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Lambert raises his eyebrows. “Why else would I have done all that work?”
All that work.Killing Mother Agnes, imprisoning MagisterThomas, driving a rift between me and Simon, taking away what gave me purpose… “You sought to win me by destroying everything and everyone that was important to me?” I ask incredulously.
He snorts. “They kept you from understanding how low you were. You never would’ve left your precious architect or the Sanctum, and if you lost those things, you could still go back to the abbey.” With the toe of his boot, Lambert nudges Simon’s chin, turning his face upward. “This one practically threw you from his presence, and after Remone blamed you for the collapse, you were supposed to go to the only person who never judged you. The one who always listened, who helped you when no one else would.”
“The one who tried to kill me that night?” I challenge.
He rolls his eyes skyward. “I wasn’t going to kill you, Catrin. You would have been allowed to escape, though until that platform broke, it looked as though I’d have to leave you unconscious but miraculously alive. I thought I might even return to rescue you, if I had time.”
Rescue.As soon as he uses the word, I realize the connection between all the victims. Juliane had described Lambert’s romantic vision of raising a woman from poverty as his father saved his mother.Thatwas what he went seeking with Perrete, Ysabel, and Nichole, yet somehow it had gone wrong.
Lambert looks down at Simon again. “But it wasn’t me you came to for help that night,” he snarls. “It washim.” He makes a noise of disgust as he shoves Simon’s face away with his foot. “You betrayed him and he sent you away, and you still went crawling back to the man who could offer you nothing.” Lambert shakes his head. “Then Remone forgave you. Oudin told me he even proposed, and you didn’t say no.”
Remi wasn’t a threat until there was suddenly a chance Iwould choose him over Lambert. Then he had to die. That was why Simon would.
If Lambert now hates me as much as he hated them, revenge is what he wants most. The question is whether, given a choice, he would kill me or kill Simon. And if it’s me, how do I survive that? I have one idea, but to make it work I need distractions and time.
I reach for my waist where the statue blocks his view. “What about the other women?” I ask, counting seven loops of the safety rope with my fingers while I try to keep him talking. “How did they offend you?”
“You act like you would have deigned to speak to any of those…women.” The last word drips with contempt. “But they disgusted me, too. Willing to do anything if money was involved. Not one of them could have told me from my brother in the dark. Do you know Perrete even offered to let us share her?”
To them he was only a source of quick and easy money. “They didn’t appreciate what you offered,” I say.
“Exactly.” Lambert shakes his head. “I wasn’t going to lose this time. I just had to be more deliberate with how I offered myself.”
What the killerneedswill not change.Simon had said.How he goes about getting it may.
I wouldn’t see myself as needing to be rescued until I was stripped of everything I had and left with nowhere else to go. Same madness, different method.
Lambert nods to the motionless form at his feet. “Even when you came to Simon, I still believed I had a chance. Until I saw you with him tonight. Then I realized everything you did was an act to get what you wanted. I was a fool. You were no different from the others.”
He was right to some extent. I’d used his liking of me to getinto the gaol, and I’d not discouraged his small advances—but that didn’t mean he owned me.
Lambert takes a sudden step in my direction, murderous rage in his dark eyes. Reflexively, I move back, blurting out the question I still need answered. “What about Juliane?”
His expression changes from wrath to agony in an instant, and he curls inward like he’s been struck. “Juliane?” he whispers.
I step up to Pierre again, the unhooked clasp of my safety rope in my hand. “Didn’t you love her?” I call from across the statue’s back. “She loved you.”
He flinches. “It was mercy. More than once she’d begged me to end her suffering.”
No, it wasn’t, and he knows it. Perrete, Ysabel, and Nichole had been victims of rage. The others had been methodical removals of people who were in his way.
He may have made Juliane’s death as painless as possible, but it’s how he left her—lovingly covered and posed like she was sleeping—that tells me she was his ultimate sacrifice in chasing his prize. Juliane he regrets.
She’s the key to pulling him apart. But I’m not ready to do that yet.
“I never got the impression she was hopeless,” I tell him. “In fact, thanks to Simon, she was more optimistic than she’d been in years.”
My gamble pays off as Lambert’s eyes are drawn to Simon, and I unwrap one loop from around my waist. Each will give me approximately three feet, which means I’ll need two more.
“Simon was madder than her,” he mutters. “He was just better at hiding it.”
I wince at his referring to Simon in past tense but push a hard edge into my tone. “If Simon was so mad, what does it say that he understood you?”
Lambert throws back his head and laughs, the mirthless sound echoing around us. A second loop comes off my waist, and I press it against Pierre’s flank to keep it out of sight. Lambert flings one arm in Simon’s direction. “If he did, he wouldn’t be lying there right now. Simon never even considered me.”
But he had. It was my denial and his own fear of bias that made him discard his theory. And if Simon was right about that, he was probably right about other things, even if he didn’t understand why. “He knew about Beatrez,” I say.
