Chapter 42
CHAPTER
Sabine
Sabine awoke in darkness to the sense that someone was standing beside her bed. She startled upright, ready to scream, only to find Ellie silhouetted against the faint light from the hall, her face pinched and white as a wraith.
“Forgive me, my lady,” Ellie whispered, voice urgent.
Sabine pressed a hand to her chest, willing her heart to slow, and counted five breaths. “What is it?”
Ellie extended an envelope, addressed in the careful, slanted writing of Lady Delarine. The wax was unbroken, still warm to the touch.
Sabine cracked the seal with her thumb. The paper caught the thin moonlight that filtered through the curtained window.
Please forgive the hour and the method, but you are the only soul in whom I may confide. Come at once to the Braythar wing of the Imperial Gallery. I trust you to move with discretion.
-D.
The note was short, but it coiled around her like a serpent, squeezing out every last drop of sleep.
Sabine had spent many afternoons in the museum’s echoing halls as a governess, shepherding her charges through the labyrinth of portraiture and statues.
But it was closed this week for renovations.
For Lady Delarine to request a meeting there, at this hour, meant disaster, or something worse.
Could she trust that the Duchess’s intentions were good? Or if not good, per se, at least in Sabine’s best interest?
She was not sure, but if she didn’t go, she’d never know. This may be her chance to ask her burning questions, find out once and for all which side Lady Delarine played for.
Ellie hovered at her shoulder. “Should I wake Lord Vaelros?”
Sabine shook her head. “Let him rest. I’ll go alone.”
A muscle jumped in Ellie’s jaw. “Not alone, my lady. Let me at least wait in the vestibule. If you do not return, I’ll fetch the lord myself.”
Sabine wanted to refuse, but the look on Ellie’s face brooked no argument. “Very well,” she said, rising from bed and dressing. “But don’t follow me beyond the doors.”
They moved through the house like burglars, taking the back stairs and sidestepping every patch of moonlight.
The city was asleep, though here and there Sabine glimpsed the lamp-lit vigils of other insomniacs, or the slow drift of patrols.
Ellie walked two paces behind, her footsteps muted and unerringly precise.
The museum loomed out of the fog, a marble leviathan straddling the canal’s southern embankment.
Sabine expected the outer gates to be locked, but the ironwork stood ajar, as if someone had already broken in.
The stone steps glistened with condensation; Sabine’s shoes nearly slipped on the slick.
She caught herself on the balustrade, then motioned for Ellie to stay.
Inside, a single Light-affinity lantern lit the gallery’s vestibule, its silvery glow pooling on the marble floor and giving the busts of dead Emperors a ghostly, underwater cast. Sabine moved quickly, guided by memory.
At this hour, the security staff would be minimal.
The Braythar wing was to the left, through a corridor lined with mythological scenes of Velyar’s beginnings.
She found herself half-running, aware that every step made her more of a target. The air inside the museum was frigid. The closer she drew to the Braythar gallery, the more certain she became that she was not alone.
She turned the last corner and froze.
In the middle of the vast, domed gallery was the unmistakable figure of a young woman, slumped in a grotesque parody of repose across a wooden chair.
Sabine inched forward, the echo of her footfalls bouncing off the domed ceiling.
She was halfway across the room before she registered the details: the girl’s hair, a tangle of copper, streamed over the chair’s arm in a river of silk.
A mark, a combination of faint green vines on one side and sharp, angular, scar-like lines on the other, marred the soft skin of her hand.
Her head lolled at an impossible angle, chin sunk into clavicle.
But the real horror was the perfect, surgical slash from ear to ear, the edges so white and bloodless that Sabine had to wonder if the girl had been dead before the blade ever touched her.
The skin parted to reveal the pale suggestion of trachea and sinew, but the wound itself was dry, the flesh blanched.
For a moment, Sabine stood paralyzed, breath refusing to move in or out.
When it finally did come, it was shallow and inconsistent, her vision swimming at the edges as her body worked furiously for air it couldn’t seem to find.
She could not allow panic to set in at this moment.
So she fisted her hands, feeling the reassuring weight of her engagement ring bite into the crease of her finger, and forced herself to count those too shallow breaths.
At first, they were a staccato faster than the most cantering of waltzes.
One-two-three, four-five-six, seven-eight-nine.
But as she kept going, the panic eased, and the sieve of her breathing widened.
