The Hidden Route Picked the Friend novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: Locked Door
The riders passed the boathouse without turning their heads.
Briony crouched in the doorway beside Sevrin's bare shoulder and watched the violet cloaks flicker through the birches.
Twelve horses.
None of them looked at the lake.
When the sound had died, he gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh.
"They're hunting the Duke's boar," he said.
"They hunt it every year before the ball."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure of the road.
They weren't looking for me."
She leaned her forehead against his arm.
All the strength went out of her at once.
He walked her back by the north path.
He left her at the laundry wall with a long kiss and a promise.
"Tonight," he said.
"Don't latch it."
"I'll lock the door."
"Then I'll come by the window."
All that day Briony went through her duties with her head full of cotton.
She fetched ink and carried gloves and smiled at the Prince in the corridor.
Twice she saw Clem across the hall.
Clem did not call to her.
A folded note was waiting on her pillow at dusk.
It said, "I'll wait up. Come whenever you can."
She read it and burned it in the candle and did not go.
She was afraid.
She was afraid of what Clem would say, and of what she would not.
She wanted, just once more, to be only a woman in her own room who was loved.
At midnight the window lifted.
Sevrin came over the sill, and she was already across the floor.
She shoved him back against the wall by the shoulders and kissed him with her whole body.
He made a muffled noise of surprise and then caught her around the waist.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
"Door," she said, when she could.
He crossed to it and shot the bolt.
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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