Wren heaved a heavy sigh as she reached into her bag. She placed a bottle of painkiller on her nightstand. “Fine. I’m exhausted, and you’re a martyr. Two drops. Take it or leave it.”

Even after she closed the door behind her, she swore she could still feel Hal’s gaze prickling the back of her neck.

As Wren settled herself behind her desk, everything else melted away. Here, surrounded by her equipment and faced with a problem to solve, she was in her element. This was what she was made to do. If her magic told her nothing, then surely his blood would.

Wren uncapped the first vial and dribbled a sample on a slide. It spread like a bruise across the glass, slow and creeping. What her nation would pay for this opportunity, to uncover the genetic secrets lurking in his cells. But underneath the microscope’s lens, his blood looked the same as anyone else’s. It would have been nice if it hadn’t. How sweet it would be to see his wickedness twined into every strand of protein and spelled out in his platelets.

She adjusted the focus of the microscope and frowned. Well, maybe it didn’t look exactly like everyone else’s blood. As expected, his white blood cell count was too high. But among them swarmed something else.

Alkaloids.

“Goddess above,” she whispered. In her search for viral or bacterial cells, she had overlooked something far more obvious—more sinister. Colwick Hall’s mysterious illness didn’t exist and never had. Hal had been poisoned.

Which meant someone was murdering Lowry’s servants.

CHAPTER TWELVE

What in the Goddess’s name was she doing here?

Wren lowered her head onto the desk. Murder and sabotage lay far, far beyond her skill set. What if someone came back to finish the job? What if someone came for her? Her mind was an ever-tightening coil of what if, what if, what if.

She had to tell someone who was qualified to handle this. She had to tell Lowry. She had to take Hal and escape immediately. But she couldn’t.

Her carriage wasn’t ready; braving the mountain roads in this snowstorm would almost certainly promise death. And Lowry was already a frazzled mess over this illness, if that absurd contract was any indication. Telling him it was poison would send him into a nervous conniption.

Assuming, of course, he’s not the one who did it.

But then why call for a healer? Why put on airs of mourning? If it wasn’t him, there were only about five other servants on the estate besides Hannah. Her list of suspects was uncomfortably small.