Page 56 of Cruel Rite

I run it backward in about half a second. Every straight answer Tomas ever gave me, which I trusted precisely because he was the honest one in this house. And Rook—who I liked, who I’ve sat across from at breakfast more mornings than I can count, who followed me down a cliff stair in the dark and told the man who owns me exactly what he found at the bottom of it, and never once, not at the table, not in a hallway, not in five months of ordinary days, let anything about it show on his face.

I liked him. I let myself hold onto that one flat fact for a second, because it doesn’t stop being true just because I know now what he did with it. Then I stop thinking about Rook, because there’s nothing left to do with the fact except carry it out of this house along with everything else, and I have a corridor ahead of me.

There was no one in this building who wasn’t reporting on me. Not one. That’s the last thing I needed to stop believing anything in Ravelin Hall was ever separate from the claim, and I have it now, and there’s nothing left in this room to ask for.

My hand is still on the door, which is still shut, and the corridor on the other side of it is dark past the sconce closest to his room, the way it always is at this hour. I notice my own breath. It’s even. I notice myself noticing that, and I let it be the last thing I check before I open the door, because it’s the only instrument left in the room that’s telling me the truth.

I open the door.

The corridor past his door is dark the way it always is this late, past the last sconce, and I walk the length of it the way I’ve walked it every night for five months, past every door on this floor, and no one comes out of any of them. Corvane men have learned not to. I don’t know when they learned it or who taught them, and it doesn’t matter tonight.

Down the wide stair, wide enough for four abreast, and empty. Across the black-and-white marble of the entry hall, the painted ceiling gone dark above me the way it’s been dark since I first walked under it in October, carried the length of a different corridor by a man whose face I hadn’t seen yet. A night guard stands near the door and doesn’t stop me, doesn’t speak, doesn’t look surprised, which tells me something about how this house handles a night like tonight that I don’t have room to think about right now. Nobody in this building comes out of a room to see what the raised voices upstairs were about. I don’t know if there were raised voices. I know there was nothing quiet about any of it, and still every door on that floor stayed shut, and I understand, walking away from all of them, that this is a house that has had practice not noticing.

Out the front door into cold that goes straight through the coat. Down the drive, gravel instead of marble and runners under my shoes for the first time all winter, the gatehouse light ahead of me, salt air finding me the second I clear the tree line the way it always does, sharper than anything indoors, the one honest thing on this whole headland.

Fifty-eight days. The number surfaces once, flat, mid-step, the way numbers surface in me when there’s nothing else to hold onto—eighteenth of March to the fifteenth of May, and I let it come and go without doing anything with it, because tonight isn’t about a number, tonight is about a door I’ve already walked through.

There’s a car at the mouth of the drive. Black, a Kholm plate, engine running, headlights off, parked exactly where the road to Ashfen starts, with a clean sightline straight back to Ravelin Hall’s front door—not blocking anything, not coming toward me, just there, the way a car sits when someone wanted to know the precise minute I came out of that house. I don’t know how long it’s been sitting there or whether it arrived before I started down the stairs or after. It doesn’t move.

The gatehouse man doesn’t look up from his book. “Name for the exit book.”

“Ferrante,” I say, before I’ve decided to say it.

Not Corvane. The first time I’ve used it since the claim, and it comes out of me before I’ve had a chance to choose it on purpose, which tells me something true about which name I’ve actually been carrying underneath the other one all along.

He writes it down. He doesn’t ask where Tomas is. He doesn’t ask why I’m walking instead of riding. The log has never needed a reason and it doesn’t ask for one tonight.

I count the whole way down—stair treads, tiles across the marble, the distance from the front door to the gatehouse light—because counting is the only thing keeping me upright right now, and somewhere between the drive and the gate I notice, with the same flat honesty I’ve used on everything else tonight, that I am finally doing the thing my body has wanted to do since he first said the twenty-sixth of June. I let it happen walking, where nobody in that house can see it.

I pass the idling car without looking at it directly. I keep walking, onto the Ashfen road, gravel giving way to asphalt, the ring still on my hand, still married to a man I just walked away from, heading toward Junie’s room at Wren House, which stopped being mine to sleep in back in October and is the only door left on this headland that anyone will open to me before midnight.

I have nothing to offer the person behind that door except my own weight on her floor. Somewhere at Kholm House there’s a folder with her name on it that she doesn’t know exists, and I haven’t told her, and I’m walking toward her anyway because there’s no one else left on this headland who’d let me in without asking what happened first. That’s its own kind of debt, and I don’t have a column for it yet, and I keep walking regardless.

I look back once, at the mouth of the drive, not at the house.

The car has pulled forward to where the drive meets the road, and stopped there, engine still running, exactly where it can see which way I go. It doesn’t follow me.

It doesn’t have to. Someone on the other side of this already knew I’d be outside these walls tonight before I knew it myself, and now they know exactly which road I’m on, and which way it goes.

Chapter 35: If I Let Go of It

The door she went through is still open.

I haven’t closed it. I’ve been standing here long enough that the sound of her feet on the stairs has gone from something I can still hear to something I’m only remembering, and the door to the president’s rooms is hanging open on a dark corridor, and cold air is coming down it from somewhere else in the house—a window left cracked three floors down, probably, nothing sinister—and I am standing in the middle of my own study doing the one thing I have not done since I was thirteen years old.

Nothing.

There are three things I could do in the next ten minutes that would put me back in control of tonight, and I go through all three the way I’d go through a column of figures, because figures are the only vocabulary I’ve got that still works right now.

One. I put a man on the Ashfen road behind her—not beside her, not visible, just a car far enough back that she never clocks it, so that whatever happens between here and Wren House happens with somebody watching who can move if it turns into something worse than a cold walk. I could have Tomas’s second in a car in ninety seconds. I don’t make the call.

Two. I get to the gatehouse before she does and hold her there on some pretext—the log’s not signed right, there’s a form, anything—long enough for a car to catch up on its own without her ever knowing I sent it. Ten minutes of delay and nobody has to know I did anything at all. I don’t move toward the door.

Three. I find out where my father is tonight. Just that. Not to stop him doing anything—to know, so that if something does happen on that road I’ll already have the answer to who it was before I have to ask. It’s the cheapest of the three, and the one I actually want most, and I don’t pick up the phone for that one either.

Any one of the three would cost me nothing. That’s what makes them dangerous. A man on the road, ten minutes at the gatehouse, one phone call about my father’s whereabouts—none of it would ever reach her, none of it would ever be traced back to me, and all three would let me go on believing I hadn’t actually done anything at all. That’s the version of restraint I’ve been practicing my whole life. Invisible hands.

I say the reason to myself once, in full sentences, because if I only feel it I can talk myself out of it by morning, and I want this decided, not felt.