Chapter 11
Of course he lived in the penthouse. The fact fit with the article she’d read, but didn’t bode well for her likelihood of convincing him to leave his life of apparent luxury to come perform illegal magic acts across the universe for her.
She watched him walk inside, but didn’t follow. She didn’t move from her current position at all.
He noticed, pausing in the doorway to look back at her. “Problem?”
“How many people are waiting for us in there?” Though he would likely think she was asking from a safety standpoint, that wasn’t why she wanted to know.
Now that she was here, and he was—theoretically—going to listen to her, she needed to know what might sway him to her side, and that meant knowing him.
Judging by how he’d reacted so far, she didn’t think he had an abundance of friends and lovers waiting inside, but she needed to confirm it.
“One,” he said.
Okay, she’d been expecting none.
“And you don’t need to worry about him,” he added.
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t do anything to hurt you. He can’t do anything at all.”
“You do realize how creepy that sounds, right?”
He shrugged. Since she wasn’t actually worried, she followed him inside. He flicked the lights on and she found herself in a spacious, airy living room. He braced one hand on the wall and leaned down, untying the laces on his right shoe and working his foot out.
Figuring it was only polite to follow his lead, Nyx took her boots off.
She was glad Jevryn hadn’t returned the mercury boots to her yet—she’d thought of going to get them herself, but popping back into Jevryn’s home unannounced didn’t quite feel right—because she wouldn’t have been comfortable taking them off here where they would be left out of her sight.
Nothing about her current footwear was magical.
They were just ordinary boots, easily replaced if lost.
They also stuck out like a sore thumb. Plain, functional, and black in a living room that was all tans and creams and soft lighting.
It was the kind of space her mother would have loved and taken as her due, and Nyx hated.
Kind of like she hated Tristen’s shoe, which both belonged to the color scheme and probably cost more than her entire wardrobe..
She couldn’t put her finger on why she disliked the fact so much.
It wasn’t jealousy. She could have anything she wanted at the Station—for a while longer, anyway.
Ignoring the stab of pain at that reminder, she followed the train of thought as she followed Tristen across the living room.
Maybe it was only that she would never think to create anything like this.
That all she had ever wanted was safety and security and comfort—a place she felt like she belonged.
She knew she didn’t belong here. But she was suddenly worried that Tristen did.
They passed through the living room and into a foyer, a staircase and an elevator its primary feature. Tristen opened the elevator doors.
Nyx frowned. “We’re leaving?” If they were leaving, she would really like her shoes.
“Going down a floor.”
Her frown deepened. “To talk to your neighbors?”
“The next floor is part of the penthouse.” Then, as if afraid she really wouldn’t get it, he added, in an insultingly patient tone, “I own it too. Are you coming?”
She stepped inside, her face flushing, the irritation he seemed to so easily spike in her right on its heels.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t used to not having less money than others—she’d been very accustomed to that her entire life—it was more that she’d never had to interact with anyone who had so much money they thought you were dumb for not realizing that some penthouses apparently came with more than one floor.
“I grew up in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere and my boyfriend lived above the barn. Forgive me for not knowing how rich people rich,” she snapped as the elevator doors closed.
He folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t come from this either.”
She understood that the smart thing to do was to let it go. But she’d never been able to be anything but unfortunately honest. She’d never been able to stop what she really thought from tripping off her tongue. Seth had always liked that about her. “You’re clearly used to it now.”
Tristen studied her. “Everyone gets used to how they live. It’s called adapting.”
She didn’t answer. She was…angry with him, she realized, and for things that were in no way his fault.
How he looked—so much like Seth in appearance and absolutely nothing like him in manner.
How he lived—an unfortunate surprise that meant her chances of convincing him to help her were almost nothing.
The most polite thing she could do was keep her mouth shut until reason overrode her emotions.
He seemed to sense she wasn’t going to respond, and he changed the topic as the elevator doors opened. “You said you spoke to the Congregation.”
