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“It’s been my whole life!” I said, harsher than I intended, because nobody got that. Not Mircea, not Pritkin, not Jonas, who would have loved to add a couple dozen war mages to the crowd of guards already milling about the suite. Nobody understood that ever since I could remember, I’d been locked away. Like I’d done some crime I didn’t recall, but kept having to pay for.
It was getting really old.
“You’re talking about that other v—Your old guardian,” Pritkin said.
I nodded and popped another antacid. Tony had that effect on me.
“But you ran away from him.” Pritkin sounded oddly hesitant suddenly, as if he were sure I wouldn’t talk about this, that I’d shut down, shut him out. Maybe because that’s what he’d have done, if the situation were reversed. He was the most closemouthed person about his life of anyone I’d ever met—okay, barring a certain vampire—and while I knew more about him than most people, I didn’t know much.
But I didn’t mind telling him. In fact, I wanted to, wanted someone to finally get it. “I ran away twice, actually. But I never really got away. Tony was always there, at least in my mind, right on my trail.”
“Because you set him up for what he did to your parents.”
I nodded. “I tried to ruin him, to get him on tax fraud, because I didn’t know how to kill him. It didn’t work, but I knew he’d never forget it, never stop looking for me.”
“And part of you didn’t want him to.”
I had been scraping a fingernail over the label on Pritkin’s empty beer bottle, but I looked up at that. Because until he said it, I hadn’t fully realized it myself. “Maybe,” I said slowly. “Maybe part of me did want that showdown I never got. But I don’t know what I’d have done if he’d come looking for me. I’m not a trained assassin, and even if I had been . . .”
“You’re not a killer,” Pritkin said flatly.
“Sometimes, I really, really wanted to be.”
He didn’t ask, didn’t say anything. But I could tell he wanted to. I hesitated, because I hadn’t planned to talk about this. I never talked about this. But there was no way he’d understand without it.
“Eugenie,” I finally said, and I was proud of myself. It came out pretty steady.
“Eugenie?”
“My governess. Tony told his people that she’d helped me escape, that she knew where I was. But he lied. I knew that even before I saw his face as she lay there in pieces, bleeding out at his feet.”
“He killed her for no reason?” Pritkin asked carefully.
I laughed and ripped the label off. “Oh, he had a reason. He was a miserable, sniveling, cowardly, vindictive bastard who was furious that some little human had come so close to bringing him down. Somebody had to pay for that. Somebody had to bleed. And if it was somebody whose death he knew would hurt me, so much the better.”
And it had hurt, as much as if I’d been there, bleeding myself. But even worse was the crippling fear that had followed. I went from being somebody who had risked everything just to watch him fall to being too scared to leave my own apartment.
“The first six months after I left him were the worst in my life,” I said. “Because he wasn’t keeping me a prisoner anymore—I was doing it to myself. I was so sure he’d find me, so sure I’d end up like Eugenie, that I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go anywhere, except to look for work, buy groceries—just what I had to do. And then I went straight back home. People in actual prison probably have more human contact than I did.”
“But you had a roommate,” Pritkin said.
“That was later. After I started going places again, meeting people . . . after I figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“That this was my life now. And that I could let some bastard decide how I was going to live it, let fear decide or I could decide. And I decided; I wasn’t going to give Tony that kind of power. I wasn’t going to give him any more of my life.”
“You just woke up one day and stopped being afraid.” Pritkin’s expression hadn’t changed, but for some reason, he sounded almost angry.
I flashed on my performance a day ago, slumped in a sniveling heap on the bathroom floor, and grimaced. “No. I mean, you don’t, do you? At least, I never have. And I kind of think it would have happened by now if it was going to.”
“Then what do you do?” He’d leaned over the table, close enough for me to map the ring of jade around each iris, and the pale amber-green layer that darkened to golden brown around the pupils. There were striations, spokes of gold, and specks of brown and emerald, all of which blended to just green at any distance at all.
Beautiful, I thought randomly—for a second, until he abruptly pulled back and looked away.
“You go on, anyway,” I said, after a pause. “And, yes, you’re scared sometimes. But it’s better than being scared all the time. Better than letting your life be about fear and nothing else. So, no, I’m not going to let them shut me away ‘for my own good.’ I’ll take precautions, as many as I can. But I’m going to live.”
Pritkin ran a hand through his hair. “Yes,” he said brusquely. “You are.”
