Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Alexandru
She has been avoiding me for three days.
Not overtly. Ms. Renfield is too professional for that. She still appears at the appointed times to deliver her reports. She still maintains the business ledgers and correspondence and the administrative work that she so excels in.
But she no longer lingers, regarding me with that mix of exasperation and reluctant fascination.
She no longer engages me in chit-chat.
She has learned her place, I suppose.
Tonight, after she delivered her evening report in that new, clipped tone of hers, she retreated to her quarters.
I heard her footsteps on the stairs. The slam of her door.
The soft sigh she sometimes makes as she sinks into a chair.
Her discourse with Liz, her plant. Sometimes the clip of coins as she builds a new tower.
I wander to the far end of the mansion and climb the stairs to the turret room, lost in the memories of home and hunts gone by, but it is not the solace it used to be. My mind roams to darker things.
A few decades after the binding. There was a woman in a village below the castle who had done nothing... nothing, that is, except exist in a way that inconvenienced the Renfield of that era, Elisabeta’s grandson.
He held the amulet and smiled at me the way a child smiles at a trapped thing.
I watched myself trudge down through the snow toward the village lights, knowing exactly what I was going to do and unable to stop a single moment of it.
My hands did what they were told. I have never forgotten her bewildered expression as I crushed the life from her.
There were others. There were always others. I have forgotten none of them.
Some hours later, I go down to the great hall where Gregor has built a fire in the hearth.
Ms. Renfield’s book lies abandoned on the table. A half-empty cup of tea has gone cold. An empty bowl that once held her Bugle snacks.
It is here that I spot it: her sweater hanging over the chair. It’s one of her usual sweater jackets, this one gray with pockets on either side. She was wearing it this morning.
I go to it, run my finger over the fabric. And then, without thinking what I’m doing, I bring it to my face and breathe her in.
I breathe her in.
And then I lower the cardigan.
But I do not put it down.