The Girl He Sold Returned as the King's Mate novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Pastry for the Assistant

Crispin comes to her clinic warm and tired, offers a sealed confession if she drops the hearing and spares Clara, and she refuses. His parting line points at the Crown.

I put the bookkeeper in the cot behind my clinic's back room and told my assistant to say he was a patient with a fever.

Then I locked the door between us and waited for the knock I knew would come.

It came at dusk.

"Investigator Giffard? I'm Crispin Ponsonby. I hope this isn't a bad hour."

He stood in the doorway with his hat in one hand and a paper sack in the other.

His hair was the same sandy brown, cut short now.

There was ink on his right cuff.

When we were children he had always had ink on his cuff, from copying letters for the dock clerk for pennies.

"I brought pastries from the bakery on Mill Street," he said to my assistant, who was sixteen and starved. "I couldn't find anyone to give them to. You'd be doing me a favor."

My assistant looked at me.

I looked at the pastries.

"Take them to the front desk," I said.

She took them and left, glowing.

Crispin watched her go, and then he looked at me, and his face changed.

It did not harden.

It went tired, and for one terrible second, it went glad.

"You're alive," he said.

"Sit down, Mr. Ponsonby."

"You have the same scar through your eyebrow," he said, still standing. "From the fence behind the net shed. You had me hold your hand while the dock nurse stitched it."

"Sit down."

He sat.

I stayed on my feet, with the desk between us.

"I didn't come to plead," he said. "I came to say something I couldn't say in a room full of councilors."

"Then say it."

"I was eleven."

"I was nine."

His jaw worked.

"Your father told me my mother's debt to the dock company would disappear if I did what he asked," he said. "My mother was coughing blood by then. She needed the physician and we couldn't pay him."

"He said it was only to send you away for a while. He said you'd be looked after."

"I gripped the coins in my pocket all the way home," he said. "I've never told anyone that."

I didn't answer.

"I've spent thirteen years doing everything right," Crispin said. "Every exam. Every shift. I put my mother's name on a clinic wall."

"I never asked for forgiveness."

"Good," I said. "You won't get it."

He took a breath.

"Here's what I can give you. A full written confession, signed, sealed and lodged with the Justice Office tonight."

"Names, dates, the coins. Everything."

"In return, you withdraw the hearing and keep Clara out of it. She was eight. She never knew, I swear it on my mother's grave."

"She cried for months. She still sets a place for you at the festival table."

My chest went hot and tight at that, and I kept my face still.

"You want a quiet confession in a locked drawer," I said.

"I want it over."

"I know what you want, Crispin. You want to walk out of this with a drawer full of paper and no face attached to it."

"For thirteen years I wore a number and had my name taken away. I want the hall full. I want your name said out loud with the whole kingdom listening."

"It will ruin Clara," he said. "It will ruin the pack."

"The pack kept a drowned-girl story for thirteen years," I said. "It can survive the truth."

His eyes went to the wall behind me.

There was a faint scrape through it, a cot creaking as the bookkeeper turned over in his sleep.

Crispin's head turned an inch.

I stepped sideways, so that I stood between him and the door.

"That's a feverish patient," I said. "I'd take him out of here myself if I thought you were a threat to him."

"I'm not," he said. "I swear that too."

He stood slowly and put his hat back on.

At the door, he stopped with his hand on the frame.

"They'll tell you at the hearing that I'm a liar, and I won't blame you for believing them."

"But I'm telling you one true thing now, Thea."

I flinched.

Nobody had said that name to me in thirteen years.

"I wasn't the only one who wanted you gone," he said. "And I wasn't the one who paid for it."

"Who did?"

He looked at me, and for the first time, he looked afraid.

"Ask your mate," he said, "why the Crown never looked for you."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend