Chapter 10 #2
Corvin and Zeva flank me one last time on the way out—habit, or orders that haven't caught up to the new arrangement yet.
At the courtroom doors Corvin stops. He's not looking at me.
He's looking at the middle distance the way he does, the way that used to make me think he wasn't paying attention until I understood that Corvin is always paying attention, that the flat affect is the disguise.
"Miss Dellaby." Formal. For the record. Then, lower, under the noise of the emptying gallery: "You've been a quiet assignment.
Predictable. I like predictable." His eyes come to me then, just for a second, and there's nothing flat in them at all.
"New house. New staff. New everything. But some of us are harder to reassign than a set of quarters. You understand me."
I swallow against the lump in my throat.
I do. I understand him completely.
He knows that I know he's been reporting to someone who isn't the council.
And he's telling me, in the only language he's allowed to use in a room full of ears, that the walls of my life are changing but not the eyes in them—that wherever Leopold puts me, Corvin will still be watching, through whatever means necessary, for whoever it is he actually answers to.
"Take care of yourself," he says, and then he and Zeva peel away and I never do get to say anything back. That's probably the point.
Zeva catches my eye as she goes. She doesn't say a word. But she tips her head, one degree, the way she did in the cellar the night everything went wrong—it really was peaceful down there.
Aamon reaches me before Leopold can, cutting the distance without seeming to hurry, the way he does. He doesn't touch me. He just puts himself at my shoulder, close, his voice low enough that it dies before it reaches anyone else.
"I've got you," he says. "Whatever you need. I'll bring it. Give me a day to see the shape of the place and I'll have everything sorted." A breath. "You're not walking into that house alone. Do you hear me?"
I hear him. I don't trust the warmth it puts in my chest, because trusting him has cost me before—but I hear him.
"They're not going to make this easy on you either," I say.
"No." Almost a smile, there and gone. "Leopold would never."
Then, speak of the devil, Leopold is there, and Aamon steps back into the exact distance the council requires of him, and the warden slides down over the man like it was never gone.
∞∞∞
After the Inquest, I’m left with nowhere else to go but… with Leopold.
He walks me to the house himself. He doesn't have to—he’s got a whole group of staff who accompanied him—but he sends them ahead and offers me his arm, bent at the elbow, courtly, like we're going to dinner. I don't take it. He smirks, lets it fall, and matches my stride anyway.
The campus watches us go. The same students who called me murderer this morning watch me cross the north lawn toward House Vassard now, and I can see them trying to work out whether I've been punished or promoted.
Leopold soaks it up. He nods to people. He knows their names.
Out here in the light he's the most charming man in Louisiana.
"You spoke well in there," he says. "The staff in combat class. The boy handing you one when no one else would. That got the mother—I watched her face." He says it like a critic marking a scene. "Real, was it?"
"Every word."
"Mm. It shows. You could have played the victim.
Half that room came in ready to hand it to you—the provocation, the sealed file, the poor sedated girl.
You didn't reach for any of it." A glance sideways, appraising.
"The whole circle lit up under your feet and you held your magic back anyway.
Gave them nothing to be afraid of. That's the part I liked. "
"I did it for me. Not for the room."
"Better still." He's delighted. Genuinely. "A woman who performs for herself is a woman I can work with."
My stomach roils.
We pass under the oaks and he talks to me the way you talk to a horse you just bought and are pleased with.
"I've given you the east rooms. They get the morning—you've been underground long enough, I thought you'd want the light.
" A pause, warm, giving me ample time to appreciate the gesture.
"Fresh linens. A proper bath, which God knows you've earned.
And my physician will see to those wrists tonight.
" He glances at the blood gone tacky on Nellie's sleeves and clicks his tongue.
"Thorns. In this day and age. The council does love to dress cruelty up as procedure.
You'll find nothing like that in my house. "
"Generous."
"I can afford to be." He says it lightly, and it isn't about money.
"You'll want for nothing, Calypso. That's the part people never believe until they're inside it.
