Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
The car stops at the side of the house, and I am dragged out without ceremony.
For a moment, past and present overlap, and my thoughts misfire between the two.
It has been so long, and so much has changed.
And that is only the facade.
My parents’ house is vast. The east wing has been altered—perhaps demolished and rebuilt—and is now more glass than brick, all sharp angles and contemporary ostentation.
The apple tree I once sat beneath is gone, replaced by a formal flower bed.
I am almost certain the tree existed.
For one disorienting second, I doubt my own memory.
Returning to a place where you once saw life so differently brings its own kind of vertigo. The house was beautiful once. It still is, objectively, but it has shifted.
Seeing it properly now, as an adult and from the outside, I notice what escaped me as a child: the scale, the ostentation, the sheer amount of space devoted to impressing anyone who passes through the gates.
It is larger even than the houses along Overseers’ Road.
The wealth of it makes me uncomfortable in a way my sixteen-year-old self lacked the perspective to feel. I could not have told you what my parents did for a living. I was too absorbed in my own small world to ask.
I had assumed Preston sat at the top of all this—the puppet master behind the rune network and the Fade.
But what if he does not?
What if the people above him are my own family?
You are not dragged home by goons for a family reunion.
This is not a rescue.
It is not even a warning.
I force myself to stop. Shock skews my judgement, and I cannot afford that. I push the thought aside for later.
We do not enter through the front.
Obviously.
The prodigal daughter, handcuffed and covered in District grime, is not granted the main entrance. We do not even use the service door. Instead, they march me around the back, through an unused utility entrance and down a narrow flight of stairs.
The basement.
A chair.
A drain in the floor.
I huff out a short, strangled laugh.
The drain is theatrical. If they wanted to remove evidence, they could use subtler methods. I suspect it is meant to unsettle the poor souls unlucky enough to sit in this chair. My parents have cleaning charms. Blood vanishes in seconds with the right spell.
Either this room is for show or something worse.
I do not dwell on which.
All right, so it’s working a little, but I will not give them the satisfaction of showing it.
My hands are secured behind me and fixed to the chair. The chair itself is bolted to the floor. No chance to wield it as a weapon or do much of anything useful.
Three guards station themselves around me in silence—one on either side, one behind.
I close my eyes.
I am not in a basement beneath my family’s estate.
I am outside, in the front garden beneath the apple tree.
Dappled light filters through the branches, shifting across my skin. The scent of cut grass fills the air. The trunk is solid against my back.
Birds call.
Leaves whisper overhead.
I hold the memory.
From that steadier place, I look at the house again. At what it is now compared with what it was.
The changes.
The differences.
It is not the same house.
Not the home of my childhood.
Not really.
It belongs to people I am not certain I ever truly knew.
That thought hurts less than it should, which tells me I have been making peace with it for years without admitting there was anything to mend.
Beneath my top, the sigil over my sternum sends one faint pulse of warmth. It gives me pause.
The suppression cuffs have silenced every other sigil except this one.
And there is Mina.
That is the thought I cannot keep still. Not the drain, not the chair, not whatever my parents are deciding somewhere above me. Her, in the back of my car in a supermarket car park with a dozen guns around it, waiting for a signal I did not have time to finish giving.
Cáel has the keys. Cáel put his body between her and a collapsing building, and healed her before it occurred to him to check himself.
He will not leave her there.
I hold on to that, and to the small inexplicable flicker beneath my sternum, and to what he said.
I’ll come for you.
The door opens with a heavy clunk. It is reinforced and layered with soundproofing and wards that must have cost a fortune; magic crackles over my skin even from here.
I open my eyes.
My mother circles the chair and looks down at me.
The expression is all too familiar: disgust, carefully refined to resemble mere distaste. The look reserved for something unfortunate on the carpet.
Her gaze drops to the red lining of my coat, and she tuts.
My coat is untouched.
They could not get into it. The ward would have taken an hour to breach, and the cuffs made whatever was inside irrelevant. Or so they assumed.
The knives are still sheathed. The spells are still in the inner pockets.
It is not much. It is something.
“Oh my.” Her gaze moves over me with surgical precision. “Look at your skin. Your hair. Was that intentional? You’ve perfected the homeless aesthetic. I can smell you from here.” She pauses as though offering a concession. “At least you’re thin. I’ll give you that.”
Well, aren’t you a ray of sunshine?
I almost laugh but keep my mouth shut.
She is immaculate and uncannily like Vivian. Or rather, Vivian resembles her, a likeness I never fully registered. The same luminous skin, pale and flawless. Dark hair falling in polished coils to her waist. Make-up applied with professional precision.
No one could deny that she is beautiful.
I have her eyes: the same wide, pale grey. Her mouth is slightly wider than mine, her nose slimmer, but the resemblance is unmistakable.
“Haven’t you anything to say for yourself?” she asks. She glances beyond me. “Roger.”
My father enters.
He is trim and handsome. Hands tucked into his pockets, he studies me, and for one moment, something flickers in his eyes.
Sadness, perhaps.
Recognition.
It disappears before I can name it, replaced by the expression of a man confronted with something distasteful.
His lip curls.
“I can’t believe she’s our daughter,” he says. “More to the point, I can’t believe she’s still alive.”
He withdraws his hands, folds his arms and steps back to address the guards. “You may go.” He gives a dismissive wave.
“Is she secure?” my mother asks. The first hint of concern enters her voice, though perhaps it is merely practicality.
“Yes, ma’am,” the boxer replies.
All three guards leave.
Nice to see you both, I think as I study my parents.
They have not changed: the same immaculate clothes, the same carefully groomed composure, the same measured distance between them that always told me everything I needed to know about their marriage.
I remain silent and wait.
They have always loved the sound of their own voices.
One thought scratches at the back of my mind.
Does Vivian know?
I picture her petitioning to bring me home. Spending a month in prison for it. Washing my clothes without being asked and thumping me between the shoulders because she was worried.
I picture the way she looks at Thea.
No.
Vivian has been many things, but she has never been able to pretend indifference where I am concerned. If she knew what our parents had done, she would not have waited thirty-two years to act.
She would have told the world.
I set the thought aside and focus.
“This is all your fault,” my mother says.
I say nothing.
“We had hoped you would die without ever needing to know. You shouldn’t have lasted this long.” Her expression tightens with irritation rather than grief. “My brother managed six months.”
Brother?
She has never mentioned a brother.
“Your great-aunt before him lasted six weeks. Going back through every generation—” She glances at my father with mild exasperation. “I told you, Roger. Vivian was always the smarter one.”
She does not roll her eyes, as that would be too uncouth, but tilts her head towards the ceiling in that familiar, long-suffering way.
“Pathetic, Elmo.” She says my nickname with a sneer. “I suppose I must explain, since you never seem to grasp anything.”
She clasps her hands neatly before her. “Our family line reaches back to the earliest written records, and from the beginning, there has been one rule. Each head produces two viable children. More, if replacements are required.”
Her pale eyes settle on mine. “One child inherits. They have children and continue the line.”
She pauses.
“The other is the sacrifice.”