Page 25 of Nikolay

When she finally spoke, her voice had gone flat.

“I am ashamed of you.”

I had expected anger. Dry mockery. Even disgust, perhaps. Shame landed harder.

“In all my life,” she said, “this is the first time I have been ashamed of my brother.”

The fire shifted softly behind her. I looked at it because looking directly into her face while she said such things would have required more bravery than I possessed.

“She was one dissertation defense away,” Lucia continued, “from her doctorate. She is ABD. All but dissertation. She built a scholarly understanding of the canon most academics never achieve, because unlike many of them, she loved the work as much as she was good at it.”

I turned my head back to her slowly.

Lucia watched the blow land and did not soften it.

“She has spent years reading, studying, writing, annotating, thinking. Not for performance. Not because she needed a title to impress the room. Because literature matters to her. Because language is one of the ways she understands the world.” A slight pause. “And because she is, inconveniently for your prejudices, brilliant.”

I said nothing.

What could I say? That I had mistaken intelligence for polish and polish for intelligence? That I had seen the leather, the boots, the sharp mouth, the ease with service work, and decided I had sufficient data to render judgment? Such a confession would not have redeemed me. It would only have catalogued the machinery of my failure more neatly.

Lucia went on, precise and relentless. “If you had ever looked at her—truly looked, Nikolay, rather than cataloging her as a disruption—you would have seen it. You would have seen the way she thinks before she answers. The way she listens to people, even when they are being tedious. The way she makes everyone around her more at ease without ever appearing to work at it.”

My gaze dropped to my clasped hands.

At ease.

I had seen that. Goddess help me, I had seen it repeatedly and called it charm as though charm were a lesser thing. At Obsidian, staff gravitated toward her in the small intervals between tasks. Amelia at her shoulder, muttering some wicked little joke. Kyra watching her floor with that severe, appraising eye and somehow choosing approval. Human donors relaxing when Maddie approached with a tray because she smiled at them as if they were people rather than parts in some luxurious machine. Even supernatural patrons, the suspicious and ancient sort, yielded a little in her presence. Witches who corrected everyone. Demons who treated service staff as decorative. Vampires from houses older than some kingdoms. She did not grovel. She did not posture. She simply entered their orbit and made the air less difficult.

I had noticed.

I had not permitted the noticing to become knowledge.

Lucia’s voice gentled by nothing. “The laughter,” she said. “Have you noticed that, or were you too busy being offended by her accent? She finds absurdity in ordinary things. It is not stupidity. It is survival. It is intelligence choosing not to become bitter.”

My throat tightened with an emotion I refused to name.

Because I had noticed that, too. The way a room altered when she laughed. Not because she performed brightness, but because delight seemed natural to her in some stubborn, hard-won way. She laughed with her whole face. The sound moved through people like warmth under a closed door. Even when it irritated me, it irritated me because it reached places in me long accustomed to remaining untouched.

“And empathy,” Lucia said, as if she were reading from an indictment she had written well in advance. “That one should have been impossible for you to miss. It radiates off her like a second skin. She never meets a stranger. She does not merely speak to people; she attends to them.”

A dozen little scenes rose up before I could stop them. Maddie on the floor at Obsidian, remembering who preferred what, who wanted directness, who needed teasing, who required distance to preserve dignity. Maddie in the estate kitchen thanking staff by name after three days while most guests took service as weather. Maddie with Doc, making some low remark that had pulled a laugh from him even as he stood exhausted from travel. Maddie speaking to one of the younger household attendants as if the girl’s uncertainty did not make her lesser. Maddie meeting each person head-on, without calculation visible on the surface, though perhaps there had been calculation in it after all—the instinctive, generous kind.

I had called her unrefined.

Lucia leaned back in her chair, but her gaze remained fixed on me like a pin. “And her books,” she said. “Not merely the romances that scandalized your delicate prince’s sensibilities, but the rest. The notes in the margins. The care. The pattern. Those shelves were not decorative. They were biography.”

I shut my eyes briefly.

The annotations.

Not perfunctory underlining. Not undergraduate enthusiasm scribbled in the heat of first discovery. The marks had been layered, argumentative, intimate. A conversation with text carried over years. She had loved those books actively, wrestled with them, carried them through time and rooms and prior lives of herself.

When I opened my eyes, Lucia was still watching.

“She handled your rebuke with precision,” my sister said. “Did that strike you? Or were you too occupied feeling superior? She did not babble. She did not flail. She chose exactly the novel that would expose the ugliness in your assumptions, and she used it with surgical accuracy.”

That, if possible, hurt worst of all.