Chapter 10
Nica: margaret how do you tell if your boss is lying to you
Margaret: all bosses lie. what did he lie about
Nica: everything, i think. also his age.
Margaret: photograph the binding and trust your gut, Veronica
Demetri worked across the room. He’d promised not to loom, and technically he kept the promise: he sat at the second desk with Benedikte’s data drive on an isolated laptop and did not pace.
He merely occupied the room with enough force to make Nica aware of every breath he took, a warmth and a weight at the edge of her vision that her whole body kept tilting toward like a plant to a window, and she’d been pretending not to notice him for forty-three minutes.
It wasn’t working. Nothing about the morning after sleeping with Demetri Vasiliev was working.
Her body remembered him every time she shifted in the chair — a low ache, a heat, the ghost of his mouth.
And her mind kept circling the same impossible pieces.
Claws. Scales. A wound closing beneath her fingers.
A shadow with wings in the fog. And Demetri telling her there was no one else.
Ever. That last one was the one she kept flinching away from, because it was the only one that could actually hurt her.
Nica bent closer to the Crowe ledger. Facts were safe.
Dates did not kiss her as though two centuries of hunger had found a mouth.
Numbers did not say forever and then look wounded when she panicked.
She turned a page, and let the small dry rustle of it, the pencil in her hand, the archival smell of old paper steady her the way it always had.
Crowe had entered seven objects into his collection between October 14 and 23, 2003 — different origins, different dealers, the same Rotterdam freight company.
She compared the dates against Margaret’s scanned notes.
Three weeks before the objects arrived, a Belgian newspaper had reported an unexplained fire outside Antwerp.
Four people missing. No bodies. She searched another cluster: six objects in 1996, two days after a residence near Lyon burned with the family presumed dead.
Prague. Oslo. Every group of acquisitions followed a death, a disappearance, or a fire.
The pattern assembled itself under her hands the way patterns always did, and this one turned her stomach as it came.
Nica sat back, her stomach turning, and Demetri looked up immediately. “What?”
She pointed at the screen. “He wasn’t buying collections. Someone went into these homes after the owners died and stripped them.”
Demetri crossed the room — so much for not looming — and stopped beside her chair, close enough that his heat reached her arm. His face went cold, a stillness settling over it that was somehow more frightening than any expression. “He killed them first.”
Nica looked at him. “You already knew.”
“I suspected.”
“You say that as if murder is a routine problem in antique acquisition.”
“For Crowe, it appears to have been.” She closed the ledger harder than she needed to.
“These were people’s lives. Family objects.
Records. And he put insurance values on them.
He reduced them to numbers.” Her voice cracked on it, because she knew exactly what it was to be reduced to a case number, a placement, a line in someone’s file.
“Then we will give them back their names.” The words caught her off guard.
His expression had not softened — he did not offer soft promises; he gave her certainty, laid it down like a stone she could stand on.
“We will identify every object. Determine where it came from and who has the right to receive it.”
“That could take years.”
“Then it will take years.”
Something inside her shifted. Dangerous.
Again. A man who would spend years returning stolen histories to the dead was a man she could fall for, and falling was the one thing she’d spent fifteen years learning not to do.
Nica turned back to the records and opened the archive of Crowe’s photographs — poorly labeled images of objects before cleaning.
Crates. Shelves. A ceremonial shield. A chair with dark stains along one arm. Then she stopped.
The photograph showed the corner of a stone room.
A table covered with metal tools — hammers, tongs, files — and something like a forge beyond it, its mouth dark.
At the far edge, almost cropped out, a man sat chained to a chair.
Dark hair, pale face turned away, his shirt removed to reveal a thin back marked by cuts and burns, and pale vines glowing faintly along both arms. Nica enlarged the image. The tattoos matched Caelen’s.
Her breath caught, and Demetri was beside her before she called him.
“What is it?” She pointed, and his body went still.
She opened the metadata: the photograph had been taken seventeen years ago, and a handwritten note had been scanned with it.
TEST ARTICLE 6. ALDRITH FAILED AGAIN. INCREASE HEAT.
Cold moved through her, the words dropping one after another like stones into still water. “Aldrith,” she whispered.
