Chapter 279: I want you to get a hold of yourself

The passage was empty. Only the red mark on the stone remained, and he scraped the toe of his shoe across the worst of it until it was only a gray smudge.

Sienna had gotten to her feet.

She stood in the middle of the hall with her arms hanging at her sides. The front of her white gown was dark from collar to hem. Aliya’s blood had dried stiff in some places and was still wet in others. It was on her hands, her wrists, and the edge of her sleeve.

Her fingers were trembling. She looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Viktor crossed the floor and took her by the shoulders. "Sienna."

She did not answer. "Sienna, look at me."

She did. Her eyes were huge and blank. She was somewhere very far away, and he could see her trying to come back.

"I want you to get a hold of yourself," he said. His voice was low and steady. "I know. I know what you saw. But we are leaving this place. We are leaving it now. And I need you with me."

Her breath came in a ragged pull. "Breathe," he said. "In. Slowly." She breathed.

"Again." She did it again. Her shoulders shook, then began to ease. A little color came back into her face. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay."

He let out a breath of his own.

He bent and picked up his jacket from the floor, where he had dropped it before the fight. It was crumpled, with a rip in the sleeve, but the white fabric was still clean. He held it open.

"Put your arms in."

She did. He pulled it up over her shoulders and fastened the front. It was far too big for her. It hung to her knees and swallowed her hands. But it covered the stains, every one, from throat to hem, and to anyone who did not look closely, she was only a woman in a borrowed coat.

He tugged the collar straight. Then he looked at her chest, where the folded pages had been tucked inside her gown.

"The files." She reached up with a shaking hand and pulled them out. The paper was creased and warm, and one corner was stained red. She held them out to him, and for a moment she did not let go.

The crown was gone. She had taken it off in the lab, somewhere between the folders and the fight, and had set it down on a steel table without thinking. It was lying there now beside a dead girl and a dead man, still shining. Her head felt strangely light without it.

Then her fingers opened.

Viktor took the files and the thin blue folder. He opened his shirt a little at the collar and slid them inside against his chest, flat, where the cloth would hide them. He buttoned it back up. The paper crackled once and was still.

"I have them," he said. He turned to look down the corridor.

The long stone passage ran back toward the main hall, toward the lamps and the soft curtains and the noise of the party. It was the way they had come. It was lit and wide and empty.

It was also the way every guard in the house would walk.

"We can’t go back through the main corridor," he said. "Too many eyes. We must find another route."

Sienna stared at the passage.

Her mind was beginning to move again, slowly, like a gear under ice. She saw the map in her head. The turn, the stairs, the long hall past the library. She saw the doors she had marked that afternoon, one by one, with her eyes half on the floor.

"There is a service way," she said hoarsely. "By the kitchens. It goes out to the garden."

"Then we take it." He turned, and she turned with him, and they began to walk. They had gone three steps when she stopped.

It was not a sound that stopped her. It was a feeling at the back of her neck, like a thread pulled tight. She looked over her shoulder. The archway to the side room stood open on the right, and beyond it she could see the glow of the screens and the dark shapes in the corner.

"Wait," she said. Viktor turned. "Sienna?" She did not answer.

She walked past him, back along the wall, her borrowed jacket swinging around her knees. She went into the little room where the guards lay tied and gagged. They were still asleep, breathing slowly and deeply, in a heap in the shadow.

The screens flickered on the long desk. They showed the gate, the garden, the empty stairs. She stood in front of them, and she did not move.

"I need an exit," she said. Her voice was hoarse. "One that’s less guarded. One we can use without anyone seeing."

She sat down in the guard’s chair and moved the mouse.

The screens flickered, one after another. The front gate, four men. The kitchen door, two men and a dog. The garden path, empty, but a light moved near the far wall. The east terrace, three guards smoking. The back stairs, nobody. The back stairs again, from another angle, still nobody.

Too easy, she thought. Nothing is ever this easy.

Viktor stood at her shoulder. He did not speak. He watched the screens with her, and his hand rested on the back of the chair.

She clicked to the next feed. Then the next. Then she stopped. It was a small room with no windows.

The walls were bare gray stone, and a single lamp hung from the ceiling on a long wire. There was a table in the middle and a chair beside it. The floor was stained in a way she did not want to look at.

Three people stood in the lamplight.

The first she knew by the white suit, even from behind. He stood with his hands folded at his back and his head slightly bowed, like a man at prayer. It was the Don.

The second stood a little to the side, small and straight in silver-white, with her hands tucked in front of her. Carina. Her face was calm and pale, like a mask carved from soap.

The third was sitting in the chair.

It was a woman in a gray maid’s dress. Her apron was torn. One sleeve was ripped away, and her arm was bruised from the shoulder to the wrist. A dark line of blood ran from her lip to her chin. Her hair hung in wet strings. Her hands were tied behind the chair, and she sat very low, as if she wanted to get smaller.

They had beaten her. Sienna’s stomach turned over. "Turn it up," Viktor said quietly.

She found the dial and slid it. A thin crackle came out of the speaker, then the drip of water, then a voice, cracked and wet and shaking.

"I will talk."

"I will talk," the maid said again. "Please. No more." The Don did not turn around. "Then talk," he said gently.

"I do not know much. I swear it." The woman gulped for air. "I only know that Don Kalisto and his men are planning something. Tonight. I do not know what. They did not tell me."

"Go on."

"He has access to the security system of this house." Her voice cracked. "I do not know how. Somebody gave it to him. He watches the cameras. He listens to the halls. He knows everything that happens inside these walls."

Sienna’s head snapped toward the screens. He watches the cameras.

She stared at the dark squares where the lab corridor should have been. Her pulse jumped. She had pulled the cable. She had cut the feed on two screens, and she had deleted the footage of every one of them walking to the lab.

But if Kalisto had the keys to this house, then he would see a black screen. He would see where it went black, and when.

He may already know. She did not say it. She only reached out and gripped Viktor’s wrist. He had seen it too. His jaw was tight.

On the screen, the maid was sobbing. "My only job was to tell him what happened here," she said. "That is all. I carried notes. I told him who went in and who went out. I did not know what it was for. I did not know it would..."