Her Three Masters (Forbidden Empires #15)

CHAPTER 1

Avery

◆

The paper under the green banker’s lamp said EIGHTY-FOUR THOUSAND in my brother’s handwriting.

Nine typed pages waited beside it. Julian Marchetti sat across from me, Alistair Devereaux held the only key to the room, and Rook Ferrante stood at the door as if the room had been built around his shoulders.

The T in Teddy’s signature was too large; the rest ran small and fast, the way he wrote when he was frightened. He was nineteen. He had signed that sheet somewhere with somebody being kind to him, then come home and told me he had found work.

Twenty hours earlier, I had been four levels under the college with a dead man’s file open across my knees. The file was under my arm now. A copper key sat in my coat pocket, four forbidden photographs waited on my phone, and everyone in the room knew about everything except the key.

Alistair had let me in and locked the door from the inside, then returned the key to his waistcoat.

Forty oak drawers climbed the far wall. Floor wax over carbolic came up off the terrazzo.

Rook occupied the doorframe, abandoned it, and took it again.

Julian had waited in the corridor until Alistair inclined his head before entering a room in his own building.

Julian’s eyes were slate, with a hairline scar through his left eyebrow.

Rook’s were moss-green, his dark copper hair still wet from the rain.

Alistair’s hands were long and exact, his waistcoat buttoned to the throat.

My body noticed the three of them in three different ways.

That was information I did not need and could not stop collecting.

Rook turned Teddy’s paper faceup with one knuckle and pushed it deeper into the light.

“That paper is your brother. This one is you. Nobody here is going to pretend otherwise,” Rook said, and he said it standing, because he had not sat down and would not for another hour.

“The twelve people who are going to be told about tonight call themselves the Cell,” he went on. “You will meet a few of them and you will never be introduced to the rest, and every one of them will have your name by morning.”

I put my hand on the stack of nine and squared it, and it did not need squaring. There is a thing I say about paper. I had said it yesterday over a payroll form in the bursar’s office, to Wren, as a joke, and it had been funny for about four seconds.

“I don’t sign anything I haven’t read twice,” I said.

Julian turned his head toward me, and that was all of the motion he spent on it.

“Miss Vance. You may stop at any page. Do you want water before you start?”

“I’d rather start,” I said. “If I stop, it will be at a clause, and I’ll tell you which one and what’s wrong with it.”

Alistair filled a glass from a carafe I had not seen anyone carry in, set it at my elbow, moved it half an inch, and then left it alone.

His fingers stopped beside the inside of my wrist, close enough that the fine hair there lifted. He had not touched me. My pulse answered anyway. Alistair’s eyes dropped to it, then rose to my face with the courtesy of a man pretending he had seen nothing.

I read the dateline first, because a dateline says who drafted a document and how much time he had.

“Executed at the Carrow Institute on Wednesday, the tenth of September,” I read.

Nobody corrected the date. They had drawn it since breakfast, and they had drawn it for me.

“The Carrow Trust of the first part, and Avery Vance of the second part, who is engaged as reader of the primary text.” I turned the leaf with my off hand and kept my working hand down on the oak.

“The reader shall reside in the Sable Wing, fourth floor east, and shall be housed and fed at the charge of the Trust.”

Pages one through three had been typed in one sitting. Page four sat a hair off the left margin the others kept, and page four was the one about photographs.

“No leaf of the primary text, and no copy, photograph or transcription of any leaf, shall pass out of this building in any hand.”

I read that one twice on the first pass, which I had not planned to do, and Alistair heard me do it.

“May I see your phone,” he said. “You will want to be watching me while I do this.”

“No.”

“Four photographs, taken in the digitizing lab at seventeen minutes past nine last night.” He said it kindly, and he kept saying everything kindly.

“I would like there to be none of them, and I would like you to see it happen, because otherwise you will spend the term wondering whether it happened at all.”

I put the phone into his hand, because the other version of this had him taking it out of my fingers in front of two other men, and I can count.

He turned the screen so it faced me. He opened the album, selected four, deleted four, went into the folder where deleted things wait, and emptied that as well. He did all of it slowly enough for me to follow every tap. Then he handed it back to me.

