Chapter XXIII #2
“Is that what you’ve been doing,” Vic said, “trying to keep me alive?”
“Of course, you demon,” he growled. “And you’re not exactly making it easy.”
“ ‘Demon,’ ‘sweetheart’—we’re all over the map today.” Vic rolled her eyes and stalked away from him. “Let’s go again.”
“We will absolutely not ‘go again,’ ” he said, following her across the room.
“I won’t try to stab you this time,” she said. “Promise.”
“No way in hell, Vic. I saved your life last night—I’m not going to kill you today.”
“Oh, don’t pretend to care about my well-being,” Vic spat, rounding on him. “You just feel guilty.”
“Guilty? I saved your life!”
“And you did such a gallant job of it, too,” Vic said, her face so close to him she could feel him breathing, harder and harder as she spoke. “After you sent me into that apartment in the first place.”
Surprise twisted his face for an instant before a serious expression took its place. Regret, maybe, or anger.
“That’s how you got there so quickly, isn’t it?” Vic asked. “You were in the hallway. I felt you there before I went in. You were right outside, waiting for that thing to attack me.”
“Vic, I wasn’t—”
“Tell me, Xan. How long did you have to wait to be sure it hurt me badly enough I’d want to leave?”
“You have it wrong, I—”
“Max told me he needed access to Meredith’s apartment, and he thought I would be able to do it. You’re close with Max, aren’t you?”
Harsh eyes bored into Vic’s as she spoke, but Xan stopped trying to argue.
“It had been weeks since Max gave me that key. I’d given up trying to get inside.
Which you knew, because you’ve been following me since I got here.
So when I went to Lethe, my little shadow came behind me.
You suggested that I use the bind to open the door.
I know you did it on purpose. At least Max had the decency to own up to his part in the whole thing. ”
A shadow fell over Xan’s face, and Vic wondered if that meant he was losing control.
She decided she didn’t care. He’d manipulated her.
He’d gone to Lethe, made her think—for a minute or two—that she had power over him, that she mattered to him.
But he was playing with her, using her obvious attraction to him to get what he wanted, what his boss needed.
“You’ve made it clear you don’t want me here. But Max won’t make me leave. Quite the opposite. It must have seemed like a great opportunity. A two-for-one deal: Max gets into the apartment, and you get to scare me away.”
Shadows curled around his hands like twitching fingers, eager to lash out at something, and Vic half hoped he would. If Xan snapped at her right now, she would snap back. He could overpower her, but she’d take her pound of flesh on the way down.
“That’s why you healed me, isn’t it? You went too far; I got hurt worse than you expected, and you felt bad.”
Vic wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream.
“Do you have any idea whose magic opened that door?” she asked, her voice falling to a dangerous whisper. “Whose bind I have on my arm?”
Vic thought she saw his eyebrows pinch forward in confusion.
“You thought it was Max,” she said. “Even though I told you it wasn’t. But why would you believe me? Little old me? Surely I was lying. I’d say just about anything, and you’d believe none of it.”
She ran a hand through her hair, growling when it caught a tangle in her curls.
“It was Aren fucking Mann,” she snarled at Xan. And there was the root of her fury. At him? At herself? She didn’t know. She didn’t care. Inside her sat a ball of fire, twisting and breaking and demanding that she do something, anything.
A rough hand closed around her wrist and wrenched her forward.
“What did you say?” he whispered.
The air around her went cold, like Xan was really losing control now. Vic ripped her arm out of his grip and strode away.
“This fucking place,” she said. “You fucking people. You think you can control me because I’m weak.
Because I came here without the power that you have, or the knowledge, I must be pliable.
Here’s poor, powerless Vic, ready to be used.
I can be pulled in every direction. I can be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.
I can be cowed, frightened, hurt, manipulated.
Whatever the almighty Order wants, heap it on top of me. I’ll deal with it.”
She threw her hands up. There was rot at the center of this castle. Strength and weakness, in a narrow sense, were all that mattered. And the weak? Well, the strong could do with them as they pleased.
Not Vic, though. Magic or no, she was done being used.
“I’m not sure it’s wise to trust Max with your life.” Xan’s voice was quiet, but she heard the fury in it, the warning.
Vic stopped. Xan could not be suggesting what she thought he was. Max was the progressive Elder, the one who carved the path forward. Xan’s closest ally.
