5. The Girl in the Water #3
He kicks the door shut with his foot, cursing softly when some coffee spills onto my carpet.
I barely stop myself from lifting my tray and throwing it at his head.
The look on his face immediately makes me suspicious.
Once Kai’s comment has been sent off, he steals my tray from me and places it on the bedside table.
Its spot is instantly replaced with Henrik’s laptop.
I glance between two pairs of identical grey eyes. “And what’s all this?”
Henrik sets his coffee aside and then types in his passcode, and what greets me is the screensaver of his stupid fucking cat, Pablo. “I found something.”
“If it’s another Reddit thread, I’m not interested.”
Kai snickers. “You will be.”
Again, I glance between the two of them, then eye the grapes my brother is so clearly enjoying. Despite my earlier complaints, I take them from him and pop the last few into my mouth. He rolls his eyes again. “If this is one of your sex scandals, Kai, then?—”
“Just listen,” Henrik cuts in, hunching over the side of me as he navigates the thousands of tabs he has open.
“Look at these. Regional press archives I managed to tap into. Local broadcast stations, stuff they don’t air outside of the duchy.
” His fingers fly across the keyboard, and his elbow is knocking into my fucking sternum.
The screen lights up as he clicks enter, and Kai leans close enough that I can smell the strawberry jam on his breath.
Dear god, I’m suffocating. A grainy video appears, the quality absolutely fucking garbage, and there’s no date stamped in the corner.
It looks like it was recorded on somebody’s microwave.
Just as I open my mouth to complain, I see her.
She’s six. Covered in blood, soaking wet, with black hair plastered to her skull and trembling .
Somebody wrapped her in a blanket, but she barely reacts to anything going on around her.
And a lot is happening. A medic checks her for any injuries, and another drapes even more fabric over her shaking shoulders.
The camera isn’t focused, but I can tell her mouth is moving.
From behind the camera come muffled voices.
“Is that the Lanorythe girl? Good God, look at her.”
“She’s the only one they found alive.”
“Where are her parents?”
“Somebody get the Duchess. Now!”
A reporter’s voice rises above the static, somewhere to the side of the man and his microwave.
“Lady Francesca Lanorythe, granddaughter of the Duchess of Sheffolk, was found unconscious near the southern bend of Lake Mirethia after a boating accident believed to have claimed the lives of her parents and elder sister. A search crew retrieved her after nearly two hours in freezing conditions ? —”
The audio catches as the person filming shoves people out of the way to get closer. I almost find myself scoffing at him, like I’m there, ready to tell him he’s being an ass. But his disrespect brings me something that freezes me in place. I hear Lady Francesca’s small voice.
Just enough.
“ The boat made a loud noise. Papa fell funny. Like he was playing. I looked for him under the boat. Mummy was holding me, but she let go. Then she was floating.”
The audio stutters. Her voice is high and hoarse. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I’m looking at now. This awareness. She’s trying to speak clearly, tiny hands gripping the medic’s jacket.
“ Mummy wasn’t moving. She was showing me how to be small. Quiet. To float like her.”
“Lucy said she wasn’t scared. It was so cold.
” Francesca looks around, blinking innocently at everyone surrounding her.
Like she’s telling a story. Then she shakes her head.
“I didn’t let go. But the water took me.
” Her chest heaves with each breath. “Lucy told me not to be scared. She held tight. I didn’t let go. ”
The video cuts.
No one speaks.
Not for a long moment.
Henrik clears his throat and then says, “There’s more, though Sheffolk didn’t allow national syndication.”
But I don’t want more. This singular video is more than enough. I try to assign a font to Francesca again, trying to box her into something explainable, anything to counteract this sudden emptiness inside me.
Baskerville. Garamond, maybe. Futura. Nothing sticks. No matter how hard I try, she’s not a name. Not a profile. She’s a little girl with bloodless lips and frozen hands that didn’t want to let go.
“Well,” I mutter, my mouth dry. “I think I’m officially depressed.”
Kai is the one who clicks a button next, minimising the screen and navigating to a new video. “Henrik said this one’s more recent. A charity gala in Lanorythe last winter. Aired briefly, or something.”
I tap Henrik’s shoulder, and he moves to retrieve my coffee before handing it to me. Kai is still struggling to find the video, and Henrik shoves him aside. “Have we not reached our invasive voyeur quota for the day? I’m feeling nauseous.”
