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)
He fell silent. We sat quietly for a while.
The books didn’t do Reynald justice. He wasn’t a stunningly handsome man like Solentine or the guy in the Garden, but there was something about him, something compelling and forceful that dragged your attention to him. If you put him in a room full of men, I’d instantly zero in on him, and I wouldn’t be the only one.
Right now, he sat completely relaxed. He was in a house he had taken away from a gang of slavers, with eleven corpses in the basement, in the middle of a very dangerous city, in the company of a woman who had mysteriously come back from the dead, and absolutely none of it bothered him.
He hadn’t looked like this back in the basement. He’d looked like a demon, and he had kept cutting grown men down like it was their first day with a sword.
Reynald could turn on me at any second, and the demon would return and cut me down. But right now, it didn’t feel like he would, so instead of being scared, I felt . . . safe. Probably for the first time since I crawled out of that muddy ditch. It was almost addicting.
Reynald stirred. “I owe you protection for your meeting.”
And had I known we would get a fortress of a house at the end of this adventure, I wouldn’t have gone to the Shears in the first place. But then I wouldn’t have contacted Reynald or saved the kids either.
“Thank you. I will need it.”
“What are you planning to do with the children?” he asked.
I picked up Lasa’s latest ledger and tossed it to him.
“The three younger girls were ‘quietly obtained,’ meaning kidnapped from the neighboring villages and towns. The locations of the ‘breeders’ are listed. We can take them home and their parents will be overjoyed to get them back.”
Reynald would be overjoyed to get his son back. I wished so badly there was something I could do to spring Matheo out of the Tower.
“I will help you with this,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“What about the other two?”
“Kaiden has nowhere to go.” I flipped through the right ledger and passed it to him.
“One puppy, twelve weeks, local breeder, breeders no longer available, sold by the trainer, requires a course in obedience.” Reynald frowned.
“A twelve-year-old orphan from Kair Toren sold by whoever he was apprenticed to.”
Reynald’s gaze darkened.
“My plan is to keep him with me until I figure out something better,” I said.
He would be a handful, but he was my handful now. I was responsible for him. I wouldn’t toss him out in the street or pawn him off on someone else.
“What about Clover?”
I sighed. “It’s on the next page.”
Clover’s entry was short. It said, “Puppy, seventeen weeks, trained as LM by KR, not intact, damaged, extremely poor condition, recommend disposal.”
Reynald looked at me.
“Someone dumped Clover on Derog’s doorstep half dead. Her condition was so bad that Lasa actually argued for letting her die. For some reason Derog kept her alive.”
Only Derog could overrule Lasa.
“She’s been here for almost two months. You can still see the bruises on her face.”
“What about LM and KR?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem like a noble or a merchant’s daughter. I think she might have been employed by a wealthy family.”
The way she’d been standing when Derog asked her about Kaiden was practiced and demure.
I could tell by Reynald’s expression that he understood what was left unsaid. Whoever had employed Clover had punished her and then sold her to Derog. This went beyond simple theft, incompetence, or household politics. This was rage.
“I will help her in any way I can,” I said.
These two children had gone through more suffering in their short lives than some people endured during their entire lifetime. And the worst part of it was, I knew it was real.
I’d read those books cover to cover, and there was no mention of Clover or Kaiden, yet here they were. They existed just like the other random people I had met: the bakers, the inn clerks, the landlords, the Garden attendants . . . Each of them had a life, a past, and hopes for the future. They weren’t abbreviated characters; they were actual human beings. The amount of detail in the city itself, the people I met, the lives they led, it seemed impossible to have come from one person’s mind. It was too much.
Technically, yes, I could’ve just fallen through some dimensional hole into a pocket world imagined by the author in greater detail than he was able to record. Maybe he was a supergenius and knew the location of every rock and the story of every one of the three hundred thousand residents of Kair Toren.
Except that it didn’t feel like a fictional world. It felt real. I had been sure of it ever since I looked into Reynald’s eyes on the roof terrace. The books might have described and recorded the events that happened here, but this was its own separate reality. It existed independently of the fictional series, and it was headed for a cliff at breakneck speed.