14. Kit
Kit
T he moment the door closed and blocked Violette from sight, I slumped against it.
For the first time in thirteen years, I’d had cause to pull on the mask my father crafted for me over the course of my childhood.
I’d put it away the day I escaped in the hopes of never needing to hide behind it again and had forgotten how exhausting it was to wear.
Though, the appearance of stoicism did nothing to deaden the uncomfortably familiar fear and anxiety simmering beneath the surface.
Standing there drawing measured breaths felt too much like the last time I had my back against this same door, a boy of fourteen so awash in terror that my knees shook.
My father towered over me, his face bright red with fury as he barred an arm on either side of my shoulders so I had no hope of escape.
“You’re lucky it was me who caught you, boy, or I’d have let them have your bones.” His voice was cold enough to make me shiver. “What were you thinking?”
Over the years, I had watched him slowly descend into insanity. I hardly remembered the soft, understated warmth and kindness with which he treated me before he steeped himself in the darkness of the Bone Men.
I was desperate to get away from him and the vile task he’d set me as punishment for some supposed slight, which was what prompted my failed escape attempt that night, but I knew better than to say that out loud. There was no answer he would find acceptable, so I kept quiet.
He ground his teeth as he seized the front of my shirt and jerked me away from the door.
“I’m well aware you aren’t strong enough to do this.
You have too much of your mother in you.
” He pulled on the wadded fabric until I was lifted onto my tiptoes.
I held onto his wrist, biting my lip so hard that I tasted blood as he seethed.
“But the least you can do is fake it well enough to not shame me with your failure.”
Turning, he flung me in the direction of my bedroom door. I stumbled but remained upright, standing with my back to him to hide the tears that flooded my eyes.
The low roar of his voice seemed to shake the foundation of the house. “Better you die undertaking your Oaths than I let you leave here a coward and put a stain on our family name.”
At least I’d honored one of his wishes.
When my next attempt to run away succeeded three years later, I shed his surname like a snakeskin and adopted my mother’s maiden name in its stead.
Evidently, he’d written me out of his own history much the same way.
Part of me appreciated that he’d let me go, but there was some small piece of me that wished he’d cared enough to mourn me.
I shook my head as if that would reset my thoughts and pushed myself upright.
Penny loitered in the middle of the room, looking lost. He plucked the stub of an old candle off the coffee table and turned it over in his hands before setting it back down, careful to line it up with the dust ring it left behind.
He turned a full circle, taking in the bare walls and sparse furniture that looked exactly as it had the day I left thirteen years before.
His eyes skimmed over everything but me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?” he asked.
I huffed a nervous laugh. “Where do I start?”
He rubbed a hand over the raw skin on his face. He looked as tired as I felt, with dirt in his hair and a deep purple bruise forming over his cheekbone. I hadn’t prepared him for an ambush, though I should have expected one, and that was the least of my most recent slights.
Rather than answer my question or accept my apology, Penny started another conversation entirely.
“Lucky you found someone who remembers you,” he said. “Remembers you pretty well, it seems.”
“You mean Vi?” I asked, earning only a nod in return. “We grew up together.” I rolled my shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “We were in the same initiate group before I left. And apparently shamed my father so badly that he tried to erase me from history.”
“You wanted it that way, didn’t you?” Penny asked.“To forget them? To be forgotten?”
Yes and no. I wished desperately to forget everything about my time among the Bone Men, to purge my memory of the sights and smells of death.
But to be forgotten? I never wanted that.
That meant I’d never been important enough to my father to be worth remembering.
That whatever fragments of fond memory I had of him only mattered to me.
When I didn’t answer, Penny moved to the fireplace and used the toe of his boot to adjust the charred logs in the hearth.
“I don’t think you could do anything to make Violette forget you,” he mused. “She seems to recall you quite fondly… Kitten.”
The mention of the pet name made me grimace. “I couldn’t stand her when we were kids. She still makes my skin crawl.”
A smile flashed across Penny’s face. “You could’ve fooled me.”
“That’s the point.” I sank down onto the uncomfortable couch. “I had years to perfect pretending to be who my father wanted me to be. Cold, domineering, and arrogant; better than the common rabble that scurried around doing his bidding. But I hated every minute of it.”
Tipping my head back, I let my eyes slide closed against the headache forming between my temples. “It’s exhausting, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep it up.” A bitter chuckle rumbled out of me. “I’m out of practice.”
It was quiet for another moment before Penny cleared his throat. “Why Mosel?”
I cracked an eye open to see him standing expectantly next to the coffee table. “I didn’t want to be associated with my father, so I took my mother’s name.”
He nodded as he glanced around again. “Are you going to give me a tour of the place?”
“Not much to see.” I hauled myself to my feet and motioned around us. “Living area, couch, bookshelves…” I stepped past him and gestured down the hall to our left. “Bathroom and bedrooms are that way.”
Penny peered into the murky darkness. “How many?”
I hung back, not wanting to revisit any more unpleasant memories of this place while I was still struggling to recover from the first one. But I had a feeling Penny’s curiosity wouldn’t be sated until he saw it all.
“Two,” I replied.
He nodded. “Good. No one has to sleep on the floor.”
The thought of either of us sleeping in my father’s bed made me feel physically ill. Not that the prospect of tucking myself into my old bed was any better. Every night I’d spent in that room had been its own form of torture.
“You can have my old room,” I told him. “I’ll take the couch.”
Penny turned back to me with a puzzled look. “But there are two bedrooms. Two beds. Why would you sleep out here?”