Henrik’s already pressing play. The video opens smoothly; no microwave this time. I see a gilded ballroom with a vaulted ceiling and aesthetic shots alongside the low hum of a choir joining the background music. Francesca appears again, but it takes me a second to fully recognise her.
“Fuck,” Kai mutters, voice almost reverent. “She’s fit.”
“Don’t be disgusting,” Henrik retorts automatically.
She’s standing next to a ginger girl whose grin tells me she knows exactly how beautiful she is.
Lady Persephone Marathid, I recall from the files.
Beside her is a tall, dark-haired young man with the effortlessly privileged look of someone sent to international boarding schools.
Lord Edmund Marathid, older brother to Persephone.
Francesca’s cousins, and one of them is Baked Bean’s suspect.
My gaze slips back to her. She’s wearing black.
Of course she is; she’s in eternal mourning for something nobody will ever understand.
High neckline, long sleeves with gloves that vanish into the fabric.
Her hair’s in a complicated updo that probably took two servants and a spell.
Gone is the drenched, shivering girl from the lake.
She’s grown into something entirely else, something poised and almost devastating.
She’s talking to a reporter as the camera pans in. “You’ve stayed out of the public eye most of your life; what’s changed now in recent years?”
Momentarily, she freezes until Persephone touches her arm lightly. Providing support. “Responsibilities evolve,” she says with a grin.
What gets me is the way she speaks. Still so softly. Not shy. Not quiet. But delicate in the way that silk is—expensive. And yet… there’s still something buried there. A gap between the words. Like, part of her never returned from the lake.
“Are you nervous?” the reporter asks.
She gives a light laugh. “I always am.”
The video pauses on her face, telling me it was probably cut out from a longer interview Henrik found. I don’t realise how long I’ve been sitting watching the screen, my coffee cold in my hands, until Kai opens his big mouth, “You’re drooling. Can’t stop staring, can you?”
I scowl. “You shoved a laptop in my face. The fuck was I supposed to do, close my eyes?”
Henrik interrupts the building squabble by asking, “Have you assigned her a font yet?” The question calms me down a little, and I take a slow sip of my coffee. He knows me far too well. “And?”
“Not yet.”
“Impossible,” comes Kai’s voice. “You categorise everyone within ten seconds.”
I motion for them to take the laptop away, then shove past both of them to pace. Frustration rises in my throat at the reminder, and I set what’s left of my coffee down onto the table. “She doesn’t fit. There’s no category I can place her into.”
“Maybe you’ll have to create a new category for her, then,” he suggests, shifting to steal a slice of my toast. As though he hasn’t already been served a five-course meal for breakfast. “Or perhaps you’ve finally found somebody who defies the rules of your ridiculous typography kink.”
“Kairos, you have the critical eye of a moth and the attention span of a gnat. Please don’t weigh in on typefaces.”
My response is quick as a whip. I’ve been waiting for him to say something, just so I can see that startled look in his eyes when I clap back. It’s some sort of guilty pleasure, payback for all the times he cried louder when Mum entered the room, just so I’d get in trouble.
Henrik has made himself comfortable in an armchair and sips at his coffee like a frightened pigeon, whilst Kai shakes his head and claps slowly.
The poster boy for Middle Child Syndrome clicks his tongue and then says, “You have to be pre-planning these. Do you, like, sit and make a list of witty comebacks?”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Henrik adds, lips twitching into a smile. Kai lifts a brow as though asking which part he’s referring to. His response makes me pause. “The idea that Eric’s wit requires pre-planning.”
Mentally, I remove the strike from beneath his name and decide he can stay as long as he likes. The other one needs to fuck off, though. “Thank you, Henrik.”
Kai crosses his ankles and folds his hands behind his head. My eye twitches when I realise he still has his shoes on. “I object. How much do you want to bet that if I were to open his laptop, I’d find a Google Doc full of insults? In alphabetical order. ”
“They’re categorised by severity, actually, now, can you fuck off?”
“Can somebody please tell me the official, philosophical term for ‘pretentious bastard’?” Kai ripostes with an affronted scoff. “For research purposes, because I think I may have discovered it.”
“Save your brain the effort,” I say flatly. “The answer is ‘Eric’.”
Henrik slips in a quiet and amused, “At least you’re self-aware.”