32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Two
veilknight has left the chat.
“No. No!” I slammed keys on my keyboard, clicked frantically, but she was gone. I went into the messages and clicked her name.
That’s two people you’ve taken from me. You’re a dead woman.
If she could be called a woman. A demon. A monster. I closed my laptop and failed to take deep breaths as my world rearranged itself around months of messages. Leads and questions that didn’t seem so prying at the time.
I loosened my tie, as if it were the thing trying to strangle me.
I needed to move, to smash something, to do anything to heat the cold and expel the rage building inside of me.
But there was nothing to do, no work to finish, no one in the basement to take it out on.
Gray was dead, and everything had come to a standstill in his absence.
I couldn’t stay here. I stood, grabbed my phone and keys, and took the lift down to the parking garage.
Sitting in my car, I stared at the steering wheel, then pounded it until I accidentally hit the horn and it scraped my ears, loud in the night.
I turned the key in the ignition and peeled out onto the street.
Disaster didn’t begin to describe what had just occurred. How long had she been watching me? Did she follow as closely as the spirits that still hadn’t returned?
Did she know I’d taken some of her power?
An invisible thread pulled me through the city, guiding me with little thought, until I pulled up outside Rook’s apartment. I knocked hard on the door, my fist loud enough to wake him.
But when he opened the door shirtless in sweatpants, he was alert. His jaw dropped at the sight of me. I knew I looked like a wreck, pale and rumpled in yesterday’s clothes.
“I know you said you need space, but I didn’t know where else to go.” The words came stilted, like they were fighting to escape my mouth.
“Fuck. What happened to you?”
“veilknight…she…and then…”
He pulled me inside gently by my arm, his hand the warmest thing I’d felt all night. He closed the door softly and guided me to the couch. I sat on the cushion that had worn thin from him sitting on it.
“Slow down. Breathe.” I did as he told me, his voice coaxing my lungs to work again. “What’s veilknight?”
“I—” I had nowhere to start but the beginning. “A few months ago, when I was negotiating the Prague collection, I received a message on a forum in The Looking Glass from a stranger—veilknight. She’s the one who told me about the ritual and the knife.”
“What did she want in return?”
“She claimed to have her own reasons, but it was her. She was prying for information, trying to see how close I was.”
“Her? Death?”
“Yes!”
He dropped down next to me on the couch and blew out a breath. “You’re sure? You were chatting with Death on the internet?”
“She knew things about me—things only she would know—and she told me to stop looking for her.” I rubbed both hands over my face and sighed, wondering if I was completely unraveling. “She burned down the warehouse. She killed Gray, and then she took him.”
“What do your dead friends have to say about this?” Rook pulled my hands away from my face and held them in his lap as he angled himself toward me.
“I scared them off,” I admitted. “I haven’t heard from them since Gray died.”
“Shit,” he said, wearing the same look he had when I told him about my mother, about the extra lives. He was processing. One of us had to. One of us had to not be falling to pieces.
“What are you going to do?” My hands were still curled inside his, and he gripped them when I tried to pull away, tightening, then loosening when I surrendered. He stroked his thumbs over my palms.
“I’m going to kill her. I’m going to fucking kill her!”
“I’ll help you,” he said. “But we have to deal with Avalon—with the man in that owl mask—too. If he didn’t burn down the warehouse, he’s playing his own game.”
“He’s toying with me. They’re both fucking playing with me.” Like a mouse caught between two cats.
“Then you figure out the next moves, just like in chess.”
“Which I’m terrible at, apparently.”
Rook huffed a laugh. “You’re not bad, you’re just not as good as me, and I said I’d help you.”
“You said you needed space,” I said, “and I’ll go. I just needed to tell someone who wouldn’t think I was completely mental.”
I rose to stand and he tugged me back down. “Don’t go.”
He scooted down the couch and pulled me into his lap, my head resting across his thighs. His fingers traced patterns in the strands of my hair.
