Written in the Stars
NICO
The balcony was off the east corridor, through a set of glass doors the house had conveniently left unlatched. The cold hit me the second I pushed through them. The city glowed below and to the south.
I pulled the mask off, leaned against the railing and breathed.
Above me, what passed for stars over Manhattan sat in a sky that was more indigo than black.
Blackthorne's walls breathed around me even out here. I could feel it, which I had stopped pretending was my imagination about six days ago.
Out here, I tried to remember what my life had looked like. I laughed into the cold night air. It was either laugh or lie down on the balcony stone and stay there, and the stone was too cold for that.
I heard the balcony door open behind me and knew who it was before I turned.
He came to stand beside me at the railing and he was holding two cups.
I looked at them. “Tea.”
“You have had four glasses of bloodwine in the past two hours.”
“It's a party.”
“It is a political event with an open bar,” He held one out. “The bloodwine is decorative. The alcohol content is real, and you are still human, and I need you standing upright for the rest of the evening.”
I took the cup. It was the right temperature.
“You're mothering me. That's scarier than the decapitation.”
He leaned against the railing beside me and looked out at the city.
“I was not aware decapitation had set a bar,” he said.
“It set several.”
Below us, the orchestra was playing a slow song. I watched the city glow and felt the strange doubled quality of the night.
“What did you actually want before all of this?” I gestured, a loose motion meant to take in everything.
He was quiet long enough that I thought he had decided not to answer. Then he said, without looking at me, “A home no one could take.”
“That's it?”
“I wanted people around me who knelt because they chose to, not because I frightened them into it.” He turned his cup in his hands. “I wanted one place in the world that did not require me to be monstrous to keep it.”
I looked at the side of his face.
Without the mask, he looked less like the monster he had taught the world to fear and more like the man he had forgotten how to be.
“Do you have it now?”
He looked at me then. “Parts of it.”
I turned back to the city before my face gave the thought away. “For me, I wanted a bigger studio. Better light, more bench space, maybe a small room for client consultations that wasn't also where I kept the solvent.” I laughed a little. “That was the grand ambition. More square footage.”
“And before that?”
“Before the shop?” I thought about it. Genuinely, which I did not often do.
“I wanted to be someone my family didn't feel like a problem. I wanted to fix things and have it stay fixed.” I turned my ring.
“People don't let you fix them the way furniture does.
Furniture is honest about the damage. It doesn't tell you the damage is your fault.”
Draco was quiet for a moment. “Old things survive by changing shape around what broke them.”
I looked at him. “Did you just give me a metaphor?”
“I gave you an observation.”
“It sounded like a metaphor.”
“Most observations do, to people who are used to things meaning more than they say.”
I felt the corner of my mouth pull. “Was that about me specifically?”
“Yes.”
I drank my tea and he drank his. Below us, someone in the ballroom laughed and the sound drifted up through the stone and dissipated into the cold air and was gone.
“My family.” The words came out before I'd planned to say them.
“They're not — it's not a good story. I'm the one who holds the pieces together.
Remy's the one who breaks them. My mother decides which version of events is true. My father—” I stopped.
“He had a particular idea about what men owed the people who raised them. About debt.”
“Debt has many forms. Blood is often the least honest one.”
“You said that like you know.”
“I collected debts for centuries and I understand the difference between what is owed, what is taken, and what is simply called a debt because naming it that is easier than naming what it actually is.”
The night felt very still for a moment.
“People probably don't see this side of you,” I said.
He turned to look at me, and the look was direct and slightly unguarded. “Which side?”
“The one that's standing on a balcony talking to me like a person. Instead of an ass.”
“You have been a considerable inconvenience.”
“Charming.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“You called me an inconvenience.”
“I called you a considerable one. There is a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Considerable suggests scale. Effort. A certain —” he tilted his head slightly, “— persistence I have found myself respecting against my better judgment.”
“So I've won you over through sheer annoyance.”
“Yes and one incident in a midtown alley that I am still processing.”
