Chapter 21 #2
"Quiet." Leopold doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't look at Kage. "Or I'll wrap the silver around your throat and you can listen without the commentary."
Kage's jaw works. He pulls once against the restraints—hard, deliberate, testing—and the silver bites and the blood runs and he holds Leopold's eyes the whole time like he's daring him to make good on it. He doesn't stop straining. He won't stop straining. But he goes quiet.
"I had a sister," Leopold says. His eyes slide to mine.
Had?
"She was younger than me by a century—for our kind, that's nothing, a little sister stays a little sister no matter how old you both get.
But she was born into the decline, after everything went wrong for my family, and I raised her more than my parents did.
" His gaze has gone distant, fixed on something I can't see.
"I was her protector. That was my whole self.
Before I was anything else—before I was any of the things you've watched me be this year—I was the thing that stood between my sister and the world. "
I shake my head, a part of me seeing where this is going. The other part terrified about what Leopold might say next. Another tear falls down my cheek.
"There was an errand." His voice is very even. "Small. Beneath telling, almost. A thing I wanted—a foolish young man's want—and I brought her along because I didn't want to go alone."
His hand, on his knee, has gone white at the knuckle.
"I tucked her somewhere safe while I saw to it. High up, away from the business I'd come for. A quiet room on the seventh floor. I told her to wait. I told her she'd be safe there." A pause.
The seventh floor.
Oh God… no…
"From the lobby," he goes on, "I felt the building break.
The air turned to fire and glass. A power I had no name for tore through the bones of the place, and the whole seventh floor came down into the sixth.
" His eyes come up to mine. Wet. Steady.
The worst thing I've ever looked at. "By the time I clawed my way up to where I'd left her, there was no seventh floor left to find.
There was no her. There was only the room it started in, and a witch child sitting alive and untouched at the center of it, in a ring of everything she'd unmade. "
I blink, tears streaming down my face. My entire body deflates.
"You," he says. "You were the child."
"I didn't—" My voice breaks. "I didn't… I couldn't—"
"I know." He says it so simply. "I've always known.
That's the part I could never reconcile.
If you'd been a monster, I could have hated you clean.
But you were a child who couldn't help what she was, but my sister is still dead.
Someone has to be responsible, Calypso. Someone has to be.
Because if it's no one—if it was only chemistry, only a wrong place, wrong time situation—then there's no one left to blame but me.
I'm the one who brought her there. I'm the one who left her on this floor and promised her she was safe. "
I swallow hard, the lump in my throat aching as a silent sob falls out of me.
"So it’s been you. For twelve years, it’s been you. I needed it to be you."
Eleven, they told me. Eleven people. A number small enough to hold and too big to feel. And now one of those eleven has a face. A vampire girl told to wait somewhere safe, and I unmade her without ever knowing she was there.
Leopold's spent twelve years turning that into a life spent hunting me and suddenly everything makes sense. My hands are shaking in their bindings as I suck in a sharp breath and break down.
"So all of it—" My voice isn't working right. I can barely breathe around the ache in my chest. "The sponsorship. The debt. Bringing me into your house. None of it was ever—"
"It was always this room," he says. "Everything was always this room."
And I understand that I have spent months being walked, step by careful step, back to the scene of the thing he needs me to answer for. That the whole architecture of my life this year was a hand at the small of my back, steering me back here.
"But you didn't just want to bring me back," I say, because there's more, there's the folding chair and the thing under his palm and Kage in silver and none of it is explained by grief. "You want something. Grieving men don't chain people to walls."
"No," Leopold agrees, a soft smirk. "They don't."
And then, behind me, from the doorway I'm not facing, a voice I would know at the bottom of the deepest sedation they ever poured into me says, very quietly: "Let her go, Leopold."
My stomach clenches.
Aamon.
He's here. I don’t know how he found me, but he's here, unmade, his shirt wrong and his hair out of its severe line. The exact way he looked the night he came through my door because I screamed inside my own head and he couldn't stay away.
Because I screamed inside my own head.
Something cold begins, very far down, to move.
"Ah," Leopold says. He doesn't stand. He doesn't look surprised—and that's the detail that turns my stomach. "There he is. Right on time." He looks at me, almost kind. "I told you I was counting on it."