The elevator door opened and he stepped out into another foyer. What he’d said hadn’t been a question, but he was waiting as if for an answer, and since she had been rude, she felt obligated to give him something. Following him out, she said, “Through another Shaman, yes.”
“What did they tell you? About what I did.”
“Only that you killed someone under your care, and that they understood why you did. Beyond that, they wouldn’t say. They believed it was your story to share, if you wanted to.”
He snorted. “So nice of them to care about my privacy. Do you know how I came to this planet?”
“Not explicitly, no.” She followed him through an industrial sized chef’s kitchen. “But I think I can guess.”
“My mother sold me.”
Nyx had been hoping for kidnapping. Because as terrible as that was, it was better than what he had just said.
“And someone here bought me.”
I’m sorry didn’t seem like an adequate response to that—she didn’t know what would be—so she trailed him in silence through a laundry room, a gym, a home theater, a library, and down a short gallery before he finally came to a halt outside of a closed door.
“His name was Edward Caruthers. Sometimes, I wonder what he paid for me. What he’d had to trade that could possibly have been worth it to the people who sold me.
How he even found out about Shamans and other worlds.
” He shrugged. “At least, I wondered all that later. At the time, I didn’t really understand what was happening.
I just knew that I wanted it to stop. And then I killed him, and it did. ”
He paused, almost expectantly.
“If you’re waiting for me to be horrified, I already knew you killed him, remember?”
“Then I guess you won’t be horrified by this, either.” He grasped the door handle and pushed.
Nyx braced herself as the door swung inward, preparing herself for something unimaginable. What she was greeted with was a man in a hospital bed.
It was so jarring that for a moment she almost didn’t understand what she was seeing.
Hospital beds and IV drips and the like were for actual hospitals.
They fit in with the decor there, were things a person was supposed to find in those places.
Here, in what was obviously a bedroom with all the comforts of home in place, the only difference the presence of an adjustable bed with railings as opposed to the bed that would have fit this room, the sight was jarring. Wrong.
A monitor beeped softly on the far side of the bed, tubes ferrying various liquids in and out of the man’s body. He wasn’t awake, and Nyx didn’t think he was just sleeping. He was too still, his face too expressionless.
“Comatose,” Tristen said, though she hadn’t asked.
“Who is he?” She knew the answer—thought she knew it—but she also thought it might be better if Tristen didn’t realize she’d read some things about him.
He seemed as if he preferred anonymity. The comatose man wasn’t old—probably no more than forty-five—and that disturbed her for some reason.
It felt like an obviously comatose man should also be on the verge of a natural death, but maybe that was just the mind’s way of lessening the horror of seeing someone trapped inside their own body.
“Howard Gales the Second. My dearly beloved adoptive father.” The sarcasm in “dearly beloved” was thick enough to slice. “Sadly indisposed for the last six years.”
“And I take it he isn’t waking up any time soon?”
“Not without a miracle.” Tristen’s tone made it clear he didn’t intend to provide one.
“Are you the reason he’s like this?”
“Yes.”
“And is that what you brought me here to tell me?” He stood there for a long while, watching the rise and fall of Howard’s chest, as if something in it could decide for him whether he still wanted to tell her anything.
“He’s part of it,” he said finally. “It’s a long story. I don’t supposed you’d prefer to hear it over coffee rather than a slowly dying millionaire?”
“I would.” He closed the door on Howard Gales and led her back to the elevator, through the gallery and into the upstairs living room she only recognized because she spied her shoes by the terrace door.
They trekked through another living room, a formal dining room, and finally into a sleek, ultramodern kitchen that, while still large, looked practically ordinary in comparison to the industrial one downstairs.
As he passed by a decorative bowl sitting on the kitchen island Tristen paused, emptying the contents of his pockets into the bowl.
It was a methodical process, the kind of thing someone did every day without thought—come home, drop the keys and wallet into the bowl, move on.