Ten… eleven… twelve… thirteen… fourteen… fifteen.
Then the old habits of logic asserted themselves, and she forced herself to notice and inventory.
The wound itself was not ragged or torn.
It was precise, deliberate, almost… clinical.
The hands, limp at the girl’s lap, showed no sign of struggle.
Her nails, recently manicured and still polished, showed a faint blue at the beds.
The throat had been slit for spectacle, but the debutante’s heart had been stopped with Ice weaving, blood congealed in her veins before the body was staged for discovery.
Sabine felt a tide of nausea rise, threatening to overwhelm her, but she willed it down. There was no sign of Lady Delarine—no sign, in fact, of any living person. She scanned the gallery, hunting for movement, for the glint of an observer in the dark, but saw nothing.
She circled the chair, careful to disturb nothing, and caught a flash of gold at the victim’s wrist.
A bracelet.
Delicate, old, marked with tiny river pearls.
Sabine’s pulse spiked. She recognized it.
It was her own.
She’d spent a good deal of time searching for it the morning of her blood vow. In the end, she’d figured Liora had taken it. Instead, the bracelet was here, fastened to the debutante’s wrist as if it belonged to her and always had.
Sabine took an involuntary step back. The world narrowed to a tunnel.
Her first, wild instinct was that this was a message.
She whirled, desperate to escape, but her heel caught the hem of her skirt, and she stumbled.
She managed not to fall, but the noise echoed like an accusation in the empty hall.
A figure stepped into the cone of light: tall, spare, robed in the slate grey of a Registry inspector. Their gaze traveled from the body to Sabine several times before sharpening.
“Step away from the evidence,” the inspector said in a voice so even it could’ve been carved from stone.
They studied her for a long moment. Then, a predatory grin spread on their lips. “I’m afraid you will have to come with me, Lady Vaelros.”
The High Binder stood at a podium at the center of the Registry’s interrogation chamber, robed in crimson this time.
Sabine sat on the single velvet-upholstered chair, straight-backed and rigid, and lifted her chin to meet their gaze.
A gallery ringed the auditorium on all sides; it was already packed with an audience of the city’s finest, the Gilt assembled at dawn as if for a debutante’s breakfast.
The High Binder spoke first. “Lady Vaelros. Thank you for your prompt compliance.”
There was a ripple in the audience. Sabine inclined her head, careful not to show weakness. “I understood the summons to be mandatory, Your Eminence.”
“The Registry does not force compliance, Lady Vaelros. It inspires it.” They let the phrase hover in the air, then turned to the ledger. “We have before us a matter of the gravest importance: the death of a young woman, her body found at Braythar Gallery. The particulars are known to you?”
“I found her.” She would not yield them the satisfaction of seeing her emotions. “She was already dead.”
The High Binder’s fingers hovered over the ledger, as if divining the truth in its pages. “You told officials Lady Delarine summoned you to the museum. Yet neither she nor you could be found in the ledger of visitors that night.”
Sabine felt the first flare of true anger. “The Gallery was closed for renovations. I entered through a side door.”
A murmur in the gallery. The High Binder absorbed it with a delicate gesture.
“So. Lady Delarine summoned you to an empty museum, in the dead of night, for a matter she did not wish to discuss in writing. And when you arrived, you found the deceased, displayed in a manner…” The High Binder paused.
“Let us say in a manner calculated to create distress. You did not touch the body?”
“No. Only observed.”
The High Binder made a mark in the ledger. “And yet, on the victim’s wrist, your bracelet.”
Sabine’s breath caught. “I lost it weeks ago, and assumed my sister borrowed it.”
A low sound spread through the Gilt. Sabine’s gaze flicked to the glass wall.
In the front row, separated by only inches of crystal, sat Liora.
Her sister’s face was perfectly composed, lips pressed in a neutral line.
She was flanked by Miss Novaris and Miss Velindor, who’d become like second shadows to her sister this Season.
The sight of her, so close and yet utterly out of reach, made Sabine’s chest constrict.
She willed her to meet her eye, to send a sign— any sign —of belief or support.
But Liora’s gaze remained fixed on the High Binder, as if her loyalty had been recast overnight.
The High Binder resumed. “Would you describe your relationship with the deceased?”
“I didn’t know her. She may have attended some of the same functions as I, but I have no memory of her.”