Chapter 327: Losing a Cold War to a First Grader

Aria woke up alone.

Damien’s side of the bed was cold. Rain still ticked against the slate overhead, softer now, and grey light leaked through a window the size of a cereal box.

She checked her phone. 6:52 a.m.

She did the math before she could stop herself. Valérie’s video had come in a little before seven last night.

Sixty hours.

A text was waiting under the time.

[Ken: Wheels up. Box secured. ETA tonight. Please inform Mr. Sinclair that I have not slept, and I would like that noted.]

Aria typed back. [Noted. Lovingly.]

She pulled on yesterday’s hoodie and went looking for her husband.

She found him in the kitchen. She found everybody in the kitchen.

It was a long, low room with a stone floor and a wood-burning stove that seemed to be the only warm thing in the house. A scarred oak table ran down the middle, and around it sat fourteen children in various stages of waking up. Some were still in pajamas. Two were sharing one chair. The girl with the braid from yesterday stood at the counter, sawing a loaf of bread into slices so thin Aria could have read through them.

Damien sat at the far end of the table.

He was the only adult sitting down. His knees were jammed against the underside of the table, and in front of him sat a chipped mug of coffee.

Directly across from him, chin barely clearing the tabletop, sat Théo.

Neither of them was blinking.

’Again,’ Aria thought. ’We’re doing this again.’

"Good morning," she said.

Fourteen small heads turned. Fourteen small faces went cautious. A few of them scooted closer together.

Damien didn’t look away from Théo. "Morning."

"How long have you been sitting here?"

"Twenty minutes."

"Doing what?"

"He made me coffee," Damien said.

Aria looked at the mug. Then at Théo, who looked innocent in the specific way only guilty children and cats can manage.

"That was nice of him," she said slowly.

"Yes."

Damien picked up the mug and took a long sip.

His face didn’t change. He swallowed, set the mug down, and folded his hands on the table.

Théo’s eyes narrowed.

At the counter, the braided girl had stopped cutting bread. Two boys by the stove were clutching each other’s sleeves. The whole table had gone silent, the way a classroom goes silent when someone has put a whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair.

Aria walked over, picked up the mug, and sniffed it.

Coffee. And something else. She touched her pinky to the rim and tasted.

Salt. A lot of it.

She looked at Damien. He looked back at her, perfectly serene.

"How many sips?" she asked quietly.

"This was the fourth."

’Of course it was.’ He would drink the whole pot before he gave a six-year-old the satisfaction.

Part of her wanted to laugh. The other part knew he’d slept maybe two hours in a bed built for a hobbit, and that brine on an empty stomach was the last thing his nervous system needed.

She turned to Théo.

"That was a good trick," Aria told him. "He’s very hard to fool."

Théo stared at her. He didn’t understand a word, but he understood the tone, and he couldn’t tell whether he had won or lost.

"Jade?"

Jade sat on a stool by the stove, wrapped in a blanket, a cup of tea going cold in her hands. Her eyes were swollen. She looked like she hadn’t slept at all.

"Can you tell him something for me?"

Jade nodded.

"Tell him my husband sits across tables from men who want him dead, every week. Tell him salt isn’t going to do it."

Jade hesitated, then translated. Her voice was flat and tired, but the children leaned in anyway.

Théo listened. His mouth pinched. He studied Damien with new, grudging calculation, like a general revising his estimate of the enemy.

Then he said something short and furious and climbed down off his chair.

"He says," Jade murmured, "next time it will be worse."

"Tell him I look forward to it," Damien said.

Jade didn’t translate that. Théo seemed to understand it anyway. He stomped out of the kitchen.

Aria poured the coffee down the sink and refilled the mug from the pot on the stove. She tasted it first. Then she set it in front of Damien and squeezed his shoulder.

He tipped his head back to look up at her. "You checked it."

"I’m your wife. I check things."

Something in his golden eyes went soft, the way it only ever did for her.

Breakfast was bread, a little butter, and a jar of jam scraped so clean the spoon squeaked.

Aria sat beside Damien and watched.

She watched the braided girl hand out the slices, smallest kids first, and keep the heel for herself. She watched a boy of about eight wearing sneakers with the toes cut open because his feet had outgrown them. She watched one carton of milk get poured into fourteen cups, a splash each, then topped up with water from the tap. ℯℯ𝘭.

Nobody complained. That was the worst part. They did it like they had done it a thousand times.

In her past life, in the asylum, Aria had learned what rationing looked like. Granny Shen used to split her own bowl of rice and push half of it across the table without a word.

These were children.

Her throat closed.

Under the table, Damien’s hand found her knee. She covered it with her own and held on.

"What’s her name?" Aria asked Jade, nodding toward the braided girl.

"Margaux."

"How old?"

"Twelve." Jade looked down into her tea. "She was the oldest one left in Lyon when it closed. She kept the little ones together until Madame came."

Twelve.

At twelve, Aria had still been sleeping with the lights on.

The back door swung open and Séverine came in, shaking rain off her coat. A basket hung over one arm. There were six eggs in it. For fourteen children.

She saw Aria counting. Her chin lifted a fraction.

"Les poules sont vieilles," she said, setting the basket down.

"The hens are old," Jade translated.

That was all. Séverine began cracking eggs into a pan like a woman who had long ago stopped expecting anyone to help.

Aria looked down at her own slice of bread. She set it back on the plate and slid it toward the boy with the cut-open shoes.

He stared at it. Then at her. Then he snatched it and ate it in three bites, watching her the whole time as if she might change her mind.

Damien said nothing. He slid his own slice across the table too.

By eight, the kitchen had emptied out. Aria helped Margaux wash the cups, which mostly meant Margaux washed and Aria dried them wrong and got corrected in rapid French with a lot of pointing.

When she turned around to ask Damien something, his chair was empty.

She checked the sitting room. The hallway. The foyer, where the plastic bucket still sat on the marble, a fresh inch of rainwater in the bottom.

No Damien.

She was halfway up the staircase when something tugged on her sleeve.

Théo stood on the step below her, his whole face screwed up in deep outrage. He jabbed a finger at the ceiling.

"Le monstre. Il est sur le toit."

(The monster. He’s on the roof.)

Aria didn’t speak French.

But she knew "monstre." And she could see exactly where that finger was pointing.

Up.

Through three floors of crumbling plaster. Through the attic. Out into the rain, onto a slate roof slick with moss, fifty feet above a gravel drive.

"He’s on the roof," Aria said. "Isn’t he."

Théo scowled and nodded.

Aria took the rest of the stairs two at a time.