A silence fills the cell after she’s gone. My pleasure in the coffee has evaporated, now all I can taste is worry.
“The strong-woman I recognize from the yard,” he says, leaning back and crossing his legs with a casual grace. “But the small one. Who is she?”
I don’t like the way he asks. “Her name is none of your business. She’s just a kid who’s been through enough without someone like you being around her.”
“Someone like me?” François tilts his head, his dark eyes glittering with a sudden, sharp interest. “And what is that?”
I stand up, smoothing my jumpsuit, then channel every ounce of Drakeward ice I have left. “A monster. She’s already been around too many.”
He lets out a short, sharp laugh. “A monster, yes. Exactly what I am,ma petite. But fret not, I am not interested in broken little girls. Tell me, did your visitors come to see you, or to see their fallen leader?”
“What does it matter? But if you must know, Layla has some medical knowledge, so she helped me check his vitals.”
“And?”
“They seem okay. Layla says there’s no physical reason for him to be under this long.” Shit. Telling him anything of Taliesin’s current state seems like a betrayal.
François gives a slow, predatory smile. “Layla’s ‘medical knowledge’ is based on the frailties of common men, Aurora. She doesn’t understand the weight of the shadow I left behind.”
He leans back, eyes fixed on the man on the floor with a detached, clinical interest. “His mind is simply trapped in the dark I wrapped around his consciousness. He’s fighting it, of course. I can feel the friction of his will against mine even now. It’s… spirited.”
He feels the friction of Tally’s will?
The way he says it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“You’re crazy,” I snap.
“Am I? I guess if your ‘friend’ wakes up, he’ll be able to confirm or deny my words.” François stretches his arms behind his head, with a languid, cat-like movement. “If he has any mind left to speak with.”
Fuck that guy. François de Vaux looks like a fallen angel contemplating his next sin. The zip on his coveralls is pulled low, the white undershirt molding annoyingly to his regrettably phenomenal torso. He catches me looking. A slow, knowing smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“See something you like,ma petite?”
“I’m just amazed that the corruption of your soul hasn’t rotted away your skin,” I retort, my face heating up. “By rights, your flesh should be putrid and decaying.”
“Oh, Aurora, you are divine. Baudelaire said it perfectly.‘She makes one wish to die slowly…” he gestures to me…“beneath her steady gaze.’”
Slowly?
I’d settle for very fucking quickly.
22. FRANCOIS
Ican taste the tang of her defiance.
“You’ll never break Taliesin,” she says, her voice colder than an arctic wind. “He’s the most stubborn, loyal man I’ve ever met. More than you’ll ever be. More than you could ever dream of being.”
I flinch.
It is a microscopic betrayal of my own muscles—a sudden, sharp contraction in the center of my forehead. For a heartbeat, the mask I have spent twenty years perfecting simply… falls. I am exposed, a raw nerve touched by a girl who shouldn’t know that she has the power to wound me.
Aurora watches the slip with a glint of triumph. Another point scored in our mental Olympic Games.
Recovering is an act of sheer will. Rolling my shoulders, I dismiss her jab with a shrug that I pray looks effortless. “We shall see. But for now? Please attend to your hair.”
Pulling a fine-toothed comb from my pocket, I toss it through the bars. It clatters onto the concrete at her feet, a peace offering. I want her groomed. I want her to look like the girl I came here to save—the girl who belongs in a manor, not a kennel.
She doesn’t pick it up.
