Catherine’s sitting up when I come in, the sedation worn off, and she’s different from the disoriented woman the sweep team carried out. Composed. Watchful. Her dark eyes track me from the door to the chair, and I know trained watching when I see it. I spent years across a cage from it. I respect it.
“You’re the one who opened my door,” she says.
“I am.”
“Celeste.” She turns my name over once, slow. “Your peoplesay it outside my door. They think the sedation makes me deaf.” Her eyes drop to my hand, to the ring. “He married you.”
“He did.” I sit. Standing would tell her I’m braced, and I’m not giving her that. “How are they treating you?”
“Well. Carefully.” A small pause. Her nostrils flare, barely, a motion so controlled it’s almost invisible, and her eyes come back to mine with something new behind them. “You came from him.” Not a question. The scent on my skin, in my hair, unmistakable to a vampire who spent years memorizing that particular combination of cedar and cold, and she’s telling me she caught it before I finished crossing the room. “His scent is all over you.”
Ah. So that’s the first pin. Not just I knew him. I know his scent on a stranger’s skin. I know exactly what you were doing before you walked through that door.
“It usually is,” I say, pleasant. I don’t shift. I don’t cross my arms. I let the sentence sit where I put it and do its work.
Her composure holds, but just. The briefest tightening at the jaw, there and gone, filed.
“You’re not what I expected, when I heard there was a wife.” Her gaze moves over me, unhurried, and lands, for the briefest beat, on the curve under my folded arms before lifting back to my face, and she files that too, I clock her doing it. “Maximus stayed last night, while they worked on me. He stood at the window the whole time and barely said a word.” Her mouth curves, soft, placed where I can see it. “He still does that. Stands at the window when there’s something he can’t put down. He did it when I knew him. Some things don’t change in a man, however long you give him.”
There it is. The second pin, pushed into the same map. I knew him before you were a possibility. I have history in rooms you’ve never stood in.
I know what a pin looks like going in. Seeing them coming is how I never lost a fight.
I don’t take the bait. Taking it would tell her it landed. I meet her gaze, easy, and let a beat go by.
“He does stand at the window,” I agree, pleasant. “Drives me up the wall. I make him come sit down.”
I rise. “Rest up, Catherine. Get your strength back. I’m sure you and I will have lots more chances to talk.”
I leave before she can find the next pin, and I get three doors down the corridor before I let my jaw unclench.
She’s good. On the way out, I count what she showed me. She learned my name through a locked door and made sure I knew it, so I’d understand locked doors don’t stop her. She caught his scent on me before I sat down and said it out loud to prove she could, a three-hundred-year claim filed through the nose. She read the ring, the pregnancy, and my guard in one pass and filed all three without blinking. And both moves she threw used nothing but true things, which is how the good ones do it, because nobody gets caught telling the truth. All of it two nights out of Konstantin’s keeping, starved thin, fresh off sedation, in the stronghold of the people holding her.
A woman who can do that while she’s this fragile is going to be a problem dressed up as a houseguest.
Seraphina finds me that night,hours before my next reading is due, which means she came looking, and Seraphina almost never comes looking.
Every twelve hours since this started, I’ve gone to her in the east garden and she’s read me, and I’ve gotten used to the routine, the cool dry press of her magic moving over me. So I follow herback to the oak bench and let her work, and I’m not expecting anything. There’s never been anything new, just the same two hearts and her quiet confirmation that they’re fine.
Except this time she stops.
Her hands go still over me. Her silver eyes lose their focus, gone to a frequency the rest of us can’t hear. Seven hundred years meeting a new thing.
“Seraphina.”
She lifts one finger. Wait.
So I wait, and I watch her face. When she opens her eyes they’re bright.
“They’ve separated,” she says.
“Separated.” My stomach drops before my head catches up. “What does that mean, separated. Is anything wrong.”
“Hush.” She puts a hand on my knee. “From each other. Not from you.” She says it carefully, like she’s translating from a language that doesn’t have these words. “Until now they were one signature to me. Two hearts, yes, I’ve felt the two hearts since the start, but underneath the hearts there was a single thread, one current, a chord that sounds like one sound until your ear learns to pull it apart. I always knew there were two. Until tonight, I could not have told you who either of them was.”
The garden goes very quiet. A moth works the lavender by the bench. My own heart is doing a thing I don’t have a word for.
“Two people,” I repeat.
