Chapter 35
Céline
I thought I had misheard him.
I did.
Two words. Quiet. Almost gentle. The same tone he might have used to say he had finished the last of the wine or turned off a lamp I had forgotten.
I stared at him across the ruined table, my dress still twisted high around my thighs, my body aching in ways that should have felt vulgar after what we had just done.
The candle had guttered out when he swept the dishes aside.
Pasta, shattered glass, red wine, and water lay pooled across the floor in a grotesque little still life.
The apartment smelled of cream sauce, cigarette smoke, rain, and sex.
“You’re lying,” I said.
Vincent did not move.
“No.”
“You are.” My voice cracked despite the rawness in my throat. “You’re lying because you want me to feel indebted to you.”
“I rarely need to lie for that.”
“Do not be clever right now.”
His mouth closed.
That frightened me more than any joke could have. Vincent, without any amusement, was always more dangerous.
Rain traced slow fingers down the windows behind him. Outside, Blackwater blurred into wet darkness, the whole city softened by storm and distance. Inside, Katherine’s name hung between us like a body we had not yet finished burying.
I stood too quickly. My legs trembled.
“Tell me again,” I said.
His eyes stayed locked on mine.
“Katherine was alive when I reached her.”
I gripped the edge of the table.
“No.”
“She was dying,” he said, calm as ever. “But not dead.”
“No.”
The word came out smaller the second time, and I hated the sound of it. Hated him. Hated Katherine for refusing to die cleanly enough to keep my version of the story intact.
Vincent’s face shifted, just slightly. For one heartbeat, I saw the answer before he spoke it. He had expected my horror. He had perhaps even expected my disgust. What he had not expected was this particular wound—the wound of discovering I was less guilty than I had believed.
“I could have called for help,” he said.
My stomach turned over.
“Stop.”
“I didn’t.”
“Stop.”
“I ended it.”
Something inside me broke open so quietly I almost missed the fracture.
Katherine had been alive.
After the fall. After my fingers had loosened. After I had run through the rain, clutching my sketchbook to my chest, sobbing until I was sick behind a locked bathroom door in Westgrave Hall. While I was already becoming the girl who would mourn her, Katherine had still been breathing on wet stone.
My mouth filled with the taste of metal.
“She said your name,” Vincent said.
I looked up sharply.
The room snapped back into focus.
“What?”
His expression did not soften. That was mercy, perhaps—the only kind he knew how to give.
“She recognized me too.”
I pressed one hand over my mouth.
Vincent watched me the way he always watched—measuring, waiting, cataloguing the exact second my mask slipped.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“You know what I did.”
“No.” I dropped my hand. “Say it.”
His eyes darkened. For the first time, I thought he might refuse me, not out of cruelty but because the words would strip the act of whatever elegance he had wrapped around it.
“I covered her mouth and nose with my handkerchief,” he said.
Silence swallowed the room whole.
My mind rejected the image at first. Then built it anyway: white linen, cold rain, Katherine’s wide eyes, Vincent’s hand perfectly steady while I was somewhere above or inside or already running, already saved by the very thing I had done.
I stepped back from him. The movement was pure instinct, and he let me.
That made the silence worse. He did not chase. He did not reach for me. He did not try to fold himself into something forgivable. He simply stood there with his shirt open, hair still mussed from my hands, face calm and utterly ruined by truth.
“Did you keep it? I need proof,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Of course you did.”
The admission should have disgusted me. It did. But disgust was no longer clean between us. Nothing was.
“Show me.”
“What?”
“I said show me.”
“Céline.”
“No.” My voice steadied. “You do not get to hand me this and then hide the evidence like some private treasure. Show me.”
He watched me for a while. Then he walked past me through the destroyed dining room toward his bedroom. I followed. My body still ached. My knees felt unsteady. There was sauce smeared across the floor and broken glass near the chair, but I stepped around it all with careful dignity.
Vincent opened the drawer beside his bed—the same drawer. Katherine’s phone lay there in its leather case. The sight of it sent the old coldness sliding through me again.
Beneath a folded black cloth rested a small flat box.
He took it out and offered it to me.
I did not accept it immediately. My fingers hovered over the lid. Then I opened it.
The handkerchief lay folded inside. White once. Not white now. Rain, time and Katherine’s blood had turned the stains a rusted brown that spread through the fabric in uneven shadows. His initials were stitched in one corner—V.M.—small, elegant, obscene.