“You have the grimoire, you have the knife. What do you own that you love? Do you have anything of your mother’s?”
He squeezed my shoulder with his other hand when I shuddered. I had photos of my mother tucked away in a drawer, but I didn’t love them. I avoided them, skirted around the way they made my heart ache and my rage boil when I looked at them. I had only one item of hers I’d brought to America with me.
“You’ll make fun of me.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“When I was little, she made me a rabbit, a small, stuffed, patchwork thing. He’s beaten all to hell. One of the buttons for his eye is gone, but I couldn’t let him go. He’s the only thing I kept. Stewart is his name.”
Rook hadn’t stopped the lazy way he stroked my hair, his fingers pressing my scalp in a way that made my shoulders finally relax.
“Would you sacrifice him to kill Death?”
The thought of burning Stewart to ash made me physically ill, but…
“I would do anything to kill her. Anything.”
“Then you have everything you need.”
The way he said it felt real, more like a plan than a rage-fueled fantasy. I could do it. Years of searching would finally pay off. It wasn’t an idea anymore.
“You should stay here tonight,” he said. “If you don’t, you’ll stay up all night making yourself crazy over this.”
“Or I’ll be here and stay up and make us both crazy,” I muttered as I sat up. “I should just go. You said you wanted space.”
He yanked me back when I tried to slide off the couch and trapped me under his arm. “I wasn’t going to last long, anyway.” He kissed my cheek. “Addicted, remember?”
Addicted, but not in love, not that he’d say out loud.
He cocked his head slightly, studying me.
“What do you want out of life, Austin?”
My eyebrows pulled together. My mouth grasped for words to answer the sudden shift in the room’s air.
“I want to kill her, obviously. This has been my life’s work.”
“And then what?”
“I—” I had never thought that far ahead.
My goal, perhaps even an obsession, had always been to find and eliminate Death, but on some level it had always felt like a fantasy, an impossibility.
I might always chase with no result. Now that had changed, and I wasn’t certain what came next.
“I suppose I’ll do what I’ve been doing—the auctions, the deals, Avalon. ”
The slow creeping of monotony twisted inside me, but what else was there? I’d worked too hard to get where I was to abandon it to…what? Retire somewhere I could finally relax?
“What do you want out of life?” I asked.
“I do what I do because it’s thrilling. That high I get when I fight? It’s the same feeling I get when I count out the money at the end of the night. I like the way power makes me feel.”
He propped himself on one elbow against the back of the couch, his palm against the side of his head, and traced the bow of my lips with his opposite index finger. “But I’m an opportunist. If a better opportunity presented itself, I’d sell it all and move on. My ambition is flexible. Yours isn’t.”
“Why are you telling me this?” My tired mind drifted as his fingers skimmed my bottom lip, and I struggled to pull it back and focus on our conversation.
“Because I’ll tell you the secret no one tells you about power. You can have a lot, but you can’t have everything. You don’t stay on top without sacrificing something.”
“What did you sacrifice?” I asked.
His throat moved slowly as he swallowed.
“Intimacy. You get too close, too attached to anything, and you risk losing it. Too many people want me dead, people close to me get hurt or killed. Places and things can be destroyed. I can’t get attached to things because if I lose them, I risk everything else—everything I’ve built—tumbling down around me. That’s what ambition cost me.”
“Is that why you won’t say it back?” I whispered.
“I won’t say it back because I’m not in love with you. I don’t know how to love someone anymore.” He frowned and his hand fell away. “But it doesn’t matter because you’re very close to getting what you’ve always wanted, and you might think it’s me, but it’s not.”
“I want you.” I tried to force my eyelids open, but I was weak against them. Sleep tightened around me and pulled me under.
“You think you want me,” he whispered as I drifted. “You’ll realize you don’t.”
I tried to argue, tried to stay awake long enough to make him understand, but I had no strength left. He kissed my forehead and pulled me closer, and I lost the battle against my exhaustion.