Reborn as the Villainess's Bodyguard, I Refused to Stop at Bodyguard novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Night Watch

Haruka sits on the cell floor all night, and through the bars Seraphine asks for a kiss and gets it.

Haruka took the night watch herself.

She sent Corwin to bed and bolted the stairwell door from the inside.

Then she sat down on the corridor floor with her back against the bars of Seraphine's cell.

A single torch burned at the far end.

She had a sword across her knees, a heavy cloak around her shoulders and a clear, calm, stubborn plan.

She was going to stay awake until the fourteenth.

Behind her, the cot creaked.

"You'll catch cold," Seraphine said.

"I'm fine."

"The floor is stone. The draught from the stairs comes straight under that door."

"I've slept on worse."

"On what?"

Seraphine's voice came closer, and the chain on her wrists clinked softly.

"On a field, in your armor, with your helmet for a pillow?"

"Everyone says Captain Delamere does that."

Haruka had slept on a gym mat once, for four hours, between a double shift and a morning class.

"Something like that," she said.

The cot creaked again.

Then came the rustle of a shift.

Seraphine sat down on the cell floor on the other side of the bars, her back against the same iron.

Their shoulder blades were separated by only a hand's breadth of dark air.

They sat that way for a long time.

"You are different," Seraphine said at last.

"Last month you walked past my door and did not turn your head."

"This morning you ate porridge in front of me and told me my wrists were thin."

"Do you want me to go back to ignoring you?"

"No."

It was a small, quick word.

Seraphine seemed surprised by it herself.

"I have not been spoken to like a person since I was arrested," she said.

"The priests speak to me like a bad debt."

"The Prince speaks through a page."

"My own mother wrote one letter, and it said she was praying for my soul."

"She didn't say anything about you?"

"There was no room."

Haruka turned her head.

Through the gap between two bars she could see the edge of a cheek and a freckled ear.

A curl of red hair had stuck to a wet eyelash.

She wanted, with a hard, immediate force, to put her hand on that cheek.

"What's the worst part?" she asked.

"The waiting."

"And the second worst?"

Seraphine was silent for a while.

"That I will be dead without having been kissed by anyone who wanted to," she said at last.

Haruka's breath stopped.

"I was engaged at fifteen," Seraphine went on, in a light flat voice.

"The Prince kissed me once, at the betrothal, on the cheek, because the Queen was watching."

"Everyone since has been politics."

"I have been admired."

"I have been feared."

"I have never once been wanted by someone who could have had no reason except to want me."

Her voice thinned.

"It's absurd. I have twelve days, a tower and a headsman, and what I mind is that."

"It's not absurd."

"Captain."

"Eleonora," Haruka said.

The name did not feel like hers yet, but it felt right to say it out loud for the first time to this woman.

"My name's Eleonora."

"Eleonora." Seraphine tried it carefully. "I think you are lying to me about something, Eleonora."

"Yes."

"I think you will tell me when you're ready."

"Yes."

"Then I'll wait." A breath. "I am very good at waiting. It's the one thing I've had practice at."

Haruka stood up.

She did it slowly, so as not to frighten anyone, and turned around to face the bars.

Seraphine got to her feet too.

She was so small, standing there in the grey shift with her chained hands held in front of her, that Haruka's chest hurt.

The torchlight picked out each freckle across her nose.

"I'm going to say this plainly," Haruka said, her hands gripping the iron bars at shoulder height.

"I'm your guard, and I don't care about the Crown or the Prince."

"I want to kiss you. I've wanted to since the second I knelt down on this floor."

"That is the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me in this tower," Seraphine whispered.

She looked up at Haruka, her green eyes wide in the torchlight.

Her mouth opened a little.

Then she stepped forward until her forehead rested against the iron, and her chained hands wrapped around two of the bars, level with Haruka's heart.

"Then do it," Seraphine said. "Kiss me, Eleonora. Right now."

Haruka bent her head.

Their lips met through the gap between the bars, cold iron against both their cheekbones.

It was a careful kiss at first.

Seraphine's mouth was soft and a little chapped, and she tasted of porridge honey.

She made a small sound that Haruka felt in her own throat.

Then Seraphine pressed closer and the kiss changed.

It grew slow and deep and hungry.

It was the kiss of someone who had waited a very long time for permission, and meant to take every moment of it.

Haruka put her hand through the bars and cupped the back of Seraphine's head, and the red hair spilled over her wrist.

Seraphine's hands slid up the iron and gripped the front of Haruka's tunic, tugging.

When they finally broke apart, both were breathing hard.

Seraphine's eyes were wet and shining, and her lips were pink.

"Thank you," she said, absurdly.

"Don't thank me."

"I'll thank you if I like. You owe me a great many more of those, and I intend to collect every one."

Haruka laughed, a startled, helpless sound.

And then she heard it.

Boots on the stairs below, a dozen of them, steady and not trying to hide.

The torch flame bent in the draught from the stairwell door.

A fist struck the wood, once, hard, the way only one man in Carrow knocked on a door that belonged to someone else.

"Open in the Prince's name," called a bored, pleasant voice.

Seraphine's hands dropped from Haruka's tunic and wrapped around her own ribs.

She had gone a little grey.

"He has never come himself," she whispered. "Not once."

Haruka drew her sword.

"He's coming now."

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