Chapter 22 #2
She’d been trying since the “winner take all” declaration, moving through the library-turned-cathedral with the carefully plotted route of someone navigating a minefield.
She stayed in her room. She visited Sidney’s room.
She walked the main corridor only when she could hear him somewhere else—his footsteps, his laugh, the faint rustle of shadows that preceded him the way a cold front preceded a storm.
Because she knew—with the bone-deep, librarian’s certainty that came from reading ten thousand stories and knowing exactly how they worked—that the moment she was alone with him, the story would move.
This shit was predictable. That was the whole point of this whole nonsense, after all. Wasn’t it?
The narrative was waiting. She could feel it. Like standing at the top of a hill with a snowball at the peak. One touch. One breath. One word, and the whole thing would start rolling and there would be no stopping it until it reached the bottom.
She wasn’t ready.
She might never be ready.
So she avoided him.
And he let her.
For a while.
But he was an impatient bastard. He found her, of course.
Because he always did.
Because he was Vile, and the concept of respecting someone’s desire for space was about as foreign to him as losing gracefully.
Because the ending was inevitable, and they both knew it.
She was sitting in the main corridor, on the floor, her back against a bookshelf.
Dundle was asleep in her lap, his bony tail curled around her wrist. Lundle was somewhere overhead, doing whatever Lundle did when he wasn’t being a judgmental gargoyle—probably staring at a wall and contemplating the nature of taxidermy, or eating a spider.
She heard him before she saw him. Not his footsteps—Vile didn’t make noise when he walked unless he wanted to.
It was the absence of sound. The way the library went quiet around him, the ambient rustling of pages and creaking of wood falling silent as if the books themselves were holding their breath.
He sat down next to her.
Not across from her. Not looming over her. Next to her, on the floor, with his back against the same bookshelf. His legs stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed. The purple pinstripes on his suit caught the lamplight.
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t flirt.
He didn’t threaten.
He didn’t even look at her, for a long time. He just sat there, beside her, staring at the opposite shelf of books with an expression that was so utterly devoid of his usual performance that it made her chest ache.
The silence stretched until it became its own kind of conversation.
“What are you going to do, Sasha?”
One question. Quiet. No inflection. No theatrical emphasis. No underlying threat or double meaning or carefully constructed trap disguised as a casual inquiry.
Just the question.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
Nothing came out.
Because the honest answer was I don’t know, and the dishonest answer was I’m going to destroy your book and go home, and the answer she couldn’t say out loud was the one sitting in her chest like a fist around her heart, squeezing tighter every time she looked at him.
He nodded, as if her silence was an answer in itself. Which, she supposed, it was.
“I can feel it building,” he said. He was still staring at the bookshelf across from them. His profile was sharp in the lamplight—all angles and shadows. “The story. Whatever it is. Whatever it’s becoming. I can feel it moving toward something.”
Dundle shifted in her lap. His glass teeth caught the light as he yawned—or did whatever the taxidermy equivalent of a yawn was.
“Something is going to happen.” Vile’s voice was barely above a murmur.
“Soon. And I can’t see what it is. For the first time in—” He stopped.
Started again. “I agreed not to read the pages. I’m holding to that, and I’m holding to it because you asked and not because I couldn’t cheat if I wanted to.
But even if I tried…I don’t think I could see it.
This story is different. It isn’t being written for me. It’s being written about me. And that…”
He exhaled.
“I hate it,” he said simply.
She almost laughed. Almost. The Vile she’d met on day one—the one who’d shoved her through a portal into Wonderland and cackled about it—would never have admitted to hating anything that wasn’t a hero’s moral superiority or a badly written redemption arc.
He would have spun it. Performed it. Made it into a monologue.
This Vile just said it.
I hate it.
Like a person.
“I have lived through the endings of a hundred thousand stories.” He turned his head to look at her.
His purple eyes were dim—not glowing, not performing, not burning with villainy or desire or threat.
Just…there. Looking at her the way a person looks at the one thing in the room they can’t figure out.
“And I have never once been afraid of one.”
A beat.
“Until now.”
She couldn’t look away from him. She tried. She told her eyes to move, to find a safe spot on the opposite shelf, to stare at Dundle, to look literally anywhere that wasn’t the face of the person she was probably going to destroy in the next few hours.
Her eyes didn’t listen.
They never did, when it came to him.
“Vile—”
“Don’t.” He held up a hand. “Whatever you’re about to say. Don’t. Not yet.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. She tensed—couldn’t help it, the reflexes were too deeply ingrained—but what he pulled out wasn’t a weapon.
Well.
It was.
But not the kind she expected.
