The Hidden Route Picked the Friend novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Girl at Midnight
Sent to fetch tea, Briony finds the court's secret assassin bleeding in the east scullery, the exact scene from the game she swore to avoid, and binds his hand anyway. A blade lifts her window latch at 2 a.m.
The tea tray was in Briony's hands before she saw the blood on the floor.
It ran in a thin line from the flour table to the scullery door, black in the light of one candle.
She knew this room.
She had stood in it for ninety hours of her old life, with a controller in her lap and a cold cup of barley tea.
The east scullery of Lanternlight Court, midnight, one candle, a flour table, and a man bleeding on it.
Briony stopped three steps inside.
She was twenty-two years old, she was the heroine's best friend, and she had one plan for this kingdom.
Stay out of everything.
"Clem asked for mint tea," she said out loud, to nobody, as if that would help.
Clem had asked.
Her head hurt, she'd said, and could Briony please go herself to the east pantry, since it had the good mint.
Clem always went for the tea herself, and Briony hadn't thought about that until now.
The man on the table lifted his head.
He had ash-blond hair cut short and ragged, pale grey eyes, and a white scar through his left eyebrow.
His black steward's coat was open, and his right hand was cut across the palm to the bone.
Briony knew the face.
It was on the hidden route's title card, and the wiki called it the one nobody should open.
The Knife.
The Regent's private assassin, who had killed everyone who had ever seen him, and in the game he had killed a lot of heroines.
In the game, the heroine came here at midnight, in chapter three.
The heroine bound his hand, and the route opened.
Briony was not the heroine.
She was the friend, with twelve lines and a train ticket home.
She turned toward the door.
The blood on the floor was still wet.
Behind her he breathed in through his teeth, quietly.
Briony set the tray on the shelf.
"I'm going to regret this," she said.
She tore a strip off the hem of her apron, stepped up to the table, and took his wrist in both hands.
He didn't pull away.
He watched her face, not the hand.
The cut was deep and clean, the kind a knife makes when someone else is holding it.
"Close your hand around this," she said, and pressed a folded corner of cloth into the wound.
He closed it.
She wound the strip around his palm, tight, and tied it off with her teeth because her fingers were shaking.
When she looked up, his other hand had caught her wrist.
It was warm and big and slick with his own blood, and his thumb lay exactly on her pulse.
Her heart was going.
"You're not afraid," he said.
His voice was low and hoarse and very calm.
"I'm terrified," Briony said.
"Your pulse says otherwise."
"My pulse has no manners."
The corner of his mouth moved.
It wasn't a smile.
It was the place where a smile would go if he'd ever had one.
His thumb slid over the inside of her wrist, once, slowly, and heat ran up her arm into her stomach and settled low.
She hadn't been touched like that in this world.
She hadn't been touched like that in the last one either.
"You saw my face," he said.
"I know."
"Nobody has."
"I know that too."
His eyes narrowed.
"How do you know it?"
Boots rang on the stone in the yard outside.
The scullery door rattled, and a guard's voice said, "Is somebody in there?"
The man on the table went still, and she felt the muscles in his forearm change under her hand.
He wasn't looking at the door.
He was looking at her, deciding.
"Stand in front of me," he said, so quietly she barely heard it.
Briony did.
She moved to the end of the table, spread her skirt, and put herself between the lantern light and his bloody coat.
The door opened.
"Pardon, miss," said the guard.
"I dropped a tray," Briony said.
She was amazed at how steady it came out.
"Tea for Lady Wray."
"The mint is on the top shelf and I'm too short."
"I've been standing here swearing at it for five minutes."
The guard's lantern swung over the floor, and over the thin line of blood.
"That's flour paste," Briony said, "and I'll scrub it myself, I'm very sorry."
He looked at her red face and her apron with the strip torn off it.
He grinned.
"Mind the step, miss," he said, and shut the door.
The boots went away.
A shudder ran through Briony all the way down.
She turned around.
The Knife had stood up off the table.
He was a head and a half taller than she was, and he stood very close, close enough that she could smell blood and cold air and woodsmoke.
"You lied to a guard," he said, "for a man you've never met."
"I've seen your face before," she said, which made no sense, and she heard it.
"Tell me your name."
"Briony Ashdown."
"Whose?"
"Lady Clementine Wray's attendant."
"Briony," he said, as if testing the weight of it.
Then his bound hand came up and he laid two fingers along her jaw, very lightly.
It was the gentlest thing she had ever felt, and it was a man's hand that had killed people.
"I have a rule," he said.
"I know."
"Anyone who sees my face dies."
Her mouth went dry.
His fingers didn't move.
"I haven't decided whether you are a person that rule is for," he said.
"Leave your window unlatched tonight, Briony Ashdown."
"I'd like to find out."
He took his hand from her face, picked up his knife from the floor, and went out through the yard door.
Briony stood alone in the scullery with the candle and the tray.
She went upstairs on legs that didn't feel like hers.
She shut her window and pushed the latch home and set the water jug on the sill so it would fall if anyone touched the glass.
She lay in the dark with her heart going.
It was a very simple plan.
At two in the morning, something thin and bright slid through the crack of the window and lifted the latch, without a sound, from outside.
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