Page 10 of Cruel Rite

The boy who drove me up drives me back down to the main campus without a word, and I don’t go to Wren House. I go to the cliff stair instead, because it’s dark enough now that nobody’s counting who goes where, and because it’s Wednesday, and Wednesday is the one night a week that belongs to nobody but me.

A hundred and forty steps, cut into the rock, and I count them the way I count everything, though I already know the number. The wind changes completely somewhere around step ninety, the way it always does, colder and closer to the water, and the bottom of the stair runs a solid ten degrees under the top of it, cold enough that by the time I reach the boathouse my hands have stopped being useful for much beyond holding a phone.

Locker 31 is salt-rotted at the hinge same as every other one down here, tucked in the corner where the single bulb doesn’t reach. I like that about this room more than I’ve liked anything all day—a space with nothing in it worth pricing.

Voss picks up on the second ring, which for her is practically a fanfare.

“Third call,” she says, instead of hello. “Go.”

I give her what I can without naming names on a line I don’t trust. A promised marriage. A claimed debt. A house I was shown today that already has a room with my name filed under it, third floor, north side, window on the road. I don’t tell her whose house, and she doesn’t ask, because she’s spent four years learning exactly how much of this kind of call is safe to want more from.

“You said I had until the end of the year,” I say. “The academic year.”

“I said a lot of things before I’d built four years of a case that keeps not closing.” A pause, and I hear a door somewhere on her end, a chair. “Here’s what’s actually true. The grand jury on the transfers expires in June. Not the date. I’m not giving you the date on an open line. The month.”

I do what I always do with a bad number. I turn it into arithmetic I can hold. Not I’m running out of time—days. How many between now and June. How many of those are already spent on the fortnight Zharov handed me this afternoon. How few, when I actually lay them end to end, are mine to spend on anything at all.

“That’s not a year,” I say.

“No,” Voss says. “It never was. A girl who thinks she’s got a whole academic year to make up her mind is a girl who hasn’t done the math. You’ve got until June, and right now you’ve got nothing that gets me a warrant. Bring me something real, or don’t call back.”

She hangs up before I can answer that. She’s never once let me have the last word, and I used to think that was rudeness. I’ve started to think it’s policy.

The climb back up costs more than the climb down did—it always does, and I’ve never once let myself resent it out loud, because resenting the steps is a smaller problem than the one waiting at the top of them.

I say it out loud anyway, alone, to nobody, somewhere around step sixty where the wind is loudest and there’s no one to hear me do it. My father worked nineteen years for that family and got a parking garage. Every road on this headland ends at a Corvane door. A man who has never told me one thing I didn’t extract or catch him at is not a man I can be near while I’m carrying what I’m carrying.

I’ve said this list before. Silently, six feet across a seminar table. Silently, in a hallway at Saint Bride’s with his hand still warm on the back of my neck. Saying it out loud, to the dark, with salt on my lips and my hands too cold to write it down properly, is the first time it’s felt like a decision instead of a fear.

Back in my room I take the black ledger off the shelf and write June in the margin next to my father’s balance—not a feeling this time. A number, filed where I file everything I mean to survive. Underneath it I reset the only rule I’ve kept since before any of this started: two looks a day, no more, starting tomorrow at breakfast. It’s a small thing to hold onto. It’s the one thing today hasn’t managed to take from me yet.

Salvatore is waiting near the Wren House steps the next morning, which means he arrived on a headland that isn’t on the way to anywhere for him, and did it early enough to be standing there when I come down for breakfast.

“There she is,” he says, like I’ve done something clever just by existing, and kisses my forehead before I can get my chin out of the way of it. Somewhere behind him a speaker is playing too loud out of an open window, and a tray goes down hard enough to skid on the dining-hall steps, and the ordinary noise of Wren House keeps happening around us the whole time, nobody on the quad aware that anything has changed about my morning at all.

He brings up Saint Bride’s before I’ve had coffee. “I heard what happened,” he says, delighted, as if I’d staged the whole thing myself for his benefit. “Good. Let them see it.” He says them the way other people say a weather system—something you can’t argue with, only stand under.

Then, still warm, still touching my elbow the way he touches everyone’s elbow, he tells me the thing he actually came for.

“Stand for it, Isadora.” Light, unhurried, already half-turned toward someone else across the quad he’s about to greet by name. “The Ashgrove match, at Michaelmas. It costs you nothing now, and it’s the only thing standing between you and a balance nobody shows up to cover in March.” He pauses just long enough to make the next part sound like generosity instead of arithmetic. “You don’t stand for it, the balance gets called at the Reckoning anyway. Same number. No groom. No family standing in for you. Nothing behind it.”

“I’m not asking you to like him,” he says. “I’m asking you not to be stupid.”

He kisses my forehead a second time before I can step back from the first one, and he’s three strides gone, calling someone’s name across the quad like the last ninety seconds never happened, before I’ve built a single sentence to answer him with.

I don’t let myself react to the kiss until he’s well out of earshot—the delay itself a small, private failure, one more line for a column I don’t have a name for yet. He has my father’s exact jaw, none of his calm. I have to look at that jaw every time he’s kind to me, and there is nothing false in a single word he just said, which is what makes it unanswerable.

He’s already across the quad, unhurried, greeting somebody else by name, by the time the sentence finishes landing: refuse Ashgrove and the balance is called in March anyway, with nothing behind it to cover it. Two weeks to Michaelmas. No decision made. No one behind me but a man already shaking a stranger’s hand and asking after his family.

Chapter 7: Close Range

Vince Marchetti has known me since I was nine, and he thinks that buys him a conversation.

Ten days to Michaelmas, and my father has left this particular piece of business sitting on my desk the way he leaves most of it now, without comment, the way you’d leave a door open for someone you expect to walk through it without being told. It’s a Tuesday. Tuesdays are for accounts.

He’s sitting where I told Rook to put him, in the side room off the east corridor where the house does its accounting—not the dining room, nothing that would make him think this is a meal he’s been invited to. Ledgers on the shelves behind him, floor wax and old paper, and under it the gun oil that never fully airs out of this room no matter how many windows we open. The room is cold in the way rooms get when nobody’s lit a fire in them on purpose, and two floors down the kitchen is already running Sunday smells out of season—the cook starts early on Tuesdays, always has, and the warmth of it doesn’t make it up this far, just the idea of warmth, coming up through the floor like a rumor. Rook stands by the door without being told where to stand. He’s done this before too.

Vince is heavier than he was the last time I looked at him closely, grey coming in fast at the temples, a man who’s spent thirteen years believing that the length of his acquaintance with a family is itself a kind of collateral. He starts with the number, because that’s the move a man makes when he still believes the number is the whole problem.