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CHAPTER 37
I press my lips together and lower my head, eyes still firmly shut.
“Do either of you recognize this hammer?” Simon finally asks.
My jaw is clenched too tightly to answer.
“Yes, Venatre,” says Remi, using the title with respect for the first time. “We know it.”
A silence of at least a dozen heartbeats follows. “Do you have any idea how it got here?”
“It’s been missing,” Remi answers. “It was stolen from the architect.”
“When?” Simon demands. “Under what circumstances?”
Tears flood my eyes as I look up at Remi.Please, I beg him wordlessly.Don’t say it. Don’t tell him.
“I wasn’t there that night.” Remi walks into the room, toward me. “You’ll have to ask someone who was.”
He may think he’s giving me the chance to redeem myself, but it feels like betrayal.
Simon focuses on me. “Catrin?”
Slowly, I turn to face him. The pain in his eyes thrusts a dagger into my already fractured heart. Remi steps up beside me and puts a hand on the small of my back. “I wasn’t there either,” I rasp.
It’s the truth, even if it feels like a lie. Simon isn’t fooled.
“Cat,” he says quietly. “What aren’t you telling me?”
I press my lips together, unwilling to destroy the two most important people left in the world to me.
Remi finally breaks the silence. “Perrete stole it,” he says. My only consolation is the torture in his own voice. “She visited Magister Thomas the night she died, and they quarreled. She used the hammer to smash the model of the Sanctum. Then she left, taking it with her.” Remi stops to take a breath before finishing. “That’s what I was told.”
Simon never takes his eyes off me. “I see.” The hammer in his hands drips bloody water onto the floor that immediately slips into a crack between the stones. “Did you know this, Cat?”
I nod, wanting to hate Remi, but also grateful he was strong enough to tell the truth when I couldn’t.
“From the beginning?” Simon demands. “Since Perrete?”
“Yes,” I force out.
“You knew I was looking for something like this, and… you didn’t tell me about it?”
I’m so afraid he’ll interrupt me that my words come in a rush. “Only because it would’ve led you in the wrong direction. It wasn’t Magister Thomas who killed her.”
“You didn’t trust me to have determined that for myself?” Simon lowers the hammer and stalks toward me. “You didn’t think I would’ve had the sense to put him under a quiet watch so that when the next murder happened, he could immediately have been eliminated from suspicion?”
As he advances, Remi moves behind me to add support—or keep me from running out the door. Simon stops barely a foot away and glowers down on me. “Don’t you understand that withholding information is the same as lying?”
The tears I’ve been desperately holding back stream down my cheeks. “Simon, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you. I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
He backs away, disgust twisting his mouth. “Save your apologies for the dead.”
“This is the last thing Cat wanted and you know it,” says Remi. “Don’t be so hard on her.”
Simon raises an eyebrow. “I recommend not saying another word, Remone la Fontaine. Both of you are lucky you’re not headed to the gaol right now.”
He turns and marches to the door, where several sisters have moved closer to watch. One already holds a stack of linen towels. Simon asks her for one and wraps it around the bloody hammer. Then he nods his thanks and sympathy to her. “I’m very sorry. For everything.”