It was small. Porcelain-white and ivory-handled, with delicate scrollwork along the barrel that was more decorative than functional.
A derringer. A lady’s pistol. The kind of thing you’d find in the garter of a woman in a period drama who was far too clever to be trusted and far too beautiful to be underestimated.
She knew it.
She’d held it before, in a gaslit London flat, wearing a silk dressing gown and playing a woman who was smarter than every man in every room she’d ever entered.
Irene Adler’s derringer.
“How—” She stared at it. “That was from Sherlock. That story ended. How do you still have it?”
“Props can leave their stories.” He turned the little pistol over in his fingers. Even in his large hands, it looked dainty. Improbable. A weapon that would be easy to dismiss. “You know that. Your disgustingly adorable little monsters are proof enough.”
Dundle let out a sleepy “skrrch” of protest from her lap.
“Apologies.” Vile didn’t sound apologetic. He held the derringer out to her. “Take it.”
“Why?”
“Because you might need it.”
She stared at the gun. Then at him. Then at the gun again. “For what?”
He didn’t answer. Just held it there, balanced on his open palm, the ivory handle facing her. His expression gave her nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was the most perfectly blank face she’d ever seen him wear, which meant there was more happening behind it than she could possibly guess.
She took it, and she didn’t know why.
The derringer was lighter than she remembered. Or maybe she was stronger. Or maybe props changed between stories, the same way the spell bottle had shrunk to the size of her thumb. The porcelain was cool against her palm and the scrollwork was smooth under her fingertips.
“Is it loaded?”
“One shot.”
She turned it over in her hands. A porcelain pistol with one bullet. Given to her by the villain, in a story with no genre, in a game where the next death was the last.
What are you doing, Vile?
She slipped it into her bag—the canvas tote she used for work, the one the library had faithfully reproduced in her room, right down to the coffee stain on the bottom corner and the button pinned to the strap that said BOOKS: BECAUSE REALITY IS OVERRATED. Sidney had given her that one, too.
The derringer nestled beside the spell bottle at the bottom of the bag. Two weapons.
Vile watched her put it away. Something moved behind his eyes—fast and deep and gone before she could catch it.
“You know,” he said, and his voice was doing the thing it did when he was trying very hard to sound casual and failing in a way that only she would notice, “I kept waiting.”
“Excuse me?”
“Every pair. Every set of twins my brother and I have dragged into this. They all eventually become predictable. The brave one, the scared one. The fighter, the pacifist. The one who rebels, the one who submits. Variations on a theme, repeated endlessly. I kept waiting for you to settle into a pattern.” He looked up at the vaulted ceiling.
“You never did. You, my dear, never once became boring.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
So she didn’t say anything.
They sat there, side by side on the marble floor, the villain and the librarian, two taxidermy monsters sleeping nearby, a bag between them that held the instrument of his undoing and a gift he’d given her anyway.
And the story waited, patient as ink on a page, for whatever was going to happen next.
Sasha finally found them in the main corridor.
Sidney and Virtue were standing together near the center of the aisle, not touching, but close enough that the space between them felt intentional.
Intimate. Sidney’s eyes were red-rimmed in a way that she’d clearly tried to hide by rubbing her face aggressively with her sleeves.
Virtue’s expression was the careful, composed neutrality of a man who was holding himself together by willpower alone.
They’d said their goodbyes. She could see it in the way they stood. In the way Sidney’s hand hovered near his but didn’t take it. In the way Virtue’s shoulders were set just a fraction too high.
Sasha walked toward them.
The canvas tote was on her shoulder. Inside it, the spell bottle and the derringer sat side by side, silent and heavy with potential. She could feel the faint warmth of the bottle through the fabric. She could feel the cool weight of the porcelain pistol beside it.
Sidney looked up as she approached. Their eyes met. Twin to twin. The same eyes, the same stubborn jaw, the same inability to back down from anything even when backing down was clearly the smarter option.
Sasha stopped in front of them.
“It’s time.”
Two words. Flat and final, the way she’d said every important thing she’d ever said in her life—without preamble, without buildup, without giving herself the chance to second-guess.
Sidney held her gaze for a beat. Then she nodded.
No argument. No questions. No are you sure or do you know what you’re doing. They were past all that.
Virtue straightened. The hero drawing himself up. The posture was instinctive—bred into him by a hundred million stories where someone had to stand tall and face the darkness.
“I’ll take you to it,” he said.
Sasha looked at Sidney. Sidney looked at Sasha.
Both of us. Or neither.
The promise she’d made in a bog witch’s cottage that felt like a lifetime ago.
She’d meant it then.
She didn’t know if she meant it now.
But she took her sister’s hand, and they followed Virtue into the dark.