I crossed my arms over my chest as if I could hold in some of the discomfort that being in this house gave me. “Neither of us is going into my father’s room, and I don’t particularly want to go back into mine. So, I’ll take the couch.”
He didn’t push it. Instead, he started down the dark hallway and paused between the closed doors. “Which one was yours?”
I came up behind him and pushed open the door on the right.
Stepping inside, he looked around, though there wasn’t much to see.
An unmade bed was pushed up beneath the window with a small table beside it, a dresser with its empty drawers hanging partway open stood across from it, and a stack of dry-rotted wood sat beside the fireplace. There were no personal effects.
It was as stark and cold as my father had been.
“I guess he cleared it out after you left,” Penny remarked after turning a full circuit.
I leaned against the doorframe. “Nope. This is exactly how I left it. ”
“But there’s nothing here.”
I turned back down the hall toward the rear of the house and called over my shoulder. “Eeus is the god of scarcity, and my father took that to the extreme. There’s nothing there because I had nothing. I was soft enough as it was without being spoiled on top of it.”
“ Soft ?” Penny laughed as he followed me. “Were you ever soft?”
“To my father, I was.”
Penny caught up to me as I entered the cramped kitchen.
The empty cookstove sat beside a large window on the back wall that overlooked a small, rocky yard.
A counter ran beneath the window with a sink at the far end, above which was a small two-door cabinet with two cracked teacups hanging underneath on little metal hooks.
In the corner opposite the cookstove sat a table barely big enough for two, and along the interior wall hung a small assortment of iron cookware that had seen better days.
“This is…” He seemed to mentally grope for the word.
“Miserable?” I supplied, and the look Penny turned on me was more compassionate than I deserved.
“You grew up here.”
It was my turn to avert my eyes. “Lived here for eleven years.”
I remembered his family’s cozy farmhouse, vibrantly teeming with life and affection.
Between his doting mother and teasing sister, it was clear that Penny was loved.
I had watched the three of them flit around a kitchen that was so much like this one and yet simultaneously so different that it seemed foreign.
It was like they were putting on a show I could observe but never be a part of.
How could I not be jealous of that when this had been my life?
I should have left him at the farm. He had everything I ever wanted, yet I’d brought him here.
I knew what we’d face in the next few days or weeks while we tried to get Penny’s father’s bones back.
I knew, too, why so many people on the list of contacts I’d supplied the interrogator, Luca, were no longer around.
There was no guarantee that Penny or I would live long enough to do what we came here to do if our true intentions were discovered.
It was more likely I’d leave Sayla and Amelina with a farm they couldn’t maintain.
I doubted they would get much help from the infamous Merrick if Penny wasn’t around to push for it.
The silence stretched while Penny examined the corroded pots and pans.
“There’s a forge in town.” I stepped in beside him and plucked the least-worn frying pan from the wall. “Hopefully they’ll let me use it to either repair these or make us some new ones.”
Penny’s quiet unsettled me, and I found myself missing his endless prattle. When it became clear that I’d lost him to his own internal musings, I spoke again. “Why don’t you get unpacked? I’ll go fetch something from the market to make for dinner.”
He whipped his head around, and I got the distinct feeling that he didn’t want to be left alone.
“We have some jerky in our bags,” he said hurriedly. “And we should clean this place before we bring in any other food. There’s years of dust built up in here.”
To be fair, I didn’t particularly want to leave Penny here alone, either.
Violette was relatively harmless unless you crossed her, but there were plenty of other people here I didn’t know and didn’t trust. My would-be recruit was my responsibility, and I would do whatever I could to keep him alive and safe.
The less we were apart, the easier that would be.
I replaced the frying pan on its hook. “All right. But I think we’ve done enough for today. We can clean tomorrow. Tonight, we need sleep.”
We returned to the living room and our dropped bags by the door. I built a fire in the hearth while Penny retrieved the jerky and a bit of stale bread from his pack, then we ate side by side on the couch.
Penny chattered about all the things he wanted to do to make the bleak house homier as if he would be here long enough to care. He effused about a garden out back and detailed his plans to find curtains for the windows, a new pillow for the couch, and a dozen other things.
I tuned out a few minutes in, and let the rhythmic cadence of his voice become a distantly soothing drone as darkness fell outside.
Yawning, he stood and stretched before announcing it was time for bed. I watched him disappear down the hall and waited for the bedroom door to close before rising from the couch myself.
After scavenging a handful of fat tallow candles from beneath the kitchen sink, I brought them to the living room. I intended to sprawl out on the couch and follow Penny to sleep, but something on the bookshelf beside the fireplace caught my eye.
Lined up one after another were eight leather bound tomes alarmingly similar to the six journals stashed in the bottom of my pack.
I’d burned the other half of the twelve I’d stolen on the night of my escape, when that had been all there was.
It made sense that a man as meticulous and self-important as my father would have continued his writing habit after I’d gone.
I could practically feel the loathing and disdain dripping from the pages as I pulled the books from the shelf and stacked them on the coffee table.
The last thing I wanted was to dive back into his twisted mind, but though I had a vague idea of the last three Oaths, I had no hard proof that I remembered them correctly.
If he wrote about them in those books, I could prepare myself for what was to come.
That didn’t make any of this easier.
I arranged the candles around the outer edge of the table. Between their meager flames and the light from the fireplace, it was bright enough to see the pages. So, I sank down on the couch, pulled the first of the journals to me, and started to read.
And then I couldn’t stop.