Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Alexandru
Achild of twelve. A momentary lapse. And she carried it all these years, a stone in her chest. “Your brother, James, would be twenty-eight now.”
“Yeah, and people point it out like, why wouldn’t he reach out? As a fully grown adult, he’d be able to make his way home. But there’s some reason he hasn’t.”
“If anybody can find him, you can.”
She whispers a soft thank you.
I study her in the firelight, hands folded in her lap. Her pulse has steadied. The grief is there, but beneath it runs a steely strain of resolve.
“But there is one thing I do not understand. Why keep it from me?”
She gazes into the fire, and I think she will not answer, but then she does.
“I’ve lived here my whole life with everyone defining me by that one moment.
They think I’m damaged. Like my talent at spreadsheets and organizational things is this coping mechanism.
” She looks at me. “I didn’t want you to see me that way too. ”
“What you carry is not damage.”
“Thank you.” Her voice is quiet. “For believing in me. It means a lot.”
It means a lot.
Something uncomfortable shifts inside me. I have been feared, obeyed, desired, despised over the centuries. I have been begged for mercy and cursed with dying breaths. I know what to do with all of these things.
I do not know what to do with gratitude. I cannot abide it.
Truly, this Renfield will not cease to vex me.
The distance between my chair and hers has grown too small.
I rise. “I shall leave you to your rest.”
I retreat to the dungeon—what Ms. Renfield insists on calling “the cistern.” It lies below the old house, accessible through a heavy oak door.
The basement itself is unremarkable, but the cistern is something else entirely.
A well dug deep into the bedrock, twelve feet down and ten feet across, its walls lined with old brick gone dark with centuries of damp.
The original builders intended it to hold water.
It is well-suited to hold other things.
Should we ever need to hold two murderers at once, for example, this is where the second would wait.
Gregor has done excellent work scrubbing the place clean. The old stains are gone, the floor swept, the chains oiled and ready. I descend the ladder and stand in the darkness.
A human would be blind here, groping at walls. But I see perfectly—every ridge in the brick, every groove in the mortar, the faint gleam of the iron rings set into the walls.
I breathe in the dark and the silence. I focus on my hunger.
I let the cold stone walls leach the unwanted warmth away.