Chapter 2
Queenie lay still on a bed of crimson silk, her wedding finery making her face appear even more pale.
She was too beautiful to be a corpse. No lividity, no sunken hollows beneath the skin. Even her manicured nails held a faint trace of pink.
Jayden reached out as if in a trance, and the instant his fingertips brushed her cheek, he went rigid.
Not cold. It was like touching tree bark on a late autumn morning, cool yet carrying the stubborn warmth of life.
His gaze drifted downward to the embroidered bodice of her gown. One second. Two. The silk rose and fell, impossibly slow, impossibly faint.
"Alive?" Jayden's mind detonated. He pressed two trembling fingers beneath her nose.
A warm, barely perceptible breath grazed his skin.
Jayden recoiled, knocking over a stool.
A feigned death. The Chancellor had used his own living daughter for a ghost wedding.
Jayden realized with sudden, sickening clarity that he wasn't here to be a groom. He was here to be the scapegoat in an unspeakable fraud.
Cold sweat drenched his spine. He started to retreat when soft footfalls sounded outside.
"Time's up." A raspy voice seeped through the door crack. "Chancellor Sherman says once the rite is complete, neither of them serves a purpose anymore. Go in. Keep it quiet. Make it clean."
The scrape of the latch sliding back cut through the silence like a blade.
Jayden tried to cry out, but terror tangled in his throat, producing only a dry, guttural rasp.
He was frail, but surviving in the Chancellor's manor had honed his instinct to a razor's edge.
He scanned the room. The windows had been sealed shut. Only a row of wobbling candelabras remained.
He snuffed out the nearest candle. Then the second. Then the third.
As the assassins shattered the window frame, Jayden swept his sleeve across the oil-filled lamp.
Flames leaped onto the crimson drapery, flooding the room with sudden light before plunging it into an even more sinister darkness. Smoke billowed, swallowing everything from view.
"Fool," The assassin spat, his blade catching the dying firelight in a cold arc.
Jayden didn't run for the door. He knew it would be suicide.
He used his slight frame to his advantage, rolling between the heavy oak tables and chairs, then ripped a tapestry from the wall and hurled it toward the coffin with all his strength.
"There." The assassins took the bait. Two blades plunged into the thick fabric.
Jayden seized that instant to scramble into the shadows behind the coffin. His heart hammered against his ribs, each breath burning in his chest.
One assassin recovered fast, whirling around, springing off the floor, his sword driving toward Jayden's throat in a streak of moonlight.
The steel missed by a hair, but Jayden felt an icy sting at his neck, a warm trickle seeping down his collar.
He hit the floor, his back against the black coffin. Nowhere left to go.
As the assassin raised his blade again, the cruel tip aimed at Jayden's heart, a hand that should have belonged to a dead woman, shot out from the edge of the coffin.
Long, pale, it locked around Jayden's wrist like an iron vise, and with a force no frail noblewoman could possess, yanked him into the dead space behind the coffin.
The thud of impact was swallowed by the chaos of footsteps.
Jayden's spine slammed against the cold hardwood, the air driven from his lungs.
Before he could grunt, a palm smelling of herbs clamped over his mouth.
The skin was ice cold, the calluses rough. Nothing like the hand of a pampered lady.
"Don't make a sound." A voice pressed against his ear.
It was cold and sharp, like stone against stone in a vault, carrying the absolute authority of someone born to command. "If you want to live, do exactly as I say."