10. Chapter 10 #2
“You keep dangling her.” My voice comes out low and even, and I am proud of it, of the flatness of it, in a room where I have nothing else.
“My mother. If you knew her, if you’re the only one left who did, then tell me one true thing about her instead of using her to pry me open. What happened to her?”
For a while he does not answer. Water drips somewhere out in the ruin, slow and patient.
“She said no to me,” he says at last. “I told you as much already. What I have not told you is what the no cost her, and I have been saving it, the way I have noticed you save the last of your water.” His eyes flick to the capped bottle by my knee, and I hate that he clocked it.
“Would you like it now? I think you would. You cannot abide not knowing. It is the loose thread in you I have pulled from the start.”
He does not wait for me to answer.
“Twenty years ago, I gave your mother the same choice I’m giving you.
Stop hiding. Stop being afraid. Become what she was meant to be.
She listened to every word. Then she looked at you.
Five years old. Asleep in the next room.
” His hands tighten in his lap. “She chose you. Told me no.” A beat.
“So, I took what I needed.” My stomach turns.
“There are ways to take power from a woman who won’t give it willingly.
They aren’t clean. Most don’t survive it.
” His eyes stay on mine. “Your mother didn’t.
” For one second, I cannot breathe. “When I was done, there wasn’t enough of Maren left to save.
So, I burned the house down with her inside. ”
“You’re lying.” My voice does not sound like mine.
“You know I am not. You have a memory you have never once trusted. Smoke. The dark. Being carried. A doorway with the fire behind it.” He tips his head, gentle, merciless in the same breath.
“No dream, Shadow. The last night of your mother’s life, and you were in the middle of it, and you have carried the smell of it in the back of your throat ever since without knowing why the embalming room made you feel at home.
Three nights ago, I gave you a name. Tonight I give you the fire.
” He almost smiles. “Consider it a courtship.”
And here is the thing he does not know he has done. The thing opening under me like the black water in Darkwater, taking me all the way down.
Because I know who carried me out of that doorway.
I have known my whole life, the way you know something you were too small to have words for. Smoke. Dark. Arms around me. A face above mine in the orange light. The face I have chased ever since.
I was five. Crow was fifteen. Just a boy himself, but that never mattered to the little girl he dragged out of a burning house. He came through the smoke, picked me up, and didn’t leave me there to die.
That is where everything starts for me. The debt. The worship. The hook that went in behind my ribs when I was five and never came out.
He saved me.
Whatever Crow is now, whatever wall he hides behind, I know what is underneath it. The fifteen-year-old boy who ran into a burning house and carried me out. I loved him before I even knew what love was.
But the house did not catch by accident.
Renner burned it. Burned it down over my mother’s body, on purpose, to hide what he had done to her. And a man was standing in the smoke of it to carry me out.
Which means the man I have loved my whole life was standing in my mother’s grave the night it was dug.
I don’t let it show. Years of hiding what I feel keeps my face blank. If Renner sees this hurt, he’ll use it. He’ll dig into it every chance he gets.
So, I give him nothing.
But something inside me has changed. The thing Renner wants. The thing no one at the club ever knew was there.
It’s awake.
And this time, I can feel it.
“There she is,” Renner breathes, and he misreads it, seeing only the color leave my face the way he said Maren’s used to. “There is the trouble in you. I have missed it so.”
He stands, smooths the coat down the front, and crosses to the door. At it he pauses, one hand on the frame.
“Eat your bread,” he says. “Grieve, if you like. It is good for you. It clears the ground.” He looks back at me over his shoulder, and the tenderness is total, and it is the most frightening thing he owns.
“And when you are done grieving, think on the thing I keep telling you and you keep refusing to hear. The book was never the point. The club was never the point. The man you follow was never going to be enough to fill the hole I can see in you from across a room in the dark.” The door swings under his hand.
“You were always the point, Shadow. You have been the point for twenty years. The only question still on the table is whether you walk into what you are on your own two feet, or whether I have to do to you what I did to her.”
The door shuts.
The chain is cold on my ankle. Somewhere above me the birds go over, free and indifferent, and I sit in the gray with a mother I’ve known for three days and a man who murdered her standing on the other side of the door.
He is coming for me. All of Grimstone is coming for me, because it is the code, no one left behind, and at the front of them, driving the long black car, will be the man who carried me out of my mother’s fire and never once told me whose fire it was.
I do not know anymore which of version of him I am waiting for.
I only know the thing in my chest is awake now, and it is done being unseen, and when the door opens next, for whoever opens it, I mean to be ready.