Chapter 114: A Soft Laugh

Count Prinslav Stessa only smelled the blood after his handsome face had been crushed out of shape against the desk.

It came from behind his study, thick and raw.

The hand pinning his face down was terrifyingly strong. Stessa felt, with perfect clarity, that the bones of his face might be crushed apart under that palm.

The owner of the hand did not do it. Instead, he withdrew that strength with effortless ease.

Stessa’s compressed features settled back into place, leaving only a huge, savage bloodprint across one side of his face.

Then the same bloodstained hand drifted past him and took the dossier from the desk.

The man behind his chair moved with a pace that could almost be called leisurely, circling half around the desk toward the guest seat.

Before Stessa dared lift his head, before he could even see the man behind him, he already knew who had come.

A silver Roaring Bear Head Necklace.

The mark of a Bear School witcher.

The dossier had included a brief overview of witchers as a group. And judging by the way Stessa maintained his web of interests, he was not the sort of noble who had risen in Temeria merely because his blood was highborn. In truth, after a single rough read through that entire dossier, he had already extracted seventy or eighty percent of its essential information.

So the instant he saw that medallion, Count Stessa understood.

The subject of the dossier had arrived.

He even had a fair idea how the man had entered his study.

The secret passage.

There was a secret passage behind the study, running straight down to the cellar.

For a noble of Stessa’s stature, a man who had become a standard and banner for an entire political current, a house without hidden passages would have been the strange thing.

The one behind his study existed because he himself sometimes went below to amuse himself, to cultivate a little shared taste with his friends from the Cult of the Sun.