Layla shakes her head. “Someone who was going out of their way to scare you, that’s who. And someone cocky. It took time to write this while you slept, as opposed to slipping in with a message that had already been written out and just placing it on the floor.”

The thought that someone was in my bedroom, bleeding a warning onto my floor while I slept through the whole thing, makes me want to march right back to Blackwood’s office and demand to leave again. If she hadn’t threatened me with that dungeon, I would head there in my nightgown, etiquette be damned.

“The worst part is, I vaguely remember hearing something,” I admit to Layla. “Although what would I have done if I had woken up and found someone here? Fought them?”

She looks up at me. “I can’t imagine that would have gone well for you. And whoever it was probably had something sharp with them.”

“Brendan or Nyx?” I ask.

“It’s possible,” she says. “They have every reason to be angry with you after the way things ended with Charles yesterday. Even though he was a newish addition to their group, Nyx was dating him and Brendan fully accepted him as part of their unit. That alliance was a bond. They would do almost anything to protect and defend each other.”

I nod and find myself wondering if Layla and Ash might ever feel that way about me. “What about Aarya? Given the unpredictable factor?” I ask.

Layla exhales audibly. “This is her kind of game, but it’s clear that the letters were formed by someone who is right-handed, and Aarya’s left-handed. Granted, she could have written them with her right hand to confuse things, but she, unlike most people, typically likes to take credit for her threats. And the width of the stroke is bigger than her pointer finger. It’s either someone with larger hands than hers, or she used her thumb. Or there was more than one person—Felix, for instance. But all things considered, I would say that Brendan is more likely.”

I blink at her. Her brain is amazing.

“We need to clean this up,” she says. “Pippa is going to be here any minute.”

My eyes widen. “Clean it up? Don’t we need to tell—”

“No,” Layla says forcefully, and takes the washcloth off my dresser. She dips it in the basin and starts scrubbing up the blood. “If we bring Blackwood into this, we will get hit with retaliation twice as hard. It’s just not how we do things here.”

“But how do we explain that much blood on the—” I whisper, and Layla hushes me. The latch on the main door rattles.

With lightning speed, Layla grabs my empty water glass, wraps the cloth around it, and uses a book from my bedside table to crush it.