14. Lilith #2
I put the blade back under my coat. I adjust her pillow. Not from kindness—because a maid will find her in the morning and the scene should read as peaceful for as long as possible, should give her sellers time to run and give me time to be gone. Professional. Clean.
I pick the Chubb shut on the way out. It doesn't fight me. Nothing does, tonight.
---
The November fog wraps around me on the pavement and Ashworth smells like coal and horse and river and the sharp copper of fresh blood under my fingernails that I'll wash off when I get back.
I'm not sorry.
I should be. I know I should be. I killed a woman in her bed and the correct human response is guilt and the correct moral position is that murder is wrong regardless of the victim's sins and I know this, I know all of it, and I'm not sorry.
Worse—there's that flicker. The same dark satisfaction I felt when I cut his shadow in Cutler's Alley, the same wicked little hum that runs through me when a job goes clean and fast and the lock gives and the exit is clear.
The satisfaction of being good at something dangerous.
The fit of it. My hands on a blade the way my hands on a pick—sure, precise, born to the work.
The dark part of me is awake and purring and I'm nineteen years old and I just killed someone and my blood is running hot and there's something very wrong with me.
I've always had this in me. The dark streak.
The thing that makes me a good thief and a better killer and the kind of person who can sit in a charity's office and read a trafficking ledger and feel nothing but cold arithmetic.
I've hated it for twenty years. Tonight it doesn't feel like something to hate.
Tonight it feels like a skill I've been underusing.
I walk to the passage point. I open the dark.
---
"Report," he says, when I step through into the palace corridor.
He's waiting. Of course he's waiting. Shadows flat against the walls, that unreadable dark gaze, and the scent of him hits me first—stone and cold mineral—and I'm not ready for it.
The passage sharpens everything. I've just come through the dark with my hand on his arm and my body in a state I can't account for and now I'm standing two feet from him in a narrow corridor with blood drying under my fingernails and he's large and still and looking at me and I'm wet.
That's the honest account. I'm wet and my nipples are hard and my blood is running hot from the kill and every nerve I have is looking for somewhere to put it and he is right there.
"Clean. Three minutes."
He looks at me. Not at my coat or my hands or the traces I'm aware of—he looks at my face. The dark eyes move across it the way his shadows move across a room: cataloguing, noting, finding what I'm trying not to show.
"How do you—" He pauses. Reconsiders. Asks it anyway. "How do you feel?"
His voice. Low. Aimed at me. It licks along my spine and curls between my thighs like it knows exactly what it's doing and the worst part is I'm not sure it doesn't. The copper smell is still on my fingers.
His scent is underneath it, through it, the mineral dark of him pressing into the back of my throat.
He takes up most of the corridor. The white of his hair catches the shadow-lamp and his skin is pale as quarried stone and he's very, very large and he's watching me with those lightless eyes and my body is doing something I will not be forgiving it for.
"Like I've been doing the wrong kind of stealing."
His shadows ripple—pleased, not smug, the speed of the wave tells me—and the ripple sends a fresh curl of heat through my belly and into my cunt and I genuinely hate myself a little. I'm fluent in his shadow-language. I don't know when that happened. I don't know why the knowing makes me slicker.
"Get some sleep," he says. "There's food in your room."
The low register of it. The way it settles into the air between us and stays there. I step back. I go before my body can finish deciding what it wants to do about any of this.
---
The shadows are following me again. Not his surveillance shadows—I can identify those now, the flat, thin observation tendrils that report back to him.
These are different. Small. Gentle. Almost playful.
They curl around my ankles when I walk and pool in my palms when I open my door and wrap around my shoulders when I sit on the bed.
I let them. I've stopped kicking these ones. They don't herd. They don't watch. They just—stay. The way Tommy stays when I'm upset, pressing his small body against my side without asking what's wrong, just solid and present and there.
I eat the food. Bread and cheese and cold meat and an apple and I eat all of it because I'm hungry in a way that killing made worse, not better, as if the body's response to taking a life is to demand proof that its own life continues.
My body is changing. Not all at once—accumulating details, the way a lock mechanism shifts, until the picture is different.
My night vision is sharper. Not Fae-sharp, but better than any human has a right to—the deep corners where the shadow-lamps don't reach are readable now, grain of the stone, weave of the sheets. The dark is less dark.
And him. I feel him in the building. Not see, not hear—feel.
A pressure at the base of my skull, heat dragging low between my hips, the certainty of his location the way you're certain of a fire in the next room.
He's in the throne room. The way I know which direction is north—without checking, without thinking, the information just there.
My scent has changed. Sweeter. The shadows that curl around my shoulders like it—they press closer when I've been training, when my blood is up, when the dark part of me is awake and working. When I'm aroused. Which is often, now. Which is getting worse.
My body has been making unauthorized decisions since the first night in the flat—the heat, the pull, the slick ache that shows up when he's near and doesn't leave quickly enough when he isn't—and now it's rewriting itself to fit his court and I didn't agree to this and I can't seem to stop it.
After the food, after the shadows settle, I pick a lock that shouldn't exist.
Not a real lock—there's no keyhole, no mechanism, nothing but smooth shadow-stone deep in the east wing where the corridors go quiet and the palace breathes slower.
A sealed wall. I've walked past it three times this week and each time my palm itched.
The thief's itch that means there's a lock nearby, the instinct I've trusted since I was six.
I put my hand flat against the stone.
It opens like a mouth. The wall separates along a seam I couldn't see, the stone pulling apart with a sound like a long-held breath released, and beyond it —
A garden.
Living shadow-flowers in every shade of dark I didn't know dark came in.
Black-violet, black-blue, black-silver, black-green.
Petals that move without wind, stems that lean toward my hand when I reach for them, leaves that feel like cool silk against my fingertips—and under the silk, a faint pulse, like a heartbeat, like something alive recognising something else alive and being glad of it.
The sky above is different from the rest of the court—deeper, more purple, with a quality of light that makes the flowers glow from inside.
It's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
It's hidden. No path leads here. No door exists in any corridor. The wall opened because my palm itched and the palace decided I should see this.
I sit among the shadow-flowers and I touch the petals and I watch them move and for the first time since the flat—since the Bramah opened and the dark came through and my life stopped belonging to me—I don't think about escape.
Staying.
The word sits in my belly hot and treacherous, growing roots I didn't plant. The blade that fits my hand. The shadow-dummies dissolving. The Chubb locks clicking open and forty-three girls who will not be sold because I am good at the wrong kind of stealing.
His shadows wrapping around my shoulders like a hand resting there. His voice in a narrow corridor, low and aimed at me, licking along my spine and settling between my thighs and staying. The way I am wet before he speaks and wetter after.
Tommy's photo under my pillow. Marcus's coat. Elena's books.
Staying. And the word doesn't hurt the way it should.
I leave before it can finish taking hold.
I walk back through the wall—it closes behind me, sealing shut, keeping its secret—and I go to my room and I sit on the bed and I press my palms flat against my thighs and I don't think about the garden or the flowers or the way the petals leaned toward my hand like they knew me.
None of it.
I think about it all night.