Right. This was his plan from the beginning.
"Aamon," I say. "Don't—it's a trap, he wants you here, he planned—"
"I know." Aamon's eyes never leave Leopold.
He's very still, the stillness that in him means he's closer to violence than he'll ever show, but under it—I can read him, I've spent months learning to read him—under it there's something that isn't calculation.
Something like dread. "I know what this is.
Let her go, take me, and we'll end it here. "
Aamon shifts his weight—barely, a fraction, the beginning of a step toward me—and Leopold moves faster than I've ever seen him move. He's out of the chair and behind me in the space of a blink, one cold hand fisted in my hair, my head wrenched back, the line of my throat bared to the room.
I whimper as pain shoots through my scalp.
"Move any closer," Leopold says, pleasant as ever, his mouth near my ear, "and I'll open her throat and drink her dry where she kneels. You'll cross the room in time to watch the light go out. Do you want to test how fast you are against how fast I am? With her life as the wager?"
Aamon goes absolutely still. Every line of him, locked.
"No," Leopold agrees, as if he'd answered. "I didn't think so."
For a long moment he holds me there, my pulse jumping against his fingers, letting Aamon look at exactly how close his hand is to my throat.
Making sure the lesson takes. Then, satisfied, he releases me—unwinds his fist from my hair one strand at a time, almost tender—and steps back around the chair and lowers himself into it.
"You offered to trade yourself for her," he says to Aamon, and he sounds delighted, because we've circled back to the thing he actually wants. "You see, that's the piece I couldn't be certain of, all this time. Whether I was right.”
Aamon’s jaw clenches.
“Right about what?” I ask.
Leopold chuckles. “See, I had a theory. I couldn't test it without spending everything I had.
" He looks at Aamon as his lips pull into a sinister smile.
"So I spent it. I took her. And here you are—miles from where you're meant to be, inside a sealed building you have no way of finding, for her.
" A pause. "No council warden does that.
No council instrument does that. Only one thing does that. "
"Leopold," Aamon says, and there's warning in it, and there's something else in it, something I have never once heard in his voice in all these months.
Fear.
"You want to know how I found this room?" Leopold says—to me now, only to me, like Aamon isn't in the doorway at all. "Room 714. The origin point. Where they found you sitting in the ash of my sister's whole floor?"
He stands. Unhurried. Crosses a slow step toward me.
"That detail wasn’t public. It was buried in your file—your beautiful, redacted file—sealed away where no grieving brother should ever have been able to read it." Another step. "And yet."
"Leopold." Aamon's voice, low, a warning.
Leopold doesn't turn to him. His eyes stay on me, and that's worse.
"Someone with access to that file has spent a year making very certain the council never saw what you truly are. A man who edits your records. A man"—he tilts his head—"who runs to you the instant you're frightened. From any distance. Through any wall."
Across the room Kage has gone rigid against the silver, his eyes cutting to me, to Aamon, doing the same math I refuse to do.
"A man, or should I say vampire, of a bloodline I looked into," Leopold says softly, "once I let myself suspect. A bloodline that has a particularly useful ability, Calypso."
I look at Aamon. He’s white as a ghost.
“A bloodline that can read minds.”
No.
"And speak into them."
No.
"The voice in your head," Leopold says gently. "The one you've never told a soul about. The one who has probably been speaking to you since you first stepped foot onto Devenir."
I shake my head, unable to look away from Leopold. No. No. Not this. Anything but—
"Ask him," Leopold says.
And I don't want to. Every part of me is bracing against it, every survival instinct screaming to keep my eyes on Leopold, on the threat, on the enemy—but my body turns me anyway, turns me toward Aamon in the doorway. I have to see his face, because I’ll know.
I’ll know if Leopold is telling the truth.
I’ll know if this is all some kind of sick joke…
For one second. One single second. Aamon’s jaw doesn't do its tell, his thumb doesn't find his fingers, his face doesn’t go still—it does the opposite, it comes open, all the careful architecture I've watched him hold for months coming apart at once, and in the wreckage of it is the answer, plain as any words, plainer, because I taught myself to read the silence between his words and the silence is screaming.
It's true.