Chapter 4 #2
The light gutters in my hands. I look up and Nellie's just there, three feet away at the foot of the stair, chest heaving like she took the steps at a run.
The second she sees me her whole face breaks open with relief, and then it crumples, and she's already coming toward me with her hands out and tears standing in her eyes.
"They wouldn't tell me where you were. For a week, Cal. I've been going out of my mind. Odette had to—there was a whole—" She drops to her knees in front of me and grabs my face in both hands and just looks at me, checking. "Are you okay? Don't you dare say fine. Are you okay?"
And the thing is, I'm not, and she knows I'm not.
So I don't try. I just let her hold my face and I put my hand over one of hers, and my eyes sting, because she came.
A week of nobody down here but a warden and a damn voice inside my head, and Nellie clawed her way through whatever they put between her and me, and she came.
"Five minutes," Aamon says from the doorway of his room. Quiet. "That's what I could get her."
I'd forgotten he was there. I glance at him, and he's already looking away, giving us what privacy a room this size allows.
“You did this?”
Aamon stops, nods. Then he’s closing the steel door to his room before I can even thank him.
Nellie talks fast, because… five minutes.
She tells me the academy's a wreck of rumor. Half the school thinks I'm a monster the council should've put down at thirteen. The other half thinks the whole Revel was a setup and I'm a girl who got triggered on purpose in a room full of people who should've known better.
Margo and the girls are loudly in the second camp and have gotten into at least one screaming fight in the dining hall about it.
The Vane name is everywhere and nobody will say it above a whisper.
There are flowers piling up outside the combat hall where Emric used to partner me, and I have to look at the drain for a second when she says that.
"Classes are a joke," she says. "Nobody's learning anything. Everybody's just—waiting. For the inquest. They know it's in a week." She hesitates. "People are placing bets, Cal. On what they do to you."
"What are the odds?" I ask, because if I don't make it a joke I'll make it something worse.
"Don't." Her jaw works. "Don't do that."
"Sorry."
She glances at the doorway to Aamon’s room. Then she looks back at me, and something in her face changes—goes careful, goes deliberate—and she takes my hand like she's just holding it, and I feel paper fold into my palm.
Small. Creased soft, like she's been carrying it a while, waiting for the right moment.
Her eyes hold mine and don't so much as flick down at it, and I understand: whatever this is, it's not for the ears in the room.
It's not for anyone with a vampire's hearing standing eight feet away pretending not to listen.
"Odette sends her love," Nellie says, light, easy, a girl running out the clock on a visit. "She's been fussing over you. Made me swear to hug you twice, so." She squeezes my hand—the one with the paper folded into it—and doesn't so much as glance down. "That's one. The other's from Margo."
"Tell them—" My voice catches. "Tell them I'm fine. Tell Odette to stop worrying."
"Sure I will." Which means she won't, and we both know it.
"Time," Aamon says.
Nellie leans in and kisses my forehead, fierce, and squeezes my hand once more, and doesn't say anything else at all. She doesn't have to. Her eyes hold mine for one extra second—later, they say, alone—and then she lets go.
Then she's up, and swiping at her face, and telling Aamon in a voice like a slammed door that she'll be back whether the Council likes it or not. He says something even and lets her rage past him up the stairs, and her uneven footsteps climb away and away until the cellar swallows them.
The fold of paper is going damp in my sweaty fist.
I wait.
"I'm going to lie down," I tell Aamon, and I make my voice bored, worn thin, a girl wrung out by a visit. "Don't come check on me. I mean it."
He doesn't argue. Of course he doesn't.
I go into my room and I lie down on the cot with my back to the doorway and I curl in around my own fist, knees up, the blanket dragged over my shoulder, and I fold myself into the smallest, quietest shape I can make—paper tucked deep against my chest where the sound of it can't carry, where even a vampire's ears have nothing but wool and my own heartbeat to work with.
Then I wait some more.
Until I can’t hear his footsteps. Until it’s quiet outside the steel door. Until I’m sure Aamon has lost interest in listening to anything going on on my side of the door.
Then I open my hand under the blanket, and I unfold the paper by feel in the dark.
There's just enough light from the grate above me seeping through the blanket to read it. Odette's handwriting, cramped and slanting.
The anchor on your door was blood-magic. Old, noble house. Getting a name off a blood signature isn't cheap—I called in every favor I had and a few I didn't, and it cost more than I'll ever tell you—but I figured out who did it. It was Leopold Vassard.
I read it three times.
I sit up.
The blanket slides off and the cold hits my shoulders, but I don't feel it. I'm too busy watching the pieces slot into place, one after another, ugly and neat.
My bag… First week here, Leopold got close enough to press blood onto my bag. He was trying to mark me so he could track me, but I didn’t play into his hand. So he came back with a bigger one. He carved the anchor into my door and gave himself a way in and out of my house whenever he pleased.
And then, when he wanted to break me open in front of two hundred plus people, he already had my sealed file in his hands.
Weeks. All of it, weeks in the planning. Before the bonfire, before the dais, before he ever smiled at me and called me by a name he had no right to. He was crouched at my door in the dark cutting himself a key, marking me the way you mark a thing you mean to come back for.
Why?
That's the part I can't get past. What did I ever do to a man I'd never met that he'd spend weeks, favors, blood, on getting his hooks into me? He doesn't want me dead—he had a hundred cleaner ways for that. He wants something. From me, specifically.
And I have no fucking clue what.
More than that, even worse: he got my file. The sealed one. The one only the council is supposed to touch. Which means somebody handed it to him, or he had it all along, and either way the line between the people keeping me caged and Leopold is getting thinner and thinner.
Who can I trust here?
Behind my sternum, in the dark, the voice stirs for the first time in days. Not words. Just a low pull of attention, coming awake at the exact moment I do, like it heard the question form.
I close my fist around the paper and I don't ask it anything. I've learned that much.
But I don't sleep, either.