Chapter 432 Thank Fuck There’s Wine

VIREMONT KEEP

Guinevere Ashford opened her eyes, assessed the handcuffs, assessed the chair, assessed the man sitting across from her, and thought: what fresh hell is this, and thank fuck there’s wine.

She blinked, taking in the scene. On the table was bread, cheese, dried meat, and fruit. The spread was generous. It was supposed to communicate hospitality but generally hospitality did not involve handcuffs.

Then again, who was she to judge.

Beside the food was a bottle of wine. Two glasses. Both empty. Waiting.

A man was sitting across from her.

He was older. Fifties, maybe sixties, with the kind of face that had been hardened by decades of decisions that other men would have lost sleep over and that this man had made before breakfast. His eyes were small, calculating, set deep beneath a brow that communicated permanent dissatisfaction with everything beneath it.

He was watching her wake up the way a man watches an investment mature.

Guinevere’s eyes moved past him and scanned the room. She had grown up in a family where reading a room was a survival skill and the reading happened before the greeting.

The furniture was eastern hardwood, a regional material that did not travel west because the trade routes between east and west Skardos had been disrupted for decades by a single family’s territorial control.

The wine was eastern vintage. She could tell from the bottle shape. Viremont’s vineyards produced a specific bottle with a narrow neck and a flared base, and the bottle on the table matched.

“Uncuff her.”

The man’s voice was flat, carrying the specific register of authority that did not raise itself for emphasis because the authority was structural rather than performative. He did not look at the guard when he said it. He looked at Guinevere.

A guard stepped forward. The cuffs clicked open. Guinevere’s wrists were free.

She did not rub her wrists. She did not stretch. She did not perform relief or gratitude or fear or any of the responses that a woman waking up handcuffed should have.

She reached for the wine immediately with zero fucks. Her day had included a prison carriage, a shepherd named Bertram, a smoke-screen extraction, a mage sedation, and a chair with cuffs. Her priorities had been rearranged by the day into a hierarchy where wine occupied the top position and everything else could wait.

She poured a full glass. Lifted it. Drank.

If it was poisoned, she would deal with the poisoning after the first sip, because the first sip was non-negotiable and the poisoning was a secondary concern and the secondary concern could get in line behind Bertram’s sheep appeal and the rock that had assaulted her tailbone and every other indignity the universe had delivered in the last twelve hours.

The wine was good. Eastern vintage. Dry.

She set the glass down. Poured a second.

The man across from her watched the entire performance.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

Guinevere paused on the second glass. Her eyes moved to his face, to the decorative blades on the wall, and to a portrait behind his head.

“You are Alpha Viremont.”

Reginald Viremont’s expression shifted by a fraction. The fraction was small, controlled, but visible to a woman who had spent her entire life reading the faces of powerful men for information they were trying to withhold. He was impressed. The impression was brief, filed, and replaced by the baseline assessment he had been wearing when she woke up.

“Good.” He leaned back in his chair. “Quick. That is what I need.”

“You extracted me from a prison transport.” Guinevere drank from the second glass. “Brought me to your keep and cuffed me to a chair with food and wine, which means you need me alive and cooperative and the food is the opening offer.”

Viremont’s eyes narrowed by a degree that would have been invisible to a less observant woman. Guinevere was extremely observant. The narrowing confirmed she was correct, and the confirmation was filed alongside the wine and the maps and the seal and every other piece of data she had collected in the forty-five seconds since her cuffs came off.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

“Because you are useful.”

“Everyone is useful. Bertram the shepherd is useful. He shears sheep and commits tax fraud. Specificity would be appreciated.”

“Who the hell is Bertram?”

“A man I shared a prison carriage with for forty-five minutes. He is six foot four, covered in sheep scars, and chose to stay in the carriage during my extraction because his wife would be disappointed if he ran. He is irrelevant to this conversation and yet I am unable to stop thinking about him.” She drank. “Why am I here, Alpha Viremont?”

Viremont studied her. He had expected to extract a desperate prisoner and was instead sitting across from a woman who had assessed his location, identified his vintage, and introduced a tangential shepherd into a kidnapping debrief, and the gap between his expectation and his reality was widening with every sentence she produced.

He had abducted the wrong woman if he wanted someone grateful and compliant. She fully planned on drinking his wine, insulting his hospitality, and making the whole damn interaction more complicated than it had any fucking right to be.

Why? The real question was, why the fuck not? She had nothing better to do.

“You were sentenced to death,” he said.

Guinevere did not correct him or mention her dragon.

Every piece of information was a lever. She was usually the one looking for leverage to use, so she knew that rule well.

“Fifteen charges,” Viremont continued. “Guilty on all counts. Death sentence. No appeal filed. No clemency petition. The Crown of Drakenfell was going to execute the cousin of Finnick Shadowclaw, and Shadowclaw let it happen.”

The sentence was designed to hurt. Little did he know, THAT wasn’t what hurt.

She kept her face neutral when she spoke.

“My cousin made his decision. His decisions are his business. Mine are mine.”

Viremont leaned forward. He was about to make an offer and wanted the offer to arrive from a position of constructed intimacy rather than obvious authority.

“I am going to ask you a question, Lady Ashford, and I want you to answer it honestly, because the answer determines whether you walk out of this room titled, free, and positioned higher than any woman in your family has been positioned in three generations, or whether you go back in a carriage.”

Guinevere set her glass down.

“Ask.”

“How badly do you want your freedom?”

Guinevere Ashford looked at Reginald Viremont.

“I am going to need you to be much more specific. And I am going to need more wine.”