Page 105 of The False Vow

Bastian chuckled, low in his throat. “Not at all,” he said. “But I have grown to appreciate your quirks.”

He hesitated. As if coming to a decision, he laid his elbows on the desktop. I struggled not to flinch as he shifted toward me, his ring glinting, the candlelight draping half his face in shadow.

“Do you remember when we first met?” Bastian asked. “It was in this very room, during the Vainglory’s second trial. I told you then that my son required a helpmate, but I did not disclose just how desperate I’ve been to find such a person.” He pressed his lips together. “Noé is an artist,” the Weaver King said. “He…aspires to things. Ideals. Beauty. People, above all.” He cast me a meaningful look. “I have tried to shape him as best I could, but he seems doomed to be a follower. A historian, waxing poetic over the works of great men—not a great man himself. But you…You are active. You break the world around you in order to advance your own agenda—you care nothing for how pretty it looks.”

He sighed, slouching lower in his chair.

“I have seen in your mind that you were raised alone,” Bastian said. I tensed, my cheeks heating with embarrassment. “Your parents did not care for you, yes? Even your lover, Eliot Lear, forsook you at the first opportunity for a girl less than half your worth.” He pitched forward. “Forget them,” he whispered fervently. “Come and be my daughter. I am loyal to few, but for those whom I choose, and who choose me, I would fight until my death.”

Daughter. The term sank into my skin. How long had it been since anyone had called me that? Since someone had claimed me without any semblance of shame?

Your parents did not care for you. Your lover, Eliot Lear, forsook you. Though I wished to deny it, it was true. Eliot had told me long ago that I was far too interesting to be good.

He hadn’t mentioned that he would never find me good enough to keep.

“Morality is a tonic made for lesser men, so that they will not think to topple those above them,” Bastian went on. “Right and wrong…Those are merely terms meant to bind you. Is it wrong that we Weavers steal your kind’s powers, as I know you are aware we do? Is it right that by wedding you, we save you from being abused by women like Lucie Dabos? Or is it all just strategy—games won and games lost?” His mouth twitched, his gaze drifting toward his desktop. “Eliot Lear has told you that the only way to defend yourself against powerful men like me is to destroy us, but there is another way. You could become a powerful man, too.”

Again, he raised his eyes to mine. They glowed in the candlelight, silver burning orange.

“The question is really quite a simple one,” Bastian said. “Do you want a cause…or do you want a family?”

Chapter Forty-Six

I left without giving him an answer.

My palms were sweaty, my heart pounding. Bastian’s final words rattled in my skull, fraying my nerves with every step I took. Do you want a cause…or do you want a family?

In truth, I wasn’t sure. When Eliot had asked me to join the Vainglory, I’d prided myself on my selfishness—my willingness to betray even those closest to me if it meant getting what I wanted. It was how I’d survived my brother’s cruelty, the harsh apathy of the capital and its inhabitants. But the competition—the other witches I’d met, the relationship which had developed between Eliot and me—had softened me. I’d begun to care for others; I’d begun to crave not only safety for myself, but also dangerous, revolutionary ideals like justice and truth and revenge.

Did any of that matter? I recalled Eliot’s words: To be frank, I am not sure whether you can love anyone, Lovett.

Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I should just…stop trying.

And then there was Noé.

He has loved you for months. I wanted to believe Bastian’s confession was no more than a mind game—and yet, the longer I dwelled on it, the more memories emerged to counter that assumption. Things Noé had said to me long before we’d ever kissed, when my hatred for him had wept from me so potently, I would have sworn a single brush with my skin would have killed him. When we’d been enemies.

Trust me, my dear, the reality of our “engagement” haunts me nightly.

You are to be my wife. You are of no use to me dead.

He’d known I’d loathed him; he’d known of my devotion to Eliot. Had he made himself a villain, not to spite me, but for me? So I would let him help me, confident in my belief that his aid meant nothing—that we were two opposing forces reluctantly leashed together, both of us itching for the day we would finally part?

But I knew that was not the question. The question was, did I love him, too?

So lost in my head was I that I almost shrieked when Mia appeared beside me in the corridor. At my startled intake of breath, my maid fell back, ducking her head in apology.

“Forgive me, miss,” she said, blushing. “It is only—a letter has come. From my cousin.”

Bashfully, she held it out—a crisp, cream-colored envelope sealed with a daub of red wax. For a moment, I stared at the missive, uncomprehending. What did it matter to me, whether her relative had written her? How did that help my cause—

Understanding collided with me roughly. Her cousin.

Eliot. He’d reached out.

Collecting myself, I took the letter from her. It was heavy, weighed down by an object within it; accepting the penknife Mia held out to me, I slit open the top of the envelope and turned it over in my palm.

A key fell out: brass, ornate, a small golden token stamped with the numeral 15 dangling from it. Fluttering after it came a note. I recognized Eliot’s handwriting immediately—his letters, so orderly and precise, lined up next to one another like if any dared to venture from its designated row, it would be identified and shot on sight.