Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
I devoured half of the soup and most of the bread before I almost got sick and had to stop. Now I sat in the bath, leaning my head on the wall behind it, with my hair brushed out and my stomach gurgling. The rest of my meal waited on the platter. I would finish it as soon as my digestion settled. I’d eaten so fast, I had barely tasted the food.
The water in the bath was still warm. They must heat it somehow.
Everyone in the capital knew about the Garden of Soft Blossoms. It sat outside proper society, and yet it was accepted the way upscale strip clubs were accepted in our world. Calling it a brothel would be like referring to the Met as “a little art gallery.”
The Garden had two cornerstones: discretion and safety. It was a place of expensive courtesans, male and female, but it offered much more. People came here for entertainment, for gourmet cuisine and rare ales and wine, to get pampered and to escape from their lives. For younger nobles and the heirs of richer merchants, this was a place to flex in front of their friends and throw their family’s money around. They could get roaring drunk, pass out at their table, and when they woke up, all their valuables would be right where they left them.
The staff of the Garden would take care of me, not because they were sex workers with hearts of gold or because they felt sorry for me, but because I gave them money. If that man had caught me before I had paid my fee, he would’ve dragged me off in plain view, and neither of the guards would have lifted a finger to help me. The noma in my hand bought my safety. Had I fumbled with my bag instead of throwing that coin at the guard, I wouldn’t be here right now.
I squinted at Everard’s copper den next to my bag of money.
Saved by the Sleepless Duke. If this was a fanfic, people would’ve trashed it for sheer implausibility.
There was a relief on the wall across from me, a marine monster winding around a column, carved in great detail down to the scales and wide fins. It looked like a weird hybrid of a dragon and one of those giant extinct reptiles that ate dinosaurs in the prehistoric oceans. I was in the Idrid Room, the place where Orsana Kallira, an aide to the Underchancellor of Ceremonies, was murdered.
Would be murdered. It wouldn’t happen for another eight months or so.
She would be sitting right here, probably in the exact same spot I sat, waiting to sell the kingdom’s secrets to an agent of the Crimson Empire, when the Shears caught up with her. In the book, they stabbed her so fast and deep, she didn’t even have a chance to scream. The entire bath turned red with her blood.
Orsana and I had that in common. We both died. Violently.
The canvas bag next to the coin assured me that I hadn’t hallucinated my own murder. It had happened. And yet, here I was, alive and soaking in the tub.
There was only one possible explanation. Whatever force had brought me to Rellas wanted me to live.
Why was I here?
Was I supposed to do something? Why dump me naked into a ditch and then have me wander around, starving and cold, for days?
And how did I get here? There was absolutely nothing in the books about visitors from another world. No mention of portals, gates, nothing like that.
In most portal fantasies, some terrible, traumatic event occurred for a person to cross into another world. Usually, they died. They were stabbed, they fell off bridges, their ovens exploded. They were hit by a truck. It was such a common trope, there was a name for it. Death was a requirement, because without dying one couldn’t reincarnate in a different world.
Nothing like that had happened to me. I had a routine day, took a shower, crawled into my bed, read some online comics, and fell asleep. My oven couldn’t explode because it was electric. Nobody had stabbed me in my sleep because my alarm system hadn’t gone off. There was no truck-kun.
Was I dead in my world? Was I missing?
If I was missing and the time back home flowed at the same pace as here, by now my parents would be frantic. We texted each other every day. They were probably searching for me. My brother was probably getting emergency leave from the army to help them.
Suddenly I missed my family so intensely that I pulled my knees to my chest, trying to curl into a fetal ball in the water.
I missed my parents. I missed my brother. I missed their voices, their texts, their hugs. I missed their jokes and their laughter.