“Do you see that?” Enne asked them, pointing at the door ahead.
“Oh, is there more that I can’t see here?” Sophia asked flatly. “Because I’m really loving this experience. I can literally feel my sanity slipping away.”
“What do you see?” Levi asked Enne.
“I think that’s it—the door we’ve been looking for,” Enne murmured, inching forward. “The one with the eye.”
“But what’s behind it? Not to be crass, but I don’t think I can stand seeing another dead person,” Sophia said, shivering. “It could be one of my siblings.”
“Or Vianca,” Levi said darkly.
Enne didn’t know why the shade would lead them to a monster they’d already faced before.
But she didn’t doubt itwasa monster. Just one of a different sort.
She held her breath and traced her fingers over the eye-shaped knocker. Its metal was eerily warm.
The knob turned of its own accord.
When the door creaked open, she recognized where they were instantly—Liberty Square, the site where Jonas had been hanged, along with dozens of street lords and Mizers before him. New Reynes’ execution spot turned tourist destination. Except, at dusk, it was vacant, the overcast sky darkened by factory smog.
A lone figure sat at the edge of the platform. He—male, Enne guessed, judging from the broadness of his shoulders—was dressed entirely in black, from the patent leather of his boots to the gloves on his hands, to the black gauze wrapped around his face and neck, obscuring all skin beneath. He looked like the charred remains of a corpse, of something meant to be buried.
Levi sucked in a breath beside her. “Veil,” he gasped.
The most notorious legend of the North Side. Enne’s father.
“I thought he’d be taller,” Levi said. “But then again, you got your shortness from somewhere.”
Sophia gaped. “Are you suggesting...?”
Enne ignored them and strode toward the platform. She didn’t care if this man was her blood. She wasn’t like him. He’d taken so much from Lourdes. He’d committed crimes she would’ve never considered. She might’ve had to fight to survive, but she’d never been malicious.
“Why are you the person we needed to find?” she asked him fiercely.
“I thought that would be obvious,” he drawled.
Enne would prefer not to acknowledge their relationship. “Enlighten us.”
“I’m the one who knows how to kill the Bargainer.”
Enne had assumed the hallway had only brought her to this door because he was her father, and so her eyes widened. “So you can help us. There is a way.”
“Of course.” He had a smug voice, the sort from a person used to having to explain things, used to being clever.
But Enne was also used to being made to feel small. And no matter how grand Veil’s legend, she was a legend of her own, equal in greatness but not in terror. She’d come so close to following his path, but looking at him now, sitting beneath the site of his own execution, she was glad she hadn’t. She’d become something stronger, and it was because she’d learned to grow when people called her small.
“Take off the wrappings,” Enne demanded. It was easy for him to have the upper hand if he could keep his mystery.
“Do you really want to see my face?” he asked, a hiss at the end of his words.
“I’m not afraid of what you look like.”
He laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve heard the rumors that I’m scarred or hideous. I know you could handle that much, even though that isn’t true. I’m wondering if you want to know how much you look like me.” He paused. “I can tell you hate me.”
“You stole Lourdes’s life,” she said.
“I lived through the Revolution, even if I was only a child at the time,” he said. “I was the last Mizer left alive. I’m not proud of what I did to survive, but I’m not ashamed of it, either.”
