Reborn as the Villainess's Bodyguard, I Refused to Stop at Bodyguard novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Ledger
By the twelfth night, Prince Aldric's guards had cut Haruka's visits to one hour a day.
She spent each hour on a stool in the corridor, with a household guard breathing at her shoulder, and Seraphine on the cot beyond the bars.
They were not allowed to touch.
They were not even allowed to whisper.
So on the eleventh day Haruka put her hand flat against the iron, and Seraphine put hers against it from the other side, two fingers apart.
The guard cleared his throat.
Neither of them moved.
"I can't promise you the swing," Haruka had said, at the end of that first hour.
"I know."
"I can promise the other thing. I swore it in this cell, on the first day. I'll carry you out of the dark."
Seraphine had looked at her for a long time.
"Then I will take that," she said. "I do not understand why it frightens you to say it."
Haruka had not understood either.
Now it was the twelfth night and she had one ring and one idea.
The ring was iron, plain and heavy, with a flat top stamped with a small axe.
It had been on her finger since she woke, and no one had thought to take it.
Corwin had told her what it was for, in a whisper, at the foot of the armoury stair.
"It's the Captain's ring, ma'am. It opens the vault under the old barracks. The Axe lives there. Nobody else has gone in since your predecessor died."
"What's in the vault?"
"I never asked. That's rather the point of it."
"Keep the stair," Haruka told him.
"Where else would I be?"
The vault door was at the end of a dusty passage under the old barracks, behind a rusted grille.
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