31. Chapter 31
Crowe
I drive too fast the whole way from Branna’s blue house to the gates of Aurora, and it still takes two nights.
The gate opens before I’ve stopped. A guard waves me through without stopping me. I get the same treatment as I head through the main entrance, and that should already tell me something’s up.
Faine meets me in the hallway before I’ve reached the admin section.
I’ve known Ysabelle Faine for my entire Turned life, and I have never once seen her meet anyone without some sort of ceremony. She’s in a coat she hasn’t buttoned, and her arms are folded. She watches me walk up to her without saying anything, which is worse than being yelled at.
“Go on,” I say.
“Oh, I’m going to.” She takes two steps forward.
“You closed a job and vanished off a mountain in the middle of the night, and nobody in this building has had a straight word out of you since. I have stood in a room and told the Court I knew where you were. Twice. Both times I was lying. I don’t lie to the Court, Crowe. That’s a thing I don’t do.”
“I’ll take all of that. Later.” I widen my stance. “Right now I need Viktor awake, and I need a Craven on that mountain before tomorrow night. Kallista Ondrathe is in danger up there, and she doesn’t know it.”
“Crowe.”
“Listen to me—”
“She’s here.”
I stop. “Say that again.”
“Kalli is here. She came in at dusk.” Faine doesn’t move closer. “She walked off that mountain, and she’s been on the road since. Serenity brought her in from a gas station in a place called Danby.”
I’ve spent two nights preparing what I was going to say. It doesn’t have anywhere to go now, and neither do I.
“Is she hurt?”
“She’s tired, and she’s filthy, and she’s been sleeping in a chair since ten o’clock because she wouldn’t go to a bed until somebody promised to wake her if you called.” Faine gives a small smile. “She’s fine, Crowe.”
“I want to see her.”
“You want to stand in a doorway and look at her, which isn’t the same thing, and you can do it in a minute.” She turns back the way she came. “Come with me. You’ve driven a long way to tell us something and I’d rather you told it sitting down.”
They put me in a room with a long table. Viktor Parlance comes in first, then Caleb Craven behind him. Bastien follows them and stands against the wall.
I sit down. It’s the first time I’ve sat in anything that isn’t a truck seat in days.
Viktor sits across from me. “What have you found out?”
“There’s been a plot to assassinate the Heir of the Ondrathe Aldrake. A year ago, her death was staged, and she was sold into the blood trade.” I look around the table. “I know how they did it.”
Caleb straightens. “Go on.”
“There’s a woman two valleys east of Marchand who creates bodies for people who need to disappear. A man paid her to build one that would pass for Kalli. It took her three weeks. That body was staged to look like she’d fallen. In reality she’d been sold.”
“You have her name,” Viktor says.
“I have her name and her street. She talks to me. She won’t talk to anybody else, so nobody goes near her without me.”
“Noted.”
“Recently, he went back to her. Not for another body. He asked her how to make a murder look like an accident.” I wait while they take that in. “He isn’t hiding what he did last year. He’s planning to do it again, properly this time, and he started the week she walked back into that hall alive.”
Nobody says anything.
Bastien comes off the wall. “You drove here to warn the clan.”
“I drove here to get somebody up that mountain who the Aldrake would actually listen to so she’d believe Kalli.” I sound tired.
“But she’d already left.”
“It seems she did.”
“Then it’s the best news you’ve had in two weeks, and you look like somebody died,” Faine says. “She’s safe.”
“She’ll never be safe. He had a plan that got rid of her without killing her, and it failed.
She’s back. He isn’t going to make that mistake twice.
” I put my hands flat on the table. “He’s known she was gone since the morning after she left, because everybody on that mountain knew by then.
She’s been on open roads for days, and nothing has happened to her. ”
“Why not?” Viktor says.
I think about this.
“Because it’s too soon,” I say. “The whole clan knows she walked away because of this. If she dies on a road this week, every person up there puts two and two together. That’s exactly what he’s spent a year making sure never happens.
He’d be proving to everyone that someone is trying to get rid of her. ”
The room goes quiet.
“So he waits,” Viktor says.
“He waits until nobody’s looking at her. Until she’s living somewhere ordinary and it’s been long enough that a bad road in bad weather is just a bad road.” I hear how steady I sound saying it. “Months, if he has to. He already sat on this one for thirteen of them.”
“Putain,” Bastien swears, once, under his breath.
“Then we have time,” Caleb says.
“We have exactly as much time as he decides to give us, and he’s better at waiting than any of us.” I sit back. “But he thinks he’s still in control of this. That’s the one thing we’ve got. He isn’t in a hurry, and he doesn’t know anybody’s looking.”
“Which is why we don’t send anybody up that mountain,” Viktor says.
“Yes,” I say. “The minute the Aldrake admits there’s a killer under her roof, he stops being patient. He finishes it.”
“Agreed.” Viktor stands. “Nothing goes to that mountain until we have a name we can put in front of her.”
“I have one.”
The room stops.
“Then say it,” Caleb says.
“No.”
Viktor sits back down. “Explain.”
“I have a description. It came from a woman who spent time with him and has no reason to lie to me about any of it. It fits a man I sat in a room with on that mountain.” I keep my hands where they are. “That’s not proof. That’s red hair and good manners, and there are forty of those up there.”
“You don’t believe that,” Faine says.
“No. I don’t.”
“Then give us the name.”
“Not in this room. Not before I’ve said it to her.”
Caleb makes a sound. Viktor lifts one hand, and he stops.
“She’s known this man her whole life,” I say.
“If a room full of strangers has his name before she does, then it’s your case and your decision, and she gets told afterward what happened to somebody in her own family.
She’s spent too much time having people decide things for her.
” I look at Viktor, because he’s the one who’ll settle it.
“She’s not getting that from me as well. ”
Viktor looks at me for a moment.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“And if she gives you a different name?”
“Then I was wrong, and I’ll admit it.”
“Good enough.” He stands again. “Go and check on her, and then sleep. We’ll get everyone in the loop as soon as we can gather them together.”
Serenity walks me up. She doesn’t say anything on the way, which I appreciate more than she knows. At the top of the passage, she stops and points at a door and goes back down.
It’s open a hand’s width.
She’s asleep in a chair that’s too big for her, sideways, with one arm hooked over the back of it and a blanket somebody put over her that she’s half kicked off. Her hair is loose. There’s a plate on the floor by her foot with most of the food still on it.
I stand in the passage and don’t go in.
For the first time in days, I feel completely still inside. I want another minute of it before I have to think about the next conversation I have with her.
Because I’m going to sit down in front of her and describe a man she probably cares about. And she is going to say the name I’ve been refusing to say to myself since I stood in Branna’s front room.
I pull the door shut, quietly, and go and find somewhere without a window.
I’ve done worse things to people than what I’m going to do to her tomorrow.
Just never to somebody I couldn’t stand to hurt.