“They fed me alongside the dogs.”
“Who did they put in the food?”
“Anyone they wanted to disappear,” I said. “Félice married a politician—the one running against Mr. Hunt for position of commissioner.”
“He was the first?”
“No. I’d lost count.”
Arkady’s fingers brushed over my wrists before intertwining our fingers. “Who was the first?”
I stared at my father, and he never broke, his wife inconsolable beside him as if she weren’t equally to blame. “My mother. They fed my mother to me.”
I couldn’t stop shaking, my limbs becoming cold from the heaving of emotion.
“They knew I was sick. A sour kind of luck where one thing led to another ... I couldn’t help it.” I swallowed. “The coroner would give me meat belonging to the evidence of their experiments. After a while, it became too frequent. I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t keep up, there were too many bodies. I was becoming tooawareof my meals, and I just ...couldn’t. I thought it was the most ethical way to satiate my cravings, but they abused it. They abusedme. My condition thattheygave me.”
“That’s good, Petre,” Arkady praised. He leaned down to my ear to whisper, “You asked me once what type of man I was.”
I nodded slowly, looking at him from the corner of my eye, his hand still in mine.
“You have a choice. If you wish to be free of this, of me, you may leave. You can walk out of here and go far away, these people and myself gone forever. You don’t need to know what happened to them. You won’t ever see me again.”
I squeezed his hand, hot tears spilling faster as I turned to him.
He held my face between his hands with something like reverence.
“I was always going to be on your side, no matter what,” he said at my lips, hesitating only slightly as they nearly touched.
My mouth hung open to say something, anything, but his lips were gone.
As he began to pull away, my hands cupped over his, holding them before they left my face ...
“Wait.” My voice rang clear. “I have something to say.”
His eyes flicked between mine, stepping back, allowing me the spotlight.
I turned directly to the crowd, gazing at each set of sad eyes looking at me. For a moment, they seemed hopeful. Likely praying over and over in their heads that I would do something. That I would tell Arkady to stop and this could all be over. That they could return to their homes, their families. Eat a warm meal and tuck themselves into clean sheets for the night. That tomorrow, they would wake up lighter knowing they’d survived their sins one more day.
It would not be so.
“My house is full of moths,” I announced, my small audience looking at me. I knew they would hang on to every word by the glassiness of their eyes in the dim light. “Infested. There’s hundreds of them. The pesky type that stowed away in between apricots, tucked into the corners of the crates.”
Arkady watched