For a second, I could not breathe.
It was ridiculous how ordinary it looked. Katherine’s last breath had ended against something that might have been tucked into a dinner jacket.
My hand shook when I touched it. The fabric was impossibly soft. That small, ordinary detail nearly made me sick.
I looked up at him.
“You kept this beside your bed?”
“Yes.”
“Like a souvenir.”
“A memento.”
“Of what?”
His gaze held mine without flinching.
“Of the first time I chose to see you.”
The words moved through me so violently I almost dropped the box.
Some ruined, hungry, unforgivable part of me understood them exactly as he meant them.
He had chosen me before I even knew a choice remained.
He had looked at Katherine—alive, pleading—and chosen the girl who had let go over the girl who had fallen.
It was monstrous. It was devotion. It was both.
I closed the box slowly.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked, voice strange in my own ears.
“Because you said I held too much over you.”
“You do.”
“Yes.” He looked at the box in my hands. “Now you have something over me.”
I stared at him.
The meaning settled like slow poison.
“No. No way.”
“Yes, Selena.”
“You’re giving it to me?”
“I am.”
I looked down at the box again. My fingers tightened around the edges until the wood creaked.
“This could ruin you.”
“Yes.”
“If I gave this to the police—”
“You won’t.”
I laughed once, sharp and breathless. “Still so arrogant.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m trusting you.”
That landed harder than anything else. I hated the word in his mouth. Trust had no business there—not after Daniel, not after Katherine, not after the phone and the proposal and every door he had opened inside my life without permission.
“You do not trust people,” I said.
“No.”
“But you trust me?”
His expression changed to amusement.
“I trust your self-preservation.”
The honesty should have insulted me. Instead, it felt like the first clean thing we had ever shared.
I carried the box to my room without asking and placed it inside my bedside drawer—the same drawer that had once held the pills I tried to use against him. Then I closed it.
When I turned, Vincent stood in the doorway. He did not cross the threshold.
“Do you like collecting things?” I said.
“Yes…”
“People’s things.”
“Not exactly.”
I folded my arms. “Do not start being philosophical now.”
His mouth curved faintly. Then he looked past me toward the drawer.
“I collect moments.”
“That sounds worse.”
“It is.”
He seemed to understand there was no point in making me drag the rest from him. For once, he gave the truth without turning it into a game.
“My father collected objects because he preferred things after they stopped resisting,” he said. “I preferred the instant before. The crack. The correction. The moment someone’s prepared face slips and shows the truth underneath.”
I thought of Katherine hanging over the ledge. I thought of my own face in that same instant, when I understood she would ruin me if she lived.
“You collect evidence of people breaking.”
“Sometimes.”
“That is so sick.”
“Yes, I admit.”
“Why?”
He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, posture casual, face anything but.
“Because that is the only time most people are honest.”
I wanted to call him cruel. He was. But I also knew the truth of it. I had spent my life lying best when I felt safe. It was fear, hunger, shame, and desire that made me real. The moments I hated most about myself were the ones Vincent loved, because they could not be polished into Céline.
“What else do you have?” I asked.
His gaze sharpened. He understood exactly what I was asking. Not Katherine. Not me. Him.
After a moment, he led me to the study and opened a cabinet I had never noticed before because it looked built seamlessly into the wall. Inside were boxes, slim drawers, labeled folders.
He did not show me everything. That was wise on his part, but he showed me enough.
A chipped porcelain flower. A pearl earring. A matchbook. A cufflink edged with dried rust. A blue ribbon sealed inside a glass envelope.
Small objects. Useless objects. Beautiful in the wrong way because they had been severed from the lives that once gave them meaning.
“These are not trophies?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then what are they?”
“Witnesses.”
I looked at him. For once I could not tell whether he believed the distinction mattered or simply needed it to.
“Did your father know?”
“He knew I kept things. He did not understand why.”
“Did he care?”
“My father cared only when my behaviour became an inconvenience to him.”
The flatness in his voice caught me. There it was—a door, not open, but not quite locked.
“You hate him.”
“Very much, he was a lot like yours but with money and a lot of restraint.”
“Is he alive?”
“…Yes”
“You sound disappointed.”
Vincent looked at me then, while the familiar pain moved behind his eyes.
“He sent me away when I was twelve.”
“To boarding school?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I became inconvenient.”
The answer was too simple. I waited.