Chapter 242

Calix

Drake left me standing beside the long windows with Lady Wren’s husband and a glass of blood I had no intention of drinking, and he didn’t look back once.

“Keep them occupied,” he’d said, as if I were a footman.

I kept them occupied.

I asked Lord Wren about his son’s trials and nodded at every word of the answer while I watched Drake cross the hall. He walked the way he always walked when something frightened him, too slow and too straight, nodding to the elders who bowed to him like a man reciting a prayer he no longer believed. He went out through the east arches toward the colonnade, where Valen kept his men.

I knew what frightened him, I could see it in the set of his shoulders. Only one thing on earth made Drake walk like that, and he was a slender, sharp-tongued boy with a belly full of Drake’s son, rolling down the mountain in an old man’s carriage.

By now, Darius would have Lysander halfway to the city. I’d made sure nobody at the house would be awake to stop them.

“Sir?”

A young servant in the council’s gray livery stood at my elbow with a folded square of paper held out in both hands. His ears had gone pink.

“A gentleman in the west garden asked me to give you this, sir. He said it was urgent.”

I took it and excused myself from Lord Wren with a smile that cost me nothing. I unfolded the paper beside a candelabra. The handwriting was cramped and hurried, and the ink had smeared where the writer’s sleeve dragged across it.

Come alone. I know what you did at the gala.

It wasn’t signed. Only one man in this city was vain enough to write a threat on the council’s own stationery, and he’d been sitting on my calendar for three days like an appointment I’d been looking forward to.

I folded the note into quarters and tucked it into my breast pocket, next to the little iron key I’d taken from Lysander’s door then I went to see Julian.

The west garden lay at the back of the assembly hall, where the musicians couldn’t be heard and the braziers didn’t reach. It was an old square of frozen gravel walled in by clipped yew hedges, with a dry fountain in the middle and a stone bench nobody had sat on since autumn. The cold bit through my jacket. I didn’t mind. Cold kept people indoors, and I liked my conversations private.

Two men waited by the fountain.

The taller one was Gideon. He’d been stuffed into a borrowed black coat a size too big across the shoulders, and he stood with his weight on the balls of his feet and one hand buried inside his coat, gripping what I assumed was a knife. His eyes kept dropping to my throat and jerking away again, and he didn’t seem to know he was doing it.

The other man was Julian, and Julian had tried to disguise himself.

Someone had chopped his golden hair short and dyed it a flat, dead black that left gray smears along his hairline. They’d glued a thin mustache to his upper lip. They’d dressed him in a steward’s brown wool and put a pair of wire spectacles on his nose with plain glass in the lenses. He looked like a rat dressed up for a funeral.

“Julian,” I said. “Black doesn’t suit you.”

His mouth twisted under the mustache. “You knew.”

“I’d have known you across a battlefield. You stand like you’re waiting for a portrait painter.” I stopped a few paces from the fountain and folded my hands behind my back. “And the mustache is crooked. It’s lifting at the left corner.”

Gideon’s eyes flicked to Julian’s lip. Julian slapped a hand over it.

“You came,” Julian said through his fingers.

“You asked so nicely.” I glanced at Gideon. “Good evening, Gideon. How’s your father?”

Gideon didn’t answer. His hand shifted inside his coat.

I turned back to Julian and studied him. He’d lost weight in that cell. His cheekbones stood out sharp under the bad dye, and when he moved his hand away from his mouth, I saw the silver burns circling his wrists, raw and weeping under the cuffs of his coat. He hadn’t fed properly in days. His hands shook.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Aren’t you curious?”

“About what?”

“About who let you go.”

Julian went still.

I watched the question land. I watched him turn it over and try to push it away the way I knew he’d been pushing it away for three nights, and I watched him fail.

“Who?” he asked.

“I did.”

The word fell into the quiet garden and sat there.

“I unlocked your door myself,” I said. “I sent your guard to the far gate with a signed order and a long list of things to count. I took the bar off the side gate and leaned it against the wall, so you wouldn’t have to struggle with it in your chains. I even left the kitchen door unlatched.” I tilted my head. “Did you enjoy the walk? I chose that night because there was a moon. I didn’t want you stumbling down the mountain in the dark.”

“You’re lying,” Julian said, but his voice cracked in the middle.

“Why would I lie? You’re the only person here I’m telling the truth to.” I took one step closer. “I knew you’d run. You’ve never been able to sit still and lose gracefully. I knew you’d go straight to someone with a grudge and an open door, and I knew you’d come back with a plan and a borrowed coat. My man followed you all the way to Darius’s green door.”

Gideon’s head snapped toward me. Behind his eyes, I watched him remember a figure in a doorway across the street.

“Why?” Julian demanded. “If you wanted me dead, why not leave me in the cell?”

“Because a prisoner who dies in Drake’s dungeon gets questions asked about him. Valen would’ve turned that cellar inside out. The council would’ve sent physicians.” I smiled. “But a traitor who escapes, plots with his friends, and attacks me at the council’s own banquet? Nobody asks questions about him or mourns him. They thank whoever put him down.”

I let the silence sit for one breath.

“You’ve given me a gift, Julian. I’ve wanted to kill you for a very long time. I’d just never found a clean way to do it until tonight.”

For a moment, he only stared at me. Then he laughed, a rough bark that echoed off the yew hedges, and he pulled the glass spectacles off his face and threw them on the gravel.

“You’re talking out of your ass, Calix.” He spread his arms. “Look around you. There are two of us. Two vampires. And there’s one of you, a pretty little secretary who’s never thrown a punch in his life. You think you can kill us both before anyone in that hall hears you scream?”

“I don’t need to kill you both,” I said. “Just you.”