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“I don’t think he cares. And yes, he can do that. He can do whatever he pleases, it sounds like.”
Zaro is silent for a moment, and then she voices the thought on her mind in a whisper, “Kind of like our father?”
I cast my mind back to the first time I met Theodora, the tall, dark man she was accompanied with, how little he resembled her, the way he commanded her to follow him without casting her so much as a glance.
“No, not like our father at all.” I shake my head with a sigh. “Our father might be harsh, it’s true, and he’s not always kind—especially not to you. But he would never take your education away from you, he would never choose your future for you.”
“Not for lack of trying.”
“Father wants what’s best for us, in his own rigid way. He might not approve of our choices, but he would never rob us of them.”
“Maybe Theodora’s father wants what’s best for her too,” Zaro says, and the sadness in her voice tells me she believes this about as much as I do.
“Or maybe he just wants what’s best forhimself.”
Zaro leans forward to wrap a hand around my shoulder, pulling me towards her in a half-hug.
“Zach. It’s normal to fear the worst. But if you keep telling yourself she’s unhappy, you’re going to drive yourself mad.”
“Iknowshe’s unhappy, Zaro.”
“How could you possibly know?”
“Because she told me herself.” I bury my face in my hands. “I think she was trying to tell me all along, in that secret, subtle, silent way of hers, that something was wrong. I just never picked up the clues she was leaving me. I think I’m so clever, Zaro, I think I’m so fucking clever but this whole time, I’ve been blind, and now, I’m more blind than ever. Everything is ruined, she’s gone, and there’s nothing I can do to find her, to help her—to save her. What if I was supposed to save her, Zaro?”
“Maybe Theodora needs to save herself,” Zaro says. “Maybe sometimes broken people have to fix themselves.”
“But they don’t have to do it alone. She doesn’t have to do it alone.”
“She knows this,” Zaro says, grabbing my hand. “She knows this, Zach. She’s smart—she’s the smartest person I’ve ever met—far smarter than you, in fact. If anybody can figure it out, it’s going to be her. You just have to trust her.”
“It’s not her I don’t trust.” I fix Zaro with a grim look. “It’s that father of hers.”
“He’s her father,” Zaro says. “He won’t hurt her.”
“Fathers hurt their daughters all the time.” I squeeze her fingers, which are still wrapped around mine. “Whether or not they mean to. I think you know this.”
She stares at me but says nothing.
There’s nothing to say.
Theverynextday,I’m on my way to the study when a commotion somewhere in the house stops me in my tracks. I freeze to listen. Voices, running footsteps, and then one voice, loud and hard and booming, rising above the rest.
I hasten down to the corridor and towards the main staircase, in the direction of the commotion, which seems to be happening in the atrium. The voices become clearer when I reach the staircase, a chaotic jumble.
“Sir—please, follow me to—”
“Damien, you need to go get Lord Blackwood, hurry.”
“Sir, you need to—”
And above all, the hard, harsh voice.
“Where is my daughter? I know she’s here. Bring her to me. Bring her to menow.”
I descend the steps, a spike of adrenaline making my skin bristle with invisible thorns, raising every hair on my body.
A man stands in the middle of the atrium. Tall, imposing, with the unpleasant, ugly strength of a Brutalist factory. He’s dressed all in black, and there’s grey streaking his dark hair, but he looks exactly as I remember him.