Behind them, a cup struck the floor. Caelen stood in the doorway, tea spreading across the rug in a dark stain, his face drained of all color.
Lirien appeared behind him, followed his gaze to the screen, and raised one hand to her mouth.
Caelen crossed the room, every step deliberate, the terrible measured walk of a man approaching something he already knows will unmake him, and stared at the chained man.
Lirien came beside him, her hand finding his, and this time Caelen gripped her fingers hard enough that the tendons stood out.
“Do you know him?” Nica asked.
Caelen’s throat moved. “My brother.” The room went silent.
“Faelar. He disappeared twenty years ago. We searched everywhere. We asked the council to investigate. They told us he had probably chosen exile.” He touched the edge of the monitor, close to the image, not quite touching the face.
“He would not have left without speaking to me.”
Nica looked at the date again. Seventeen years ago. If Crowe had held Faelar for at least three years after his disappearance — she did not finish the thought. Some arithmetic was a cruelty to complete.
“Caelen,” Demetri said, “we found two weapons carrying an elven sigil. You reacted to the mark.”
Caelen closed his eyes. When he opened them, grief had carved something new into his face. “I did not recognize it. Not consciously. But I knew the hand. Faelar forged the blades.” His voice cut sharp. “Never for Crowe. Not willingly.”
Nica looked back at the photograph — the tools, the burns, increase heat. “No,” she said quietly. “Not willingly.”
For one moment Caelen’s composure broke completely, and Nica saw a brother who’d spent twenty years imagining every possible reason someone he loved had vanished — and understood that none of those possibilities, none of the ones that had let him sleep at night, could have been worse than the truth on the screen.
She knew that arithmetic too, from the inside: the wrong apartment number, the ambulance, all the softer stories she’d told herself for years that the truth had eventually burned through.
Lirien drew him against her. He resisted for half a second, then folded, his forehead lowering to hers, and she whispered something in a language Nica didn’t know, old and liquid and meant for no one else.
After several minutes Caelen straightened, his face returning to order — a sharpened order, this one, grief tempered into something with an edge. “I need every image. Every inventory entry connected to a forged weapon. Every location.”
“You will have them,” Demetri said.
Lirien touched Caelen’s arm. “Not today.”
“My brother may have left us a trail.” Hope was worse than grief; Nica watched it enter Lirien’s eyes and understood why she wanted to stop him — because hope could be taken again, and grief at least had stopped moving.
“I must know,” Caelen said. Lirien nodded, and they left together. Always together.
Nica watched them go. “You knew,” she said.
“That Caelen had a missing brother? Yes. That the photograph might be him? No. But I recognized the markings. They identify the Aldrith line.”
“Elves.” The word escaped her before she could stop it, and Demetri’s expression changed. Not much. Enough. Nica’s heartbeat accelerated. “Those aren’t tattoos. Are they?” He said nothing. “Demetri.”
“I cannot answer.”
Anger flashed hot through her. “Because of the law.”
“Yes.”
She laughed once, harshly. “This is insane.”
“Yes.”
“You agree?”
“Completely.” Nica pushed away from the desk and walked to the windows, the fog pressing pale against the glass, the world beyond it erased down to gray.
She felt him behind her. Not touching. Waiting, with that particular patience of his that felt less like distance than like a held breath.
“Everyone in this house knows what’s happening except me. ”
“That is true.”
“And no one thinks that’s cruel?”
“I do.” She turned. “I think every moment I remain silent is cruel. I also know that speaking before I am permitted would place you in greater danger.”
Nica folded her arms. “You said you’d give me every answer you legally could. Then answer something else.” He waited. “What language were Caelen and Lirien speaking?”
“Elvish.” The word came softly. Real. Not folklore. “Caelen is an elf?”
Demetri said nothing. He did not need to.
“Oh my God.”
“Nica.”
“No. Don’t Nica me.” She rubbed both hands over her face. “There are elves in your house.”
“Yes.”
“Lirien too? They’re married?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
Demetri hesitated. “Twelve hundred years.”
Twelve hundred? What? Nica sat down; her legs had decided the matter without consulting her. “One thousand two hundred years?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not possible.”
“No.”
“But it’s true?”
“Yes.”