“Luna asked,” I said, and watched the way his eyes moved when I said her name. “You manipulated her into freeing you and tying up the vampires to buy your exit. You chose chaos when you could’ve chosen honesty. Why?”
He tried, and failed, not to look amused. The cockiness is part of him, even in a room that refuses theater. On other nights, I’d have promised to invent a hex specifically for that mouth.
“I didn’t manipulate her,” he said, and the Hollows didn’t flinch at the word. “I found the only person I could reach during the fight and asked for a message to be carried. She chose what to do with that.”
A flash—not memory, but the taste of it: Luna’s shawl snagging on a doorknob, her mouth shaping words she didn’t want to say, the sharp, dark pulse that ran under the battle like a current beneath a floor. The feeling I didn’t have time to examine then, that someone had tugged on a thread I wasn’t holding.
“You tied up the vampires,” I said. “With your shadow, with your men, with tricks you could have avoided.”
“I tied up the vampires,” he agreed. “Because if I hadn’t, I would have been taken.”
“Back to Shadowick,” I said, as if saying the destination would make the map behave. “Your home.”
He shook his head, a single precise movement that cut the word from the air. “It isn’t any longer.”
The not-home sat between us like a third chair, making my stomach clench. “You expect me to believe the village you’ve spent years bending isn’t yours to sit in?”
“It was never mine to sit in,” he said, surprisingly mild. “I was the guest who stayed too long and rearranged the furniture. The house remembers who signed the deed.”
“You’re very fond of metaphors I don’t like,” I said, even as the image landed with an accuracy I hated. “Why would it be a problem if they took you back?”
He considered how much to bite off. He’s always been good at portioning truth, as if honesty were a tray of sweets and the right-sized piece would keep you from noticing the missing cake.
“Because I would have been used to close something that shouldn’t be closed,” he said. “Or open something that shouldn’t be opened. It depends on what the priestess desires.”
Cold needled up my arms.
“The head priestess,” I said quietly.
He smiled without teeth and shook his head, as if to say: you know. “Your grandmother.”
The words didn’t echo. The Hollows didn’t care for melodrama. But inside me, they struck metal. It’s one thing to hold a secret in your mouth until you can spit it into a safe hand. It’s another to hear it turned into a conversation.
“Yes,” I said, and my voice stayed steady only because this place pressed it flat. “I meant her.”
He watched me say it. There’s a cruelty in being seen when you’re trying to carry yourself unnoticed.
There’s also a relief. My stomach hushed. My palms remembered they were hands and not fists.
“You were there for decades. Why run?”
He took the smallest breath, as if obeying an old rule. “She would have bound me into the knot and called it mercy. Or cut me out of it and called it justice. Sometimes the labels don’t matter as much as the knife.”
“Why bind you?” I asked. “Why cut you?”
“Because I can carry a charge she cannot,” he said, and for once the cockiness was gone. “Because if the knot eats something, it prefers a man who made the first trouble.”
“You didn’t make the first trouble,” I said. “You just refined it.”
“See,” he said, and there was something like admiration in it, which made me want to throw the raven feather at his forehead. “You don’t need me to explain to you.”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
He leaned a fraction closer, hands never leaving the table. The Hollows hummed in warning: steady, steady. He heeded it. His voice dropped, not to seduce but to fit inside the shape of the room. “I asked to speak alone because I know you can hear reasons without falling in love with them.”
“That’s not a compliment,” I said.
“It’s the only truth worth anything in a place like this,” he said.
