29. ?? Day Until Bonding
Chapter twenty-nine
?? Day Until Bonding
Laurel
The instant we turn the corner and the kitchen disappears, Jack’s hand closes around my upper arm. His fingers dig into the muscle as he drags me toward the wine cellar stairs.
“You’re not supposed to touch me.”
“Who’s going to know?”
His eyes are the same blue as Jackson’s. The resemblance makes my skin crawl.
“You’ll leave bruises.”
“Good.” His grip turns brutal. “Something for you to remember the dead by.”
Gunfire follows us into the cellar, dulled by stone but close enough that every burst reaches me. I count. Two. Three. A pause long enough for hope to form, then another cluster that destroys it.
Jack pulls a brass key from his pocket. The same key Rebecca used when she brought me here to bathe.
The lock clanks as he works it open. The dank smell of the Vault wafts up. Mold, metal, and blood.
Jack releases me long enough to pull a lighter from his pocket. He ignites one of the torches mounted inside, and smoke immediately gathers in the narrow stairwell.
“Down we go,” he says, almost cheerfully.
The steps coil around the stone shaft until the constant turning makes me dizzy. Smoke scratches my throat. Dirty water, tinged a greenish-brown with rust and mold, streams over the lower stairs, and my shoe slides before I catch myself against the wall.
Jack doesn’t slow down.
By the time we reach the bottom, I can no longer hear individual gunshots. Only faint vibrations.
Jack fits the torch into a bracket high on the wall. The unsteady light moves over symbols carved into the floor, bending their serpentine lines.
I look away.
“Don’t know how long it’ll take us to get back to you.” Jack pulls two bottles of water from inside his jacket and places them on the altar.
The stone lid has been returned to its place, concealing the bathing chamber under it.
“You’d better hope we win,” he continues. “That might last a day or two. If no one comes back, dying slowly would be a fitting end for a traitorous outsider like you.”
I barely hear him.
Carrson is fighting somewhere above me.
The last thing he gave me was the truth.
I don’t know.
He didn’t call me a traitor. He didn’t say I caused the attack.
He also couldn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.
A warning might have made them check the waitstaff. Stretson and Juliette might never have walked through that door. Rebecca might not be trapped behind a staircase. Every shot fired above me might belong to someone who would have been safe if I’d spoken.
Jack starts back up the stairs.
The torchlight stretches his shadow across the floor, then pulls it away one step at a time.
“Jack.”
He stops but does not turn around.
“If you see Carrson, tell him—”
The words vanish before I decide what I have any right to ask him to say.
Tell Carrson I’m sorry.
Tell him I love him.
Tell him I understand if love is no longer enough.
Jack waits another beat, then continues climbing.
Let Carrson blame me. Let him never forgive me.
Just let him survive.
I lower myself onto the cold stone beside the altar and wrap my arms around my body. I listen for the sound of gunshots, but all I hear are Jack’s footsteps walking back upstairs and the clang of the Vault door shutting and locking.
He leaves me to rot.
Maybe that’s what I deserve.
***
I don’t know how long I remain in the Vault.
At first, I try to ration the water. Small sips with long spaces between them. I set the bottles on opposite ends of the altar and tell myself that distance will make them easier to resist.
It doesn’t work.
Without food, conversation, or daylight to divide the hours, thirst becomes my only reliable measure of time. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. Every bit of water sliding down my throat makes my body demand another until I tip the second bottle over my tongue and nothing comes out.
I spend what might be hours crying. Then I spend longer trying not to cry, because tears are another form of moisture I can’t afford to lose.
Eventually, I take the torch from its bracket and examine the Vault more closely.
There are words on the wall in Latin that Rebecca already read to me. The vow of The Order. I leave them alone and inspect the floor instead, crawling on my hands and knees, holding the flame low while my hair falls around my face. Up close I can see the carvings were made by different hands.
Some are crude. The outline of an animal. A crescent moon. Flames cut into the stone with hurried, uneven strokes.
Others are painstakingly detailed. An eye surrounded by individual lashes.
A hand with the fingers lightly curled, wearing a ring with a cross on it.
The same cross now branded on my chest. A flower with so many thin petals that whoever carved it must have spent hours hunched over this exact patch of floor.
Some marks are deep and violent, gouged into the stone as though the person holding the blade wanted to wound the Vault itself. Nearby, faint scratches barely break the surface.
Letters appear among the images, drawn from languages I recognize and others I don’t. There are curved symbols, angular ones, and entire strings of characters that might form prayers, curses, or declarations of love. A few are written in English, mostly women’s names.
Ann.
Tabitha.
Elizabet.
Suzanna.
I carry the torch from one name to the next, searching for dates or repetitions, anything that might turn them into a story. Ann appears twice. Tabitha only once. Elizabet’s name ends abruptly, the final letter trailing into a shallow scratch as though whoever carved it was interrupted.
I wonder what made these women special enough to have their names placed here. Then I wonder if they died here, were murdered as a part of some dark ritual, and a chill goes through me, head to toe.
I try to arrange the symbols into a pattern. The moon beside the animal. The hand beneath the eye. Names surrounded by flames. None of it makes sense. Maybe I’m looking for meaning where there is none. People trapped in darkness will make patterns out of anything.
The torch sputters, so I lift it higher, but the flame shrinks as billowing black smoke curls into my face, leaving me coughing. I have enough time to return it to the bracket before the light gutters out.
Darkness devours the room.
Without anything real to see, other images rise in my mind. Memories from the battle.
The first time I saw Carrson, he was covered in another man’s blood. I imagined the violence that had put it there, but imagination softened the details. It didn’t show me how quickly he would move or how little space existed between recognizing a threat and ending it.
Upstairs, when he killed the men dressed as servers, blood ran from his dagger, but his face remained Carrson’s. The same mouth that kissed me on the dance floor. The same eyes that searched for me every time the crowd pulled us apart.
I used to divide him into pieces I could understand. The man who makes me laugh. The man I desire. The Ashford heir. The killer everyone warned me about. Now I see how useless those divisions are.
He is all of them.
Already I can feel myself reaching for reasons. They were armed. They came here to kill us. He did it for me. I stop, recognizing the pattern Carr lives by. The belief that love justifies violence.
It doesn’t.
At Sinners, I told Carrson I could love the dangerous, flawed parts of him. Now I know I meant it. Part of me should be afraid of him, maybe even revolted, but I’m not. I hate that he killed those men. I hate even more that he lives in a world where killing them was necessary.
If I can take away the danger, I can take away the need for him to defend himself, to protect me. It won’t change who he is, but it might finally give him a choice.
Then he won’t need to kill.
Whether he’ll still want to is a question I don’t let myself answer.
I lower myself onto the cold floor and wait for sleep, but it never comes. Every unfamiliar sound sends my heart racing. Each time, I expect the lock to turn, but the blackness remains absolute and the drip of water continues counting time for me.