I laughed and I could feel him watching me.
“Your family. Would it help you to see them?”
I looked at him. “What?”
“You have been in this house for a while. You are not a prisoner, whatever the contract reads like from the inside. If you wanted to visit them, I would arrange it.”
“You'd let me do that?”
“I would arrange it, yes.”
“I just need to ask and you'd send me.”
“With Mateo and Rowan, a route checked in advance, and a window that does not put you in the open longer than necessary.” His jaw moved once. “But yes. If that is what you need.”
I turned back to the railing and breathed out slowly. “Maybe Remy,” I said. “Not my parents. Not yet.”
Draco nodded, and I appreciated that he did not ask me to explain the distinction.
“I could bring you an item to fix if the restlessness is the problem. The east library has a side table with a leg that has been wrong since 1987 and no one in this house has the correct frame of reference to address it.”
I looked at him. “Did you just offer me a project?”
“I offered you a structurally compromised piece of furniture. What you do with that information is your concern.”
“What's wrong with the leg?”
“It lists. Approximately six degrees to the right.”
“Original joint or replaced?”
“Original, I believe. There was some attempt at repair in the nineties that I would describe as enthusiastic rather than competent.”
I pressed my lips together to keep the grin from getting away from me. “Enthusiastic.”
“Whoever did it had access to the right adhesive and absolutely no patience for drying time.”
“That explains the nineties generally.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. I had started collecting those because they were rare enough to mean something and I was apparently the kind of person who catalogued rare things. Occupational hazard.
“I'll look at the table,” I said.
“I expected nothing less.”
“Don't make it a thing.”
“I would not dream of making it a thing.”
“You're already making it a thing.”
“I am simply noting that this is the first time you have agreed to do anything in it voluntarily.”
“I wander around it.”
“You case it. There is a difference.”
“I'm observant.”
“You clocked the exits on the ground floor within your first forty minutes. Rowan was impressed.”
I opened my mouth and closed it. “I do that everywhere.”
“I know. The house noticed too.”
I looked at him sideways. “About that, is this place actually — I mean, is it—”
“Alive?” His mouth curved just slightly. “In a sense.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It is not alive the way you and I are alive. It does not have a heartbeat. It will not bleed if you cut it.” He considered the railing, running one thumb along the stone.
“It is sentient in the way that very old magic becomes sentient when it has been tended long enough. It has been absorbing intention and will and blood and grief for two centuries, and it has developed opinions.”
“Opinions,” I repeated.
“Strong ones. Particularly about furniture arrangement and guests it finds interesting.”
The balcony door behind us drifted open an inch on a night with no wind, then settled back shut. Perfectly timed. Smug, even.
“Did it just—”
“It agreed with me,” Draco said simply. “My house is a diva of considerable age and has never once been subtle about it. It has been rearranging the temperature in your room since the third night. Did you notice?”
“I thought the heating was just good.”
“The heating is exceptional because the house decided you were cold and took it personally.”
“And it likes me?”
“It pulls your curtains open every morning at the same time. It keeps your workbench in the east room at the right temperature before you arrive. Last Tuesday it moved a lamp three feet across a room because the angle was wrong for what you were reading.” A pause.
“I did not ask it to do any of those things.”
The balcony door drifted open again.
“Stop it,” I told it.
It settled shut. Primly.
“And the necklace? What's actually going on with it?”
He went still.
He set his cup on the railing then looked at the bloodstone where it sat against my chest.
“Where did you find it?” he asked.
“An antiques roadshow. A dealer who didn't know what he had and had it listed as Victorian mourning jewelry.” I touched it. “It felt familiar the second I saw it.”
“The bloodstone knew your skin before you knew what it was.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is older than the dealer could have known. Older than any record he would have had access to.” He picked up his cup again and turned it in his hands.
“I commissioned it during a war.” He paused.
“There was a soldier who’s stubborn that you could not move him without his agreement, and even then he would make you explain yourself first.”
My heartbeat had changed.