“I am well enough, Your Eminence,” Quinten Case answered from where he was pacing in front of a shelf full of rare books.
The chair by the false window that displayed any view in the world was pushed to one side, the window blank. The table that had always been covered in books, papers, and recording devices—not that the frustrating Mr. Case had ever taken a single note in all the time he’d been here—was cleared and dust free.
“My contract with you has been fulfilled,” Quinten said. “More than fulfilled by months now, as I’ve been trying to explain to your servants. My three years are over. I have organized your research library. I have scoured every entry for the information you wanted. There is no data that indicates the galvanized experiment can be replicated. I am sorry not to have found more encouraging results. I will be taking my leave.”
“Will you?” Slater Orange asked with zero interest. “And where do you think you will go?”
“Back to House Gray, of course.”
“Such an interesting choice.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “It is the House that has legal claim to me.”
Slater almost smiled at him bringing up the legality of his ownership. The Houses were the law, and the law was whatever they desired it to be.
“While you have been looking through my records, Mr. Case,” Slater said, “I have been looking through yours. Not the records of your service to House Gray. Older, hidden things.”
Quinten was still pacing, pacing. No expression on his face, no pause in his step. He was a caged thing that had finally spotted the open door. He wanted out. But he knew if he rushed his keeper, he would never be granted freedom.
“I have found something very precious to you. Something you hid away on a farm. Do you know what that is, my dear Mr. Case? Do you knowwhoit is?”
Ah, there. Quinten faltered just slightly in his pacing, the surprise catching at his feet.
“I see that you do,” Slater went on. “Would you like to know how I discovered the creature you built, that lovely young girl?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinten said. “I do know I have a right to contact House Gray.”
Slater ignored him. “Your mother believed she could get information out to someone who cared, all those years ago before they died. She believed there would be other people at other Houses willing to take her side. To save her husband. To save her. And, yes, to save the abomination they had been so intent to keep a secret all these years. A stitched daughter.
“She said nothing of you, her only natural son,” Slater continued. “I have spent months wondering over that. Perhaps you have spent years wondering why your mother would send out a distress message and not mention you.”
That finally made Quinten stop pacing. He turned and pressed his fingers to his lips, gathering his thoughts.
“I am a man of some intelligence, Your Eminence,” he said. “Unless I am allowed to see this message you speak of, I have no opinion on it whatsoever. I respectfully request contact with House Gray.”
“There is nothing House Gray can do for you, Mr. Case,” Slater Orange said. “I own you now. And with the press of a finger, I can send forces out to capture that young woman you built.”
“I respectfully request contact with House Gray,” he repeated.
“Let me make my intentions very clear,” Slater Orange said. “I will go to extremes to tear that lovely young girl apart slowly and brutally until I see what makes her tick.
“Or . . .” He lifted the cloth to pat the sweat at his lip, just once. “You can tell me what you know. What have you found in your father’s research? Better still: how did you make that girl galvanized? Is she immortal or is she nothing more than a toy doll, slowly unwinding?”
Quinten shifted his shoulders a fraction and curled his hands at his sides. He might be a scholarly man, but he had spent most of his life out in the unclaimed lands, scratching out his survival day by day. He was a resourceful man, and maybe just a bit wild.
“I have served my contract,” he said. “You will release me now or allow me contact with House Gray.”
It was all he said. A curse of sorts. A defiance.
“Ah, now, Mr. Case. You know I can’t do that. What I can do is kill her while you watch.”
Quinten didn’t even blink, nor did his breathing change. He had probably already worked through the outcome of this meeting. An outcome that would not be in his favor.
Slater needed that young stitched girl alive. If Quinten refused to give him the information on how to create a galvanized body, then she was the only person in the world who had been stitched in modern times. A blueprint. A beginning of his forever.
She was his chance at immortality. A chance he must take before his body gave in to the disease even his best doctors had run out of solutions for.
She was his last chance to cheat death.
