I Sold My Blood to Pay My Sister's Debt, and the Vampire King Who Bought Me Swore I'd Be His Queen or His Ruin novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Sunrise on the Steps

I read it three times.

Then I folded it very small, the way Emmeline used to fold the rent money, and held it in my fist.

"How?" I said. "Nobody saw but us."

"The maid saw him in the sun." Corin was looking down the dark stair. "Anybody with half a brain can work out the rest. If the old stories say the dawnblood makes a man walk in daylight, the old stories say what it costs."

"Emmeline's never read a book in her life."

"Lady Montcalm has read all of them."

I took the note up to Kaelen.

He was sitting in the dark exactly where I'd left him.

He read it once, by the window's grey line, and handed it back.

"Well," he said. "Now she knows when to send the knife."

"After you drink."

"After I drink."

"Then don't drink."

He looked at me.

"In three nights," he said, "Isadora is going to ask me to prove it on the white steps in front of the whole court. If I won't, they'll take that as proof enough."

"And if you do, you'll be bleeding in a crowd full of people who'd like to see you bleed."

"Yes."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's the only one with you alive at the end of it."

The new moon came up black.

The white steps run down the east face of the keep, broad as a street, from the great doors to the square below.

By the last hour of the night, the whole court was packed at the top of them under the deep portico, out of reach of the coming light.

Silk and furs and jewels.

Hundreds of eyes.

At the bottom of the steps, in the square, where the sun would hit first, the guards had built a pyre.

Fresh wood. A post in the middle with iron rings on it.

They'd built it the day before, while the court slept.

I'd watched them from my window.

I wore black.

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