Then he took a small brass tamper off the desk beside the index, the lead-weighted kind for knocking a stack of cards square, and set it down on the phone where it lay on the oak.

“Your stipend was frozen at four o’clock this afternoon,” he said. “Your academic file came out of Ashgrove at five.”

He walked the wall and ran a drawer out to the end of its slide, and that was the loudest thing that had happened in a room built to eat sound.

“Third from the bottom, second column,” he said. “It stays there.”

“You did that before you knew what I was going to say.”

“I did that so the question would be worth asking.”

My hands were cold and my face was hot. I picked the pages back up and found my place with the tip of my thumb.

“She is about to tell you this paper would not survive ten minutes in front of a judge,” Rook said. “She is right, and she has not even said it yet.”

“I was going to say eleven,” I said.

Alistair laid his pen down parallel to the blotter. “The paper is not for a court. It is for the twelve people who will be told she signed it, and for your brother’s marker, which is very much for a court.”

He said that to Rook. I was three feet from him with my hand on his own contract, and he said it to Rook, about me, in the third person, and he was pleasant the entire time he was doing it.

“Tell it to her, then,” Rook said.

“I did tell it to her.”

“You told it near her.” Rook came off the doorframe and put his knuckles down on the far end of the table. “That is your whole trick, and one of these nights somebody in this room is going to charge you for it.”

I set page four down and put my palm on it. “Then here is the part I want out loud. You have the file. You have the building. You have a room with one door and you hold the key to that door. There is nothing in that folder my hands are required for, so somebody tell me why I am worth feeding.”

Julian answered without shifting anything but his mouth.

“Those pages have been in this building since 1911, the key text burned in 1919, and in a hundred and fourteen years exactly one living person has read a clean line off them. You do not shoot the only key you have.”

“One living person,” I said. “Say the name out loud, please, so I know we mean the same person.”

“You,” he said. “Last night, seventeen past nine, in the digitizing lab, with a phone in your hand and no idea at all what you had just done.”

I went back to page two, because it had bothered me once and I had let it go by. “Clause two puts me on the fourth floor east. Who else sleeps on that floor?”

“I do,” Julian said. “My rooms are at the far end, past the kitchen. My office shares a wall with yours, and you will hear me move a chair, and I will hear you.”

On the far side of the table, his chair leg moved a single inch over terrazzo. The sound ran through the soles of my shoes and settled low in my stomach. Rook made me watch his hands. Alistair made me watch his. Julian could move a chair and make my whole body listen.

“That is a strange thing to volunteer to a woman you have locked in a room.”

“I do not touch a patient. Ever.” There was no weight on it at all when he said it. “You will hear me say that again before this is finished, and you may hold me to it in front of anybody you like, including these two.”

“He is not being gallant with you,” Rook said. “It is the one promise he keeps without being asked twice, and it is his to give you, not mine.”

“Clause five says my brother’s obligation is satisfied in full on completion of the term,” I said. “Tell me what the word completion does if I fall down your stairwell tomorrow.”

“Then the instrument is unperformed and the marker goes back into the drawer I took it out of,” Alistair said.

“Then put a line in that says otherwise.”

“I will not draft a new clause at eight in the evening for the party sitting across from me.”

“If she is hurt in this building, the marker burns and I do it in front of her,” Julian said.

“That is not in the nine pages,” I said.

“It is not.”

“Then it is worth nothing.”

“It is worth what I am worth, and you have no way to price that tonight,” Julian said. “Keep reading. You are three pages from the end and you have not asked me the thing you are actually afraid of.”

I went back to page one and started again, out loud, slower, with my finger under the line.

Nobody told me to hurry. Alistair capped his pen.

Julian’s hands stayed where he had put them down.

Rook picked a chair up by its back, changed his mind about the chair, and let it down harder than he meant to, and the crack of it went around the terrazzo and came back at us, and Julian did not blink.

It took nineteen minutes. Three men who could have ended that evening in any direction they liked sat in a windowless room and let a second-year master’s student read nine pages of their own paper back to them at half speed.