And that neither of us is going to survive it being the last.
Chapter 33
Grace
Vanya sends for me later in the afternoon. I’ve been waiting for this since Viktor said her name in his office. Now that it’s here, my mouth goes dry on the walk.
The guard takes me down to the admin floor, to a room I didn’t know existed. No sign on the door. Inside, the window is papered over, and the light comes from two lamps. Every flat surface holds stacks of folders in an order I can tell matters, even though I can’t read it. A map is pinned to the far wall with nothing marked on it that means anything to me.
The woman at the table doesn’t get up.
I’ve seen her before. Twice, maybe, crossing the yard, always alone. Platinum hair pinned back, lean, neat, no wasted movement. I never knew her name until Viktor said it. Looking at her now, I understand why nobody ever offered it. She feels…lethal.
My wolf, who has been loud for days, goes low and quiet in this room. She does that around exactly one other person, and he’s a bear. Whatever this lean, still woman is, my wolf doesn’t want to test her.
I steady my breathing and take the chair across from her, because the only other option is to stand there being read, and she’s already doing that anyway.
“Grace.” She has a folder open in front of her. My old burner phone sits on top of it in a plastic sleeve, dead and small. Strange to see it. It used to be the heaviest thing I owned. “You know what I have. Records. Numbers. Times. What I don’t have is what the records can’t hold. That’s you.”
“All right.”
“We’re going to walk through what you remember about the woman on this phone. All of it, from the first call. When I ask a question that seems pointless, answer it anyway. The pointless ones are usually mine for a reason.”
So we walk through it.
She takes me back to the beginning, and it’s harder than the briefing room, because Vanya doesn’t want an outline—she wants the detail. Not “she called at night” but which nights, and what I could hear behind her voice, and whether she started calls the same way each time. Not “she asked about the mood” but the exact words she used for it. I find I have them, because being on edge all the time meant noticing everything, and my memory kept it all whether I wanted it or not.
“She never said hello,” I tell her. “She’d start in the middle, like the conversation had been going on without me. ‘Be ready, tomorrow, after dark.’ Or a question, straight in. I used to think she did it to keep me off balance.”
“She did.” Vanya writes something. “Go on.”
“Long silences. If I didn’t fill them, she’d just wait. She could wait longer than anyone I’ve ever known. And she nevergot angry. Not once, the whole time. Even when I gave her almost nothing, she’d just say, ‘That’s fine, Grace,’ like a teacher marking homework.”
“What did she call your sister?”
The question lands the way those calls used to. “Serenity. Her name. Never anything that made her seem like a captive. Always her name, like they knew each other.”
Vanya’s pen stops for a moment. Then moves again.
“And the proof,” she says. “They gave you proof she was alive. What did it look like?”
“Photos. On the phone.” I nod at the plastic sleeve. “They’re on there. She could’ve been anywhere. A bed, a gray wall, out in the sun.” My throat tightens, but I push through it. “The rest was spoken. She’d drop it in when I started dragging my feet. ‘Serenity’s looking better these days. Healthier. The people looking after her seem to like her.’”
“Those words?”
“Those words. I’ve had a lot of nights to think about them.”
“What else? Spoken proof? All of it, even fragments.”
I close my eyes and go back to those moments—the phone pressed against my ear, my hand shaking, trying to sound steady. Remembering brings the fear back, sharp and cold, but I do it anyway because this is the one thing in the world only I can do.
“Once she said Serenity had a good appetite again. Once, that she was sleeping through the night.” I open my eyes. “And once she said the move had done her good. That she’d stopped coughing since they moved her out of the damp.”
Vanya doesn’t move.
Her pen stays where it is. Her eyes lift from the folder and hold on me, and something sharpens behind them.
“Say that again. Exactly.”
