Page 140 of Flames and Blood

Fairly sure has never once been good enough for me to act on.

Decades of reading rooms for a living and I have never been wrong about one. I’m wrong about this woman twice a day.

She gave up a title, a family name, and four hundred relatives who have known her since she could walk. She told me to my face that she didn’t do it for me. I believed her then, and I believe her now.

What I don’t know is what’s left of her when all of that is gone, or whether any of it is meant for me.

She lifts her head and finds me already looking.

She holds it longer than she has to.

Then she puts the cup down.

Chapter 34

Kalli

The meeting breaks up the way they all do, into three smaller ones. Creed has Viktor and Craven cornered by the window. Bastien is still arguing about something with a man in a gray coat who keeps saying the word jurisdiction. Odile already has Torbjorn on his feet and moving toward the door, still asking him about roads.

Nobody is looking at me. It’s the first time in days that’s been true.

Gideon catches my eye across the table and tips his head at the door, and we go.

I know the way to his room. Third door, second floor, past the alcove where somebody has put a plant that isn’t doing well. I walked it early this morning with my hair still down, and I’ve thought about it more times since than I’d say out loud.

He shuts the door behind us, and the noise of that building goes away.

I don’t sit down. I stay standing in the middle of his floor with my arms crossed and let myself shake, which I have not let myself do since I said my cousin’s name out loud in front of nine people.

He doesn’t come over. He stays by the door and lets me get through it.

“Somebody’s going to write that down,” I say.

“Probably.”

“It’ll be in a file with my name on it. Sereth Ondrathe sold his cousin. Somebody I’ve never met will read it over lunch.” My teeth are chattering, which is ridiculous. “He taught me to read a wind off the north face. I was nine. He sat out on that ledge in the cold for three hours because I asked him to.”

“I know it hurts.”

“Does this part stop?”

“No.” He says it plainly, the way he says everything. “It stops being the first thing you think about when you wake up. That’s all. It takes longer than anyone tells you.”

I get my breathing back. He waits until I’ve done it, and then he crosses the floor and stops in front of me, close, not touching.

“There’s something I never told you,” I say.

“You don’t have to do this tonight.”

“I’m going to.” I look at his hands instead of his face, because it’s easier. His knuckles are calloused. They were probably that way the day he was Turned. “I saw Kaevor before I left. Before my mother. He was the first person I told I was leaving.”

Nothing moves in him at all, which is how I know I have his whole attention.

“He’d already worked it out. He asked me flat out whether it was you.” My mouth is dry. “I told him the truth. Not all of it, because I didn’t have all of it. Enough.”

“And he let you go.”

“He didn’t make a single argument.” That’s the part I keep going back to. “He could have. He’d have been within his rights, and half that mountain would have backed him. He just stood there and told me to go and find out what I needed to know, and that if it came to nothing, nothing at his end would have changed.”