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 6 of 24

Chapter 6: My Sister's Price

The torches hissed in the river wind.

Kaelen stepped between me and the horses.

"She didn't run," he said.

"She's standing outside the wall at midnight with a boat behind her," Isadora said. "What would you call it?"

"I'd call it an ambush." He nudged one of the gold-coated bodies with his boot. "Your men, Isadora. Again."

"Thieves in my colours. It's the fashion this season, apparently."

The eldest of the council leaned forward on her horse.

She was white-haired and narrow and sat her saddle like a blade in a sheath.

"The law doesn't care who held the rope, Majesty," she said. "It asks only whether the tithe left the keep of her own will."

Everyone looked at me.

I had left of my own will.

I'd climbed down a servants' stair to do it.

Kaelen crouched by the man he'd killed last, the one with the rope.

He went through the gold coat with quick, careful hands.

From the inside lining he drew a folded paper with a broken wax seal.

He read it in the torchlight.

Then he held it out to the eldest councillor.

"Read it aloud," he said. "All of it."

She unfolded it.

She read the first line silently, and her mouth went thin.

"An agreement between House Montcalm and Emmeline Finch," she read. "The said Emmeline will bring her sister, who carries the dawnblood of their mother's line, to the Tithe. House Montcalm will call a debt of four thousand crowns, which does not exist."

I heard the words.

They came to me slowly, one at a time.

"House Montcalm will buy the sister," the councillor read. "If House Montcalm is outbid, the said Emmeline will deliver her by other means within seven nights. In payment, the said Emmeline will be turned by the hand of Lady Isadora Montcalm, and given a place in her house."

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