Chapter 17
Kit
The blow left me disoriented. My vision was hazy, though I was vaguely aware of the three guards dragging me up another flight of stairs and into a room that was empty but for two chairs set facing each other several feet apart.
They pushed me down into the one facing away from the door, and one of them secured my wrists to the back legs so I couldn’t lift my hands.
Then they were gone. Silence swelled in the empty room, and the fuzziness of my head slowly dissipated. Rage and fear sharpened in its wake, lodging deep in my chest and adding their own unique sting to my cacophony of pain.
I didn’t have to worry about Penny being unable to lie this time, but that didn’t ease my mind.
He was in no shape to endure any sort of interrogation.
He needed a warm bath and a good night’s sleep, not vicious, probing questions about what happened in Wendwood.
Especially not without me there to offer comfort when he had to talk about the fire.
I wasn’t left alone for long. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before the door behind me opened and footsteps sounded on the wood floor.
“Kit Koesters.” Matina dragged a hand across my shoulders as she came around in front of me.
She had my Penny-menacing knife tucked into her belt, along with a sheathed blade of her own.
A wicked smile parted her lips when she took in the mark on my face.
“Well, isn’t that a lovely sight.” She rubbed her thumb over the bruise blooming on my cheekbone.
When I flinched away, she grabbed my jaw to steady my head so she could press her thumb into the tender flesh. Then she leaned in close, her breath hot and sour against my face.
“If I had my way, I’d see you with bruises more often,” she hissed. “Insubordinate, entitled little shit.”
She withdrew to settle into the chair across from me and tugged my knife out. She remained quiet for several moments as she dragged the flat of the blade up and down the thigh of her slacks like she was sharpening it on a whetstone, all the while maintaining unwavering eye contact.
I surmised she was trying to appear threatening, but I wasn’t afraid of her. There were rules to interrogations, and there wasn’t much she could do to me. Besides, I had nothing to hide.
“No one escapes the militia,” she said finally when her stare down didn’t phase me. “So how are you here? Did you cut a deal with them? Agree to be their spy? Or did you simply lead them here?”
“The militia wasn’t involved, so there was no one to escape or make a deal with,” I said.
I walked her through what happened, starting with Anders setting the first fire and culminating in our two-day walk in the cold and the snow to get back here.
I left out our overnight stay at an inn on the way—paid for by the coin pouch Margo had snuck back into our bag, which we discovered when we stopped for lunch on the first day—but made sure that I stressed that we left no trail and weren’t followed.
Matina’s eyes narrowed and her lips pursed the more I talked. By the time I was finished, she looked like I’d just told her I kicked her dog. She leaned forward, pointing my knife at me like an accusation.
“That’s not what we heard.”
“I’m sure it isn’t,” I retorted. “Unlikely that Anders would admit to anything when he was the aggressor here.”
“The problem is,” she began, the ghost of a smirk turning up one corner of her mouth, “I know Anders better than I know you. I trust him. I have never trusted you.”
I didn’t have a response for that. She didn’t know me.
She, like Merrick, hadn’t approved of my return to Ashpoint, and she’d made that no secret when Vi had brought me to rescue Penny from her interrogation on the day we arrived.
Son of Vaughn Koesters or not, I was as good as an outsider in her eyes.
I was relieved, at least, that they’d assigned her to me this time and not to Penny. I just hoped he was faring better than I was.
“Wendwood didn’t even call the militia. Anders was long gone before they could even send someone, so there was no point. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Maybe,” she said, knife inching closer to the soft skin beneath my chin, “you can start with why you came here in the first place.”
“It’s been months now, and that’s still in question?”
“You never gave a satisfactory answer,” she snarled. “You hated it here. You ran. And yet, here you are again.”
I didn’t rise to her escalation, keeping my face and tone impassive. “I ran from my father, not from the Bone Men.”
She barked a laugh and tapped the underside of my chin with the flat of the blade. “And you expect me to believe that four years after his murder, suddenly you wanted back in?”
“There’s nothing left for me out there,” I lied. “I could never escape the rumors, the stigma.” My breath hitched, and for a moment, even I believed the manufactured emotions that clogged my throat. “I was tired of being run out of town after town. I was ready to come home.”
