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He stands, tries to touch my elbow. I lurch out of his reach.
“She’s gone, Luca.”
Gone. The word lands with horrifying finality, an offence to the very core of my being. My entire body recoils from it, my mind a furious black void, refusing it. I clench my fists, the leather of my gloves protesting against the force.
“How long ago?” I manage to ask, my voice a spectre of itself.
“About a week ago. She left as soon as she could.”
For a long moment, Mitchell watches me. Maybe he’s waiting for more questions, and maybe part of him wants to say something comforting. I can see it in the sympathy softening his features. When he set out to destroy me, Mitchell didn’t do it with the intention of causing me pain. That was obvious from the beginning. He expected to get his hands wet with my blood, not my tears.
It’s a good thing I’m too empty to weep.
Since there really isn’t anything left to say, Mitchell sits back down in his desk chair, places his glasses back on. “Is there anything else, Mr Fletcher-Lowe, or is that all?”
The question is a full stop at the end of the conversation. I came here for an answer of sorts, and Mitchell has delivered the answer, more crushing and devastating than any other blow he could ever deal me.
I turn away from him, numbness seeping into my bones. “That’s all.”
When I exitThe Royal Observerheadquarters, the world outside is a blur. Grey concrete, grey glass, grey walls. A single dark bird rising against the sky, pulling against the gravity that would keep it bound to this grey place. I watch it and wish I had my bow with me so that I could sink an arrow into its chest and watch it fall back to the ground, back here in the mud and dirt with me.
One final hunt, I’d told myself. Had I not hunted Willow over and over again, perfected the hunting of her into an art?
One final hunt—except I lost before it even began.
And Willow, devil, angel, poison that she is, stands as the phantom victor of this game. She couldn’t just win—she had to bring my entire world down on my head to ensure complete victory.
And she’s not even paying me the grace of witnessing my defeat.
51
Rotten Limb
Luca
The article comes outthe following day. I turn my phone off and spend the day walking the woods with Cerberus. My father’s team delivers the newspaper in person, in case I want to read it, but I don’t care to. I don’t care much about anything, really.
Mitchell’s blow lands but hardly impacts, as if he’d smashed his fist down over something that was already shattered.
The months drift by me like shadows, an eternity weighed against the void left by Willow’s departure. The fallout of the article is slow but inexorable. CHOKE shuts down after an ostentatious public enquiry. My staff is dismissed, the lights turned off, the doors shuttered and barred. My velvet flytrap becomes nothing but a crumbling edifice to my mistakes.
It’s not all misery. The press, vultures I’ve kept starved for years, finally get to feast, ripping into the carcass of my reputation. My face and crimes are splashed across every newspaper, every magazine, every blog. Accusations, speculations, gleeful revelry at my comeuppance.
All my secrets, revealed like innards to feed the world’s infinite appetite for gossip. Headlines paint me in turn as ignominious and pathetic, power-mad and impotent. I am a prince turned pauper, a predator become prey, a puppet master ensnared by his own strings.
Why should I care? Journalists have never liked me anyway.
“Keep your chin high, sir,” Woodrow tells me. “This storm will end as storms are wont to do. You’ll still be left standing in the wake. You don’t need to fight it—you only need to withstand it.”
Rousing words, but if I withstand the storm it’s only because I’m too insensate for it to hurt. I move through days on automatic, without much thought, effort or purpose. I try to go back to my life as it was, to resume my routine before it was thrown into chaos by Willow.
It doesn’t work.
I wake up later and later, I spend too long on my walks and too little on practising my fencing. I lose my first championship. My instructor advises me to take some personal time, to not underestimate the power of mind over body. I ignore him and compete—I lose spectacularly.
Across the piste, I imagine that behind my opponent’s helmet is Willow’s face, and when my opponent lunges forward, I step in and strike their arm away from arm on instinct.
Corps-a-corps is an error I’ve never made in fencing before; on principle, I’ve always abhorred physical contact too much to ever put myself at risk of it. But I strike my opponent, and when I get my first warning, I strike them again. The referee awards myopponent a penalty touch point, and then I realise I don’t care at all.
