CHAPTER 98 ROHAN
ROHAN
Help descended the moment they emerged. Even through the chaos and the shock and his body giving out, certain details pinged for Rohan.
These medics were not ordinary medics.
The search team moved with military precision and never showed their faces.
The press presence was limited and controlled, and the number of police on the scene was at least eighty percent smaller than it should have been.
Bowen Johnstone-Jameson did not show himself, but Rohan recognized the man’s handiwork well enough, and he knew instinctively that there would be no record of this midnight rescue, no record that Rohan or Nora had been there at all.
There would be no leaks. The story that did make its way to the press would be carefully controlled.
A natural disaster. A tragedy. Please respect the privacy of the victims.
And that list of victims would doubtlessly be highly curated.
Rohan’s only real question, once he’d managed to slip away, was who was pulling Bowen Johnstone-Jameson’s string—and how.
Like a homing pigeon, Rohan returned to the Devil’s Mercy. No one intercepted him or tried to block his access, and when he arrived in the underground palace that had once been his home, it was readily apparent the Mercy was empty, except for a lone figure awaiting him in the atrium.
“Proprietor,” Rohan greeted. “Or do you still prefer Duchess?”
“My duke passed away yesterday morning,” Zella said. “I should have been by his side, but I was not.”
“I take it you’ve been busy,” Rohan said.
“I take it you’re here for a reason?” That she issued her retort as a question told Rohan she absolutely already knew the answer.
“You left me to die.” Rohan arched a brow. “If I was capable of being offended, I might be offended about that.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you made it out.” Zella delicately cocked her own brow. “I expected nothing less.”
If she wanted to waltz, Rohan would waltz. “You knew what Nora was up to, didn’t you? You knew she was following us, and you knew why.”
Zella was the one who’d sent the Hawthornes to Rohan, the one who’d brought Rohan and two of those Hawthornes into the maze, the one who’d set off heading in a different direction with Grayson and Xander at the same time. All the more misdirection.
And because of all of that misdirection, Nora had slipped in unnoticed.
“You never betrayed Alice Hawthorne, did you?” Rohan could just almost see how the pieces fit together. “Whatever deal you struck with the true believer, you never intended to uphold it.”
“I would have,” Zella said, “if the woman I struck that deal with had survived.”
“You knew she wouldn’t.” Rohan was certain of that.
Zella had won herself the Devil’s Mercy and been complicit in the destruction of the Gilded Blade, thereby freeing herself from a leash of any sort.
“How soon, I wonder, did Bowen Johnstone-Jameson descend on the disaster site? How terribly convenient that he had every reason to be there, given that his nephew owned the place. Care to share what kind of chit you or Alice held that allowed you to call in a favor of this magnitude?”
“Does it matter?”
Rohan studied her for a moment. “I suppose not.”
“She’s gone now.” Zella’s head bowed slightly. “Alice.” That was real grief in her tone.
The old woman meant something to her. Nearly as much as her duke. “My condolences,” Rohan said. “If indeed Alice Hawthorne really is gone this time.”
Zella seemed to come to a decision then. She turned with characteristic grace and called back over her shoulder, “Follow me.”
In the inner sanctum, Zella handed Rohan a USB drive, then nodded toward a laptop. “Go right ahead.”
Rohan wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he came here—a job offer, perhaps, or exile, but not this. Willing to see where it went, he plugged the drive into the laptop.
It contained a single file. A very large video file. He pulled it up. Footage.
On the screen, there was an empty room, circular, made of stone, and lit only by a ring of torches. There was one arched entry, and in the middle of the room, there was a raised dais. On the dais sat three golden chalices.
Having read the letters between the first Proprietor and his Ascendant, Rohan knew exactly what he was looking at. The final trial.
“Go to twenty-four, fifteen, fifty-three,” Zella said.
Rohan did exactly that, and when he pressed Play again, the stone room was no longer empty. Three girls in dirty, tattered ballgowns stood in front of the dais. Rohan’s gaze went first to the one he did not recognize.
“Nora’s sister, I presume?” Rohan said. “Freya.” The name was no sooner out of his mouth than there was a flash of metal on the screen. A knife. And just like that, pale-haired Freya had one arm locked around her target’s neck, her other hand holding a knife to the girl’s throat.
To Avery’s throat.
Rohan read meaning into that in an instance. “This is the final stage of the Crucible. The Candidates are made to believe only one of them can survive.”
“Some years, Candidates are made to believe it’s two,” Zella replied.
On screen, a thin line of red appeared on Avery’s throat, a warning cut.
The footage had no audio, but it was clear enough Freya was saying something, issuing a threat to go along with the cut she’d just made, and the person Freya seemed to be issuing that threat to was Eve.
That made little sense to Rohan, given what he knew of the long-standing tensions between Avery and Eve, but within moments, Eve was walking toward the dais, her chin held high.
Avery struggled against Freya’s hold as Eve picked up one of the three chalices—the one in the middle, the one Rohan knew instinctively had been marked with a certain symbol.
