CHAPTER 72 ROHAN
ROHAN
In all his years growing up at the Devil’s Mercy, Rohan had never once set foot in its true inner sanctum. For more than two centuries, only Proprietors had been given access to this room.
Now, like everything else, it was Rohan’s.
The sanctum was more vault than study, its walls lined with numbered and locked metal boxes, none larger than a safe deposit box. There was but a single bookshelf in the room, and that shelf held thick, leatherbound tomes.
Ledgers.
Since the Regency era, powerful men had paid a levy to join the ranks of the Mercy—the same levy paid by the staff who called this underground palace home: a secret both terrible and true, leverage to be held over them.
A secret—and proof. Nearly an hour ticked by as Rohan read.
Even as the Mercy had evolved with modern times, even as the lock boxes had come to hold USB drives and literal, taped confessions, the levies were still recorded in the ledgers, written by the secret-holder’s own hand in fountain pen, one page for every secret.
And now all of those ledgers, going back to the very first, were Rohan’s.
Page after page after page. He’d started with the most recent and worked his way backward until only the oldest ledger remained.
He started at the end of that one and made his way through it backward toward the beginning, but again and again, his gaze was drawn to the bookshelf and the four objects he’d placed on top of it.
A ballgown shredded to pieces.
A hairbrush.
A knife.
A rose made of glass.
None of which should have captivated Rohan even half as much as the ledgers—or, for that matter, the years’ worth of security footage archived and kept in the vault.
The power of the Mercy was not just the levies.
It was every secret spoken in its hallowed halls, every deal made, every bit of knowledge gathered by dealers and bartenders and jacks-of-all-trades.
The power of the Mercy was and always had been that of controlling the board.
Tell me, Savannah. What’s the board right now? Rohan pushed against the memory and so many others—of wagers made and rules broken and letters inked onto skin.
Fair warning, love: I want it more. He’d warned her. Right from the beginning, he’d warned her. What choice did I have? Right from the start, what choice did I have with you?
Rohan gritted his teeth and read on—on and on, centuries-old secrets, skeletons in every aristocratic closet, the alchemy at the intersection of power and wealth and the desire for more.
And all of it—all of it—was like sand in Rohan’s mouth. Room after room had been erected in the labyrinth of Rohan’s mind, and he felt nothing.
Not a single thrill.
Not even a hint of anticipation.
No satisfaction at the schemes he could lay or the battles that would inevitably be won.
Nothing.
Nihil.
“Long live the king,” Rohan said darkly.
Eventually, he made it back to the first entry in the first ledger. Rohan stared at the page—at the name.
The founder of the Devil’s Mercy—a brilliant, Machiavellian man, a man with royal blood and the kind of reputation that had survived generations—had his own entry in the ledger. His own secret. Why? It made little sense that the man who’d founded this place would have required a levy from himself.
And yet… Rohan found that he did not care.
He closed the ledger and set it aside, and the next thing he knew, he was standing at the bookshelf, staring not at the ledgers but at the glass rose and the brush and the knife and the remains of a ballgown the color of smoke.
He picked up the shredded fabric, still soft to the touch.
Savannah had really done a number on the dress, destroyed it the way Rohan had once dared her to destroy another glass rose.
I see you, Savannah, Rohan had told her. The real you. The angry you.
And she’d told him that women like her didn’t get to be angry.
At the time, Rohan hadn’t even let on that he knew quite well what that was like.
He’d grown up in the seat of power, playing game after game with men who all too often let their anger rule them, men who, outside of the Mercy, would have looked right through Rohan based on nothing more than the color of his skin.
Men who even within the halls of the Mercy had needed to learn the hard way not to.
I see you, Savannah. The real you. The angry you. Rohan picked up the glass rose and thought about Savannah’s hatred of flowers, of roses in particular, and he let the glass rose slip from his fingers. Rohan heard it shatter. He saw the shards, and still—
Nihil.
He returned his attention to the ledgers—to the staff ledger this time, and flipped it open to his own page.
He stared at his secret, written in shaky, childish scrawl in dark purple ink.
Rohan stared at the page until the words blurred, and then, as the sound of his mother’s song—and her screams—rose in his mind, Rohan heard another voice, a woman’s voice, taunting him on the other end of a phone line.
You said to make you an offer. I thought you should know: We already have.
Rohan looked back again to the glass on the floor—so many shards—and the pieces clicked into place.
We already have.
Rohan picked up the first ledger with one hand and the cane with the other, his scepter, a match for an invisible crown that did not matter to him the way it should have.
I want everything, Rohan had told Savannah once, and I always have. The Mercy was supposed to be his everything. Rohan was supposed to rule, but instead, he found himself leaving the inner sanctum and making his way to the Proprietor’s study—his study, now.
Alastair was there, waiting. Rohan dropped the ledger onto the desk.
Make me an offer, he’d told the Gilded Blade.
We already have.
Rohan really should have seen it. For as long as he could remember, fresh calla lilies had decorated the atrium of the Devil’s Mercy—floating on water, year after year after year.
If you play any game long enough, he’d told Jameson Hawthorne, certain patterns will always repeat.
“It didn’t take you half as long as I expected,” Alastair said. “Have you tried the handle of the cane yet?”
Rohan tightened his grip over said handle, that elaborately carved handle, the alchemical symbol for alchemy repeated again and again and again.
He found a fleur-de-lis on the underside.
Rohan pushed it, and the handle of the cane popped up, revealing a hollow compartment inside. As Rohan pulled a piece of aged paper from it, he thought of the warning he’d given so often as Factotum:
Where angels fear to tread, have your fun instead. But be warned: The house always wins.
“The Mercy is power,” Rohan said, unrolling the paper and beginning to read. “But it isn’t the house, is it?”