“You don’t trust Max?” Vic asked, cautious.
“I understand Max,” Xan corrected her. “We’ve worked together for a decade. I know how he operates. I would trust him with my life—I would not trust him with yours.”
Xan approached Vic as he spoke, his voice low and urgent.
“Max is so powerful, sometimes he forgets he has limits. He might say he can guarantee your safety here, but he can’t.”
“And you know better than Max does?”
Xan was right next to her now, and Vic looked up at him. She saw the dark lines under his eyes, the mark of many sleepless nights and the lengths he’d gone to to save her. He watched her face for a long moment before responding.
“I know my limits,” he said.
Ice-blue eyes bored into hers. Vic was acutely aware of him as he loomed over her, overwhelming as always, blocking out the moonlight. It would be easy to get lost in a man like this, to get dragged under by the anger and fear and power until all she knew was those eyes watching her.
The words he’d whispered at Lethe haunted her.
I know you like it when I touch you.
And she had. She probably still would, and she hated herself for it.
Xan leaned down until they were eye to eye, and Vic hated him even more.
“Come with me,” he said softly. “I want a chance to explain myself.”
She should run, Vic thought. She’d told him about the bind, she’d screamed in his face, even tried to stab him.
She should run and hide and not follow him down darkened corridors.
But she wanted Xan to have a reason for all of this.
She wanted her anger to be misplaced, she wanted him to have meant some of what she’d sensed the other night.
Vic nodded.
Her heart battered in her chest as she followed him down a hallway off the back of the classroom. They entered a large, unfamiliar room full of couches and tables and lined with wood-paneled shelves, and Xan led her through a door into a small office tucked in the corner.
On one side of the room sat a faded leather couch across from a heavy wooden desk.
One wall was occupied by a large black screen, and Vic stumbled at the sight.
She’d become so accustomed to the analog ways of the castle that she’d almost forgotten about the ever-presence of technology in the real world.
Xan moved behind the desk, and Vic crossed her arms over her chest as he bent to open one of the drawers and withdrew a framed photograph.
Vic turned in surprise when the lamp behind her flicked on without him touching it.
When she looked back, Xan stood in front of her with a focused expression, his hand reaching to offer her the photo. She took it slowly.
It was an old picture. Two teenage boys posing for the camera with their backs together, laughing.
“Who is this?”
“Sit down.” Xan gestured to the couch behind her.
Vic sat on his desk instead, and he chuckled under his breath.
One of the boys was clearly a young Xan, short-haired and beardless. He must have been Henry’s age, maybe younger. On his chin he had a little dimple, a line down the center that Vic supposed was still there now. Vic had the urge to run her finger over his jaw to find it.
She didn’t recognize the boy beside him, though they looked alike. The other boy was a little taller and had curly hair around his ears. But he had the same blue eyes and a matching dimple in his chin.
“My older brother.” Xan leaned against the desk beside Vic.
His hip bumped and settled against hers, but Vic didn’t scoot away from the contact.
“Dimitri. Another pompous Greek name,” he added with a knowing raise of his eyebrows.
He squinted at the photo. “Here we were sixteen and eighteen, I think.”
“You look alike,” Vic said, handing the frame back to him.
“Dimitri was born without magic,” Xan said. “The first Galanis in five generations without power.”
Vic looked at the image with renewed interest. Dimitri looked young and fit, happy and at ease beside his magical brother.
“He was older,” Xan said, “but I was always the favorite. I was the one who would carry on my parents’ legacy with the Order, and that was all that mattered. You’d think he would have resented me, but Dimitri was always protective of me. He thought I needed all the help he could give me.”
The situation sounded familiar to Vic, and she felt a knot in her throat. “Are you saying I remind you of him?”
“Not really,” Xan said, looking at her with a crooked smile. “He was nice to me.”
Was, Vic noted. The smile fell from his face.
“But with Henry, yeah, the resemblance is hard for me to shake. Maybe I’m seeing what I want to see, I don’t know, but you look at Henry the way he looked at me.”
Again Vic noted the past tense. Xan looked tired, and all her anger had left Vic behind. She felt raw and sad and she had an awful sense she knew what Xan was about to say.
“He was killed by an Orcan the summer I turned seventeen. About six months after we took this photo.”
“I’m sorry,” Vic whispered.