After My Best Friend and I Transmigrated Into a Book, the System Made Us Seduce Each Other's Husbands novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Music Box

Elora pins her hopes on one fact about Dacian and ends up against the shelves with him asking who told her about the box.

Elora picked the lock on her bedchamber door with the pin from her hair.

It took four tries and one scraped knuckle.

She had read about it once, in a criminal procedure textbook, under the heading of things no reasonable person does.

The corridor outside was empty and lit with blue torches.

The System's pale letters had been waiting for her all evening.

TARGET: PRINCE DACIAN. AFFINITY: 0%. HINT: The second prince reads in the Grand Library on nights he cannot sleep.

"You are surprisingly helpful for a doom machine," Elora whispered.

The letters did not reply.

She followed the cold air down three staircases and found a pair of doors as tall as a house.

The library behind them was the size of a train station.

Shelves ran up into the dark, and on a table in the middle a single candle burned beside an open book.

Dacian sat at the table with his boots on a chair.

He did not look surprised to see her.

"The wife of my brother," he said, and turned a page. "Out of her room, with a scraped hand. I didn't think you'd manage it before dawn."

"You expected me?"

"I expect everyone. It's a habit." He lifted his eyes. "Shouldn't you be in bed with the crown prince?"

"He locked me in."

"That sounds like him." He closed the book. "Sit. You look like you rehearsed something on the stairs."

Elora stayed standing.

She had rehearsed six openings on the stairs.

She had written them out in her head as a list, with the likeliest reaction after each one.

None of them survived the sight of him leaning back in the candlelight with that smile.

"I read a lot," she said. "Back home. I read about your family."

"Did you?"

"I know your mother had a music box."

The smile stopped.

It stopped completely, and the whole library seemed to wait.

"She had a lot of things," he said.

"It plays a lullaby from the south. It has a silver dragon on the lid and one tooth missing from the comb, so the third note is wrong."

Elora had memorized that detail from the book's second chapter because it was the saddest thing on the page.

Dacian stood up.

The chair scraped across the stone.

He came around the table slowly, and she stayed where she was, because backing up would have told him everything.

"Who sent you?" he asked.

"No one."

"My brother?"

"No."

"Linnea?"

"I don't know who that is."

He stopped close enough that she had to lift her chin.

His horns caught the candle, copper-bright, and his breath smelled of wine.

"The box was in my mother's room when she died," he said. "Nobody has heard it since. Not the servants, not the court, not my brother."

"I'm not a spy."

"Then you're something worse."

His hand came up and landed on the shelf beside her head.

The books creaked.

He leaned in until she felt the heat coming off his coat.

It was dragon heat, dry and steady, and it moved through her thin gown as though nothing was between them.

Her heart started hammering.

She noticed that his eyes had gone from amber to nearly gold.

She noticed the pulse in his throat.

She noticed that he had stopped breathing, and that she had too.

He looked at her mouth.

"You're about to kiss me," Elora said, in the flattest voice she had.

He blinked.

"Your Highness, you're leaning on a book of tax law. Third shelf. I think the spine is the only thing between your wrist and my ear."

He turned his head and looked.

The title was stamped in gold along the leather.

A Treatise on the Grain Levy of Kharzad, Volume Nine.

For a second Dacian said nothing at all.

Then he laughed.

It was a short, startled sound, and it seemed to surprise him more than it surprised her.

He straightened up and ran a hand through his hair.

"I'm going to remember that," he said.

"Please don't."

"I will, though." He had stopped smiling, but the amusement stayed in his eyes. "Do you know what's strange? I'm not afraid of you, and I should be."

"I'm not scary."

"You said the third note was wrong. Where did you learn a thing like that?"

Elora opened her mouth and could not think of a single true answer that wouldn't get her killed.

The System chimed softly.

AFFINITY: 3%.

"I read it," she said. "That's all."

"Where?"

"In a book."

His eyes held hers for a long moment.

Then he pushed himself off the shelf, picked up the candle, and held it between them.

"The box was never written in any chronicle of this empire," he said. "I made sure of it."

Elora's mouth went dry.

"Dacian," she said.

"Tell me who told you about the box," he said, very quietly, "or I'll have to decide whether you're a gift or a knife."

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