Anything you ask for, you'll have—clothes, books, food that isn't slid under a door on a tray.
A window that opens." He tips his head toward me, pleasant.
"All you have to do is be exactly where I put you. "
"So I have everything I want," I say, "as long as what I want… is to stay put."
"Now you understand me." He laughs—warm, delighted, beautiful, the worst sound I've heard all day, because nothing I throw at him lands. I'm a mouse who's just learned the cat finds her hissing adorable.
He turns his head, and for one second the warmth thins to nothing, and I see the look in his eye that I saw the first day I met him. Chills spread down the back of my neck. "I've wanted you close a long time, Calypso. Longer than you know. And here you are." A beat. "Walking me home."
My magic goes small and still under my sternum. Hiding.
"What do you want from me?" I ask. “What is all of this about? What did I ever do to you?”
The warmth pours back into his face like water filling a print in sand. He doesn't answer.
"Here we are," he says.
The residence sits at the north edge of the grounds where the campus gives way to trees. White stone, black shutters, iron gone delicate with age. Staff wait on the steps. A woman in grey takes my canvas duffel from one of Leopold’s bruisers.
They walk me up and inside what I now realize should have been referred to as a mansion.
Wide stairs, good rugs, a hall of closed doors.
My rooms are at the end—gold light, a real bed, a window seat, folded towels.
Every inch of it built to make Leopold’s hands around my neck feel like a thoughtful gift.
"Dinner is at eight." The woman in grey stops at the door. "Mr. Vassard would be pleased if you'd join him."
"And if I don't?"
She hesitates—just a beat, but I catch it. "Then I'll tell him you're resting. After everything today, no one would think anything of it."
I nod, thankful she’s giving me this gentle out. "Tell him I'm resting," I say.
She nods and leaves me alone in my new room. The door doesn't lock. I check.
Then it's just me, in more beauty than I've ever stood inside.
I don't sit. I walk my new jail cell instead.
It's a beautiful room. That's the cruelty of it.
My whole first duplex would have fit inside it twice, and everything in it is soft and warm and chosen—a bed with too many pillows, a writing desk, a wardrobe that already has clothes in it, hung and waiting, in my size.
I run a finger along the desk. No dust. Somebody prepared this while I sat in a stone chair and learned what I was worth.
Leopold has been planning this for…
I shiver. I can’t think about that.
There's a bookshelf, half-full. A basin with real soap that smells like something green and expensive.
A rug thick enough that my boots make no sound.
I trail my hand across the back of a chair, the cool brass of a lamp, the cold pane of the window, and none of it feels like mine because none of it is. It's his. I truly am a prisoner here.
A gilded fucking prisoner.
The window looks out over the north lawn.
Past it, the tree line, and past that—nothing I can see, but I know the shape of the campus out there in the darkening evening: the watchtower, the cellar under it, the chapel I turned to ruin.
Somewhere out there is Nellie. Somewhere is Kage.
Somewhere is a version of tonight where I chose differently and it went worse, or better, and I'll never know which.
A tear slides down my cheek before I feel it coming. Just one. I catch it with the back of my wrist and press it away, hard, and I make myself stop crying.
I knew this wouldn't be easy. I never once thought it would be easy. Nobody handed me a life where the doors open when I push them, and crying at a pretty window in a house I'll never own isn't going to change the arithmetic.
So I focus on what I can control.
I train. I get better—really better, not the version Aamon feeds the council.
I hold my magic through anything they throw at me, and I earn the freedom they promised, and when the year is up I walk out of here and I get as far from Leopold Vassard and every other person who wants to watch me suffer as possible.
I press my palm flat against my sternum, where the sunny heat of my magic sits coiled and restless and watchful. Behind it, something stirs—the voice twitching like an open mouth. It doesn’t say anything, but it’s here.
I don't answer it. I've learned that much.
But it settles in close, like a held breath, like it knows this house better than I do. And for the first time since they read my sentence, I don't know which of the things watching me tonight I should fear the most.