'm on your sister's side," Mio said. "I can't prove it."
"No."
"And I can tell you I haven't stopped thinking about your desk."
His eyes went black.
"Neither have I," Caspian said roughly.
He took the bottle out of her fingers and set it down on the table without looking at it.
Then he put both hands on her hips and lifted her.
She gasped.
He carried her three steps to the shelves and set her back against them.
The jars rattled, and she wrapped her legs around his waist.
"Quietly," he said against her mouth.
"Make me."
He kissed her.
Her fingers dug into his hair and his shoulders.
She tore at the buttons of his shirt until it hung open, and she put her palms on his bare chest.
It was hot and hard, with scars under her fingertips, and his heart was pounding.
"Take it off," she whispered. "All of it."
He undid his trousers with one hand while the other held her up.
She felt the length of him spring free against her, thick and heavy and hot, and she shivered.
He pushed her skirt up around her waist.
He found her drawers, wet again, and tore the thin cloth at the seam with one pull.
"Caspian," she breathed, which she had not meant to say.
"Say it again."
"Caspian."
He groaned into her neck.
He took his cock in his hand and rubbed the head through her wet folds.
He slid it up and down over her clit until she whimpered and her heels dug into his back.
"Now," Mio said. "Please, now."
He pushed into her.
It was slow, and she felt every inch.
She was tight and he was big, and the stretch burned.
It filled her so completely that her head fell back against the shelf.
He stopped halfway, shaking, with his forehead against hers.
"Breathe," he said.
She breathed.
She rocked her hips down, and he slid deeper, all the way, until his hips were flush against her.
They both made a low sound.
"Good girl," Caspian said.
She nearly came right there.
The words went through her, and she clenched around him so hard that he swore, quietly and thoroughly.
"You like that."
"Yes."
"Good girl," he said again, and began to move.
He fucked her slowly at first, long hard strokes that made the shelves knock and the jars hum.
Her back slid against the wood.
His hands gripped her ass, holding her open, and every thrust rubbed the base of his cock against her clit.
"Harder," she gasped.
He gave it to her.
He braced one forearm on the shelf above her head and slammed into her.
The sound of their skin was wet and shameless in the quiet stone room.
She bit his shoulder to keep from screaming.
"That's it," he muttered. "Take me. You take me so well."
"Caspian, I'm going to-"
"Yes. Come on my cock."
She came with a stifled cry, her whole body convulsing around him, and the pleasure rolled through her in long dizzy waves.
He thrust through it, his breath ragged, and then he groaned low in his throat and buried himself deep.
She felt him pulse inside her, hot and shuddering, and his arms closed around her so tightly she could hardly breathe.
For a while neither of them moved.
The candle guttered.
A jar of pickled plums tipped slowly off the shelf and rolled across the floor, and he caught it with one bare foot.
Mio began to laugh, helplessly, into his collar.
He lifted his head and looked at her, and for a second something in his stern face almost cracked.
It was not a smile.
It was the place where a smile would have been.
"Tilda," he said.
Then, from the kitchen, they heard the soft slap of a bare foot on stone.
He set her down in one smooth movement and turned his body between her and the door.
Verena stood in the kitchen doorway in her white nightgown, with her ringlets loose on her shoulders and a candle in her hand.
She looked at the torn drawers on the floor.
She looked at her brother's open shirt.
She looked at the empty brown bottle on the table, and her violet eyes rested on it for a long moment.
"Go to bed, Tilda," she said quietly.
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