Chapter Two
The Isle d’Eylau’s famous masked opera house was all red—thick ruby carpet underfoot, flocked scarlet walls with gold molding at my sides—so that passing into it was like entering the column of an open throat.
Beyond our box, the corridor was set on a curve, circling the building.
On my right-hand side, a pair of staircases bracketed a compact bar; on my left, the hallway featured only a row of identical doors, each of which accessed a private box like the one where Noé and I were seated.
I moved past them without hesitating. When I caught sight of the side passage which branched toward the powder room, I avoided it, continuing straight ahead until, finally, I paused in front of a plain crimson door.
From a distance, it appeared the same as the ones which neighbored it.
As I approached it, though, certain flaws revealed themselves.
The door’s glossy red paint had chipped, and its doorknob was tarnished, rather than the gleaming gold of its neighbors.
To the door’s side, a small rectangular plaque announced its identity in rusting gilded lettering: The Emilie Suite.
According to the information I’d been sent, this entrance had once accessed the private box of the wealthy Emilie Macron before she died, an unwed spinster, several years ago.
Through some obscure clause in her will, it had not been maintained since her passing, though for my purposes that mattered little.
All that mattered was that it was empty.
Stooping down, I fished in the bottom of my slipper, withdrawing a glowing circular object from beneath my heel.
A coin, burning the clean, pure white of magesilk, and the source of the warmth which had speared me earlier.
Tapping the metal piece three times, I quieted the enchantment, then stowed the newly dull bronze token back in my shoe.
Taking the doorknob in my hand, I gave it a testing rattle. Locked—just as I’d been told it would be. Good.
I summoned my Wit. My magic jerked eagerly up from its resting place behind my rib cage, stretching outward toward the door in front of me. When I turned the knob again, the lock clicked open, admitting me into the space beyond.
It was pitch-dark, and as silent as a tomb.
Unlike the box I’d been seated in, the wall lamps here were unilluminated—not dimmed for the performance but completely burned out—and without their reassuring glow, I could see nothing.
The stage and the audience surrounding it were nonexistent; I assumed drapes had been drawn over the box’s opening, closing it in on itself like a clamshell.
I stepped forward just as a pair of arms wrapped around my waist and drew me into the murk.
—
I recognized him by his touch, the same way I’d guessed at his identity from the moment he’d glanced at me in the opera-house lobby, even with his face hidden behind his disguise.
It was more than simple familiarity. Each time I encountered him, I was conscious of a connection—a twinning—the likes of which I had yet to experience with anyone else.
It was as if we were a pair of matched cards—as if I were designed especially to be played after him.
I bunched my hands in the folds of his suit. “Eliot.”
He caught me, the door to the abandoned box clicking shut behind us.
Without the light from the hallway to illuminate it, the compartment fell back into darkness, the shift as rapid as a creature scuttling deeper into its warren.
Swearing softly, Eliot reached into his pocket, finding his own coin and tapping it thrice before tossing it on the floor beside us.
On cue, I felt the bit of metal wedged beneath my foot flare with heat as its sibling lit up, responding to its summons.
The token had been one of the only pieces of Eliot I’d dared to keep after the final night of the Vainglory, when I’d taken Noé’s hand and, with it, shattered the delicate foundation of the relationship Eliot and I had begun to build.
I hadn’t been sure, when I’d first called for him a week or so following the competition’s end, whether he would answer at all.
And yet, two days later, a reply had appeared, tucked into my laundry in such a way that I knew he must have been forced to pay an Alaire maid handsomely to ensure its delivery.
An invitation to a private salon to be held at the city town house of the Moreau Weaver family the following evening, a hand-inked message dashed on the back of it: B I tried to keep my expression even as he echoed lowly, “Does he?”
His voice was hushed. In the coinlight, his eyes had a feline gleam to them, half of him still swallowed by the dark.
“But you do not know him, Lovett,” Eliot said.
Quiet fell over us. It was not the first time he’d made the point.
I shifted my weight to one hip, then the other. During the Vainglory, I would have countered him easily—it didn’t matter how well I knew Noé, only whether I thought he would uphold his end of the bargain we’d made—but since…I was frightened of pushing too hard and severing something between us.
It was true, I’d entered the Alaires’ competition only because Eliot had enlisted me to do so.
And it was true, too, that throughout it, he’d hidden as much from me as I had from him—his secret partnership with Sybil, for one.
Even so…I knew he felt I’d betrayed him when I’d accepted Noé’s proposal without consulting him.
No—that wasn’t quite right. I knew I had betrayed him.
He’d told me that he loved me, and I’d agreed to marry his best friend. It was further evidence of the terrible difference between us. He was loyal, and I…Well, sometimes, I worried I was more like Noé than him. Just a rat, driven by anger and need, looking for an ankle to bite.
Abruptly, Eliot released a breath, and my thoughts scattered. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, nodding into the murk ahead of us. “She’s here.”
My anxiety dissipated. Meeting his gaze, I gave him a nod in return, then stepped back as he stooped to pick up his coin from the ground.
The Emilie Suite was larger than the box Noé and I were seated in, divided into two portions—a receiving area, where Eliot and I had been conversing, and then, down a set of steps, the viewing box itself.
I caught glimpses of a worn wooden banister separating the areas as Eliot led me onward, torn carpeting in a vibrant rose shade, its floral pattern faded and stained.
We descended the stairs together, my hand on his arm.
At their bottom, the space extended forward, its outer railing curved to allow a view of the stage.
As I’d guessed upon entering the suite, thick velvet drapes had been pulled over the opening, obscuring the auditorium from sight.
I could hear the muffled voices of the singers through the dimness, but could make out nothing except the darkness in front of me.
The darkness, and a woman seated within it, the back of her head illuminated by Eliot’s coin.