“Our Right Hand might be swayed by your sob story, but I’m not.
” She lurched forward and pressed my knife against my throat, hard enough that I had to lean back to avoid its sting.
“You didn’t belong here then, and you don’t belong here now,” she hissed.
“Tell me what deal you made with the militia.”
“There was no deal,” I croaked, afraid to swallow against the pressure of the blade. I tried to keep my breathing slow and even, to cling to my mask of calm, but my palms were sweaty as fear crept up my spine, and my grip was slipping. “There was no militia involvement. Just Anders. Just fire.”
“Liar.”
She pressed forward again just as the door behind us creaked open and someone else stepped inside.
“Enough, Matina,” Levitt snapped. “This is not how we conduct interrogations.”
A held breath rushed out of me when she sat back and the knife went with her.
Levitt came around into the space between us. He was dressed in his ceremonial robes, head to toe in black with half a human jawbone hanging from a cord around his neck. I’d never seen him in them before, and it was hard to look at him when all I could see was my father wearing the same.
If I looked too hard, I was afraid of finding the same bitter hatred in his face.
He held out his hand to Matina. “You’re done here. Give me the knife.”
She slapped it into his palm, then shoved out of the chair so hard it scraped across the floor and tipped onto its back legs a moment before settling back with a clack. She bared her sharpened teeth at me as she passed, and the door slammed behind her.
Levitt’s shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath before he turned and bent over me to cut through the ropes binding my wrists.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, head down so I couldn’t meet his eyes. The commanding edge was gone, and his voice was weak with relief. His hand shook when he returned my knife to me and straightened. “When Anders said you’d been captured…”
Fury surged like bile in the back of my throat, chasing away the last vestiges of my fear.
“Anders,” I growled. “Where is he?”
Levitt finally looked up at me, and he grimaced when he saw the bruise on my cheek. “What’s this?” he asked, his own tone edged in anger as he reached for the mark. “Who did this?”
I slapped his hand away. “One of your guards. Where is Anders?”
His brows pinched. “At home, I assume. It’s getting late.”
It took every ounce of my willpower not to leap out of my chair and leave. To go stalk the streets of Ashpoint until I found the man in question so I could unleash my fury on him. Until all he knew was pain.
The desire to hurt him scared me.
“If anyone is to be questioned,” I said, “it should be that idiot.” I shook my head as if I could erase the violent thoughts that rattled through my mind.
“No, not an idiot. He’s a criminal, Lev.
Calculating. He stranded Penny and me in Wendwood and tried to burn down the mission with us inside.
” My volume rose until I was all but shouting in Levitt’s face.
His frown deepened. “That isn’t what—”
“What he told you?” I scoffed. “I’m sure it’s not. Will you be taking his word over mine? Over Penny’s? Speaking of, have you put a stop to his interrogation, too, or have you left him to it while you satisfied your need to see me alive?”
I didn’t wait for an answer before barreling on, each word more vicious than the last. “We walked here in the snow, in the cold. It took two days. If all of that leads to you doubting us, perhaps we should’ve stayed gone.”
Over those two days, I’d kept my head steady.
Penny needed me collected, so I spent my time reassuring him that I knew the way back, that we wouldn’t be lost in the endless woods.
That we wouldn’t freeze to death on the road.
We’d huddled together in the tiny bed at the inn like it was another night at home, and I was calm.
But there was no space in this interrogation room for any sense of peace, not with the eruption of the quiet rage that had been brewing inside me over those long, cold days.
It filled me up and spewed out in every sharp-edged word and accusation, and I hoped it scalded Levitt as badly as it was burning me.
Let him feel some of this.
Let him take the responsibility he never did after the third Oath.
I was tired of carrying it alone.
“What about the militia?” Levitt sounded more confused than hurt, and all that did was make me angrier.
“What about them?” I snapped.
“Anders said you were caught, that he barely managed to escape himself.”
My lips slid back from my teeth in a sneer. “The only things that almost captured us were the godsdamned fire and our death of cold.”
He shied back from the vehemence in my tone, but it wasn’t enough.
I pushed to my feet and advanced on him, driving him into a retreat.
“This makes the second attempt on our lives. Another near miss. Do you suppose we should ask your Shroud Warden about this plot, as well?”