Chapter 219: You know, don't you....
As she walked, the soft carpet once again muffling her steps, the initial relief began to curdle into a deep, unsettled foreboding. The rose scent in the corridor outside seemed fainter, replaced by the colder, cleaner smell of beeswax and old stone.
She had promised peace. Her actions were no different from promising a solution. But as she made her way through the dimly lit halls toward Victoria's more austere quarters in the west wing, the faces of her two daughters warred in her mind. Esmeralda's, shattered and pleading, and Victoria's, which she knew would be calm, composed, and unreadable. One was an open book of tumultuous feeling; the other a locked volume whose contents she suddenly feared she had never fully understood.
