The Hidden Route Picked the Friend novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: After the Ball
The lantern gallery lay above the ballroom, long and narrow and empty.
Paper lanterns hung along the whole length of its inner wall, hundreds of them.
Servants had left them burning and fled to watch the court fall apart.
Gold light swayed over the floorboards.
It was past two in the morning.
Sevrin had spent the hours before it in the guardroom, giving the Captain's clerk twelve years of names in a flat voice.
She had held his hand under the table the whole time.
When the clerk's pen ran dry, the Prince had said that was enough for tonight.
The rest could be written from wherever Dray chose to be.
Briony pulled Sevrin through the door by the hand.
She turned, shut it, and dropped the iron bar across it.
"Nobody comes up here tonight," she said.
"Everyone's below, looking at her empty chair."
"Briony."
"Be quiet."
She pushed him backward by the chest.
His shoulders hit the wall between two lanterns, and a dozen of them swung on their hooks and threw light over his face.
She caught both his wrists in one hand and pinned them above his head.
He let her.
She looked at him in the soft light, at his ragged hair and the scar through his eyebrow.
His face was open and stunned, the face of a man who had put down what he had carried for twelve years.
"Your hands are cold," she said.
"They have been empty for an hour."
"I know what you are."
She kissed him.
It was fierce and deep, and he groaned into her mouth and strained against her grip.
She held him there with one hand and let him feel she could.
She undid his coat with the other.
One silver button at a time.
She slid the coat from his shoulders and let it drop, and then the shirt, until he stood bare to the waist against the wall.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Hidden Route Picked the Friend are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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