Chapter Forty-Seven
CHAPTER
Forty-Seven
MOMENTS AFTER CASSANDRA leaves, a new set of footsteps snaps down the staircase. Expensive shoes.
Roth sees Judgement before she sees him; an old woman, bent to tend her desolate lake.
The last time he’d been here, it was as an acolyte to the society, only a few weeks ago, preparing him to be an owner—or so he’d thought.
He’d drunk the water of the river, sifting grit between his teeth because it was so shallow.
Then, when he’d been able to drink no more, they’d forced it down him until he passed out.
The dreams afterwards were… unpleasant.
Now, virtually the entire lakebed is bare, leaving a hard, ugly surface. His last few steps crunch on dry gravel.
Judgement doesn’t turn. Eveline, he corrects himself. But she must hear him because she straightens up. She seems smaller without her robe and mask on, no longer surrounded by bodyguards.
But she still looks at him as though he is less than the dirt he walks on. “How the dog turns to bite.”
Roth smiles at her, all teeth. “I didn’t know you were fraternising with the enemy.”
Eveline ignores this, but that doesn’t surprise him.
Eveline has been ignoring him since that disastrous society night, when Cassandra Fairfax had slipped between their fingers yet again.
Perhaps she’d already realised that Roth had grasped the essentials.
That he wasn’t so fucking stupid that he couldn’t read between the lines and see what they intended for him.
“You’ve been rather absent, James.”
Roth cracks his knuckles. “Tell me why Cassandra was here.”
Eveline shrugs. “She had questions. I had answers.” Seeing his expression darken, she adds, “It’s between us, I’m afraid.”
The silence stretches across the lakebed. Eveline sighs, as though Roth is a child up past his bedtime. Pestering. As though he can’t possibly be considered an equal. A threat worthy of attention. His fists tighten.
“What did you come for, James?”
“I want my life back!” he shouts, and hears it echo, hollow, across the lake.
“You still have your life. If you’re talking about your father’s money, I believe you spent it.”
“Don’t talk about my fucking father,” he snarls.
His father, who had promised him that life would be good. That there would always be beautiful women and wondrous hotels and comforts to be bought. That the money would never end.
His father, who’d been a liar all along.
“You were bored,” Eveline says. “You wanted entertainment that money couldn’t buy. We provided that for you. Anyway, the river is dying. You’ll have bigger problems to worry about than your squandered fortune.”
“I know you wanted me for your bullshit paradox book ritual. I know I was the sacrifice.”
Eveline looks unperturbed. “It didn’t have to be you. But you killed the others. You forced my hand.”
The red-haired one, he’d done to prove to Eveline that he could be loyal.
And sure, she’d been mad that he’d done it in such an…
unrestrained manner. He hadn’t liked doing it, but she suspected their Fool had double-crossed them, and he needed her to know that he wasn’t just a hitman for hire.
That he could be dangerous, too. Hartley, on the other hand, had asked too many questions. The others… well, he was angry.
Their bullshit rituals, their petty bickering over bookshops—over the river—had only meant something to him before he realised what they were really fighting over. A chance to fossilise themselves—and damn him in the process.
But he doesn’t need the bookshops to change his fortunes. He doesn’t need to be an owner. He just needs the river.
He grabs the back of Eveline’s head by her hair. “Tell me what Cassandra wanted.”
Eveline has been stoic, unemotional, downright rude, and a thrill goes through him when he hears her cry out. Though no pain can replicate how she’s made him feel. Just like his father, to hold everything out like the world’s biggest feast for the taking, and then snatch it away from him.
After his previous dispatches, he remembers what the hitman had told him. No blood, no mess. And water doesn’t stain.
He holds her down in the water, his hands a vice around her neck.
But it turns out that leaning his bodyweight against her isn’t even necessary; she fights against him once, twice—and then stops.
Judgement is an old, frail, weak woman. How terribly amusing to think that this is the entity the society were so afraid of.
Can you drown in the river? he’d wondered. Now, he has his answer.
“These shoes are too fucking good for you,” he mutters.
He leaves the body face down in the puddle of water. Pathetic, that they should all be worried about something so insignificant. The river might die, but if they had acted faster, they would have lived. Now, the game is winner takes all.
Between him—and Cass Fairfax.