Rohan watched Eve bring the chalice to her lips, watched as Avery screamed and screamed and Eve ignored her and took a single drink from that golden chalice before setting it back on the dais, and then—
And then.
As Eve’s body hit the floor, Rohan reminded himself that the Crucible did not actually require a sacrifice, that the Candidates were only made to believe it did.
But Eve didn’t get back up.
Freya pushed Avery toward the dais, knife angling up into her chin, and then a cloaked figure appeared in the shadows behind them. Rohan had time to register only the color of that cloak—black—before the figure in question grabbed Freya’s head between her hands and snapped her neck.
“A Candidate fails the Crucible the moment she draws another’s blood,” Zella said. “It is not the only way to fail, but it might be the most common.”
On screen, there was a flurry of movement, as new figures suddenly appeared: three of them. Like the Woman in Black, two wore cloaks. One red. One white. The third woman wore no cloak at all, her face bare, her hair as pale as Freya’s.
As one, the three cloaked women lowered their hoods. A distraught Avery dropped to her knees beside Eve’s prone form. And still, Eve did not move. Her head lolled as Avery pulled her body into her lap, cradling her.
Sisters.
The Woman in White, Alice, knelt beside Avery, taking Avery’s hands in her own, murmuring to her, comforting her. And then Alice gathered Eve’s body and arranged it just so beneath a magnificent archway.
And then the Woman in White stood. She walked back to the dais and picked up the same chalice that Eve had drunk from.
She approached Katalin, the Woman in Black, and began to whisper in her ear.
That whisper stretched on and on and on in what Rohan assumed to be a ritual passing of knowledge, and when Alice was done, she stepped back.
She lifted the chalice to her lips. She drank.
And crumpled to the floor.
The pale-haired woman, almost certainly Nora’s stepmother, had not shed a single tear for her daughter’s death.
She smiled slightly as she bent over Alice’s body, and with a flash of metal, slashed the dead woman’s throat open from ear to ear.
As blood spilled onto the floor, Rohan suddenly realized that Avery was no longer visible on screen.
The last thing the camera caught before the world exploded was a blur of motion, Toby Hawthorne throwing himself over Eve’s body in that archway.
End of footage.
“Why show me this?” Rohan said quietly.
“The world will be led to believe only four people died at Vantage,” Zella replied. “That is how many bodies will be released for public burial. One of those will be Toby Hawthorne’s.”
Rohan was not one for mourning. He’d barely known the man, but somewhere, in the labyrinth in his mind, Rohan could hear Toby Hawthorne’s voice saying, If you make it out, if you get the chance—
“And what of the others?” Rohan asked flatly. “There were eight people in that room, seven once Avery found her way out.” Per the news, Avery had survived. The others, however…
“One can hardly publicly bury women who died years ago,” Zella said.
“But all three Ascendants are gone, Rohan. The head and the heir of the Kyrie line are gone. I needed you to see that. What once was is no more. This is a whole new world.” She let that sink in.
“And in that world, I will need a Factotum.”
It was ironic, really, that now the Mercy was what Rohan had believed it to be all along: a true power, no longer leashed. But the Mercy was also no longer his. It would never be his again, and Rohan found that he couldn’t go back to second-in-command. “Ask Kier.”
“He’s too young.”
“We both know there’s no such thing.”
Zella stared at him for a moment. “Where will you go?”
“Nowhere,” Rohan replied. “Appropriate, is it not? After all, I’m nothing now.”
“You are not nothing,” Zella told him, “to Savannah Grayson.”
If you make it out, Toby insisted in Rohan’s memory, if you get the chance—
“Who knows I survived?” Rohan said evenly. His old adversary owed him that information at least.
“No one with the last name Hawthorne, if that’s why you’re asking,” Zella replied. “No one who could or would tell Savannah Grayson you’re alive.”
“Good.” Rohan turned and began to take his leave.
Zella followed, calling out to him only when they hit the atrium. “You gave up everything for her.”
“She doesn’t know that,” Rohan said. “She never needs to know.”
On bended knee, a dead man—a good man—whispered in the recesses of Rohan’s mind. The world and the whole damn sky.
“Ask me one more thing before you go, Rohan,” Zella commanded. “Ask me if I truly loved my duke.”
“Why?” Rohan refused to look back at her.
“Because,” Zella replied, “for some people, love is a tsunami that knocks them off their feet or the undertow pulling them out to sea. Love sinks its razor-sharp teeth into some people and never lets go. But for others of us, love is a choice—and that choice, it’s terrifying, and it is never simple, and it can feel like offering up your throat. ”
“I despise you,” Rohan told her, his tone deceptively light even as the ghost of Toby Hawthorne wouldn’t stop whispering to him: On bended knee if you have to—
The world and the whole damn sky.
“You know,” Zella said, sensing weakness and taking her final shot, “I never did take you for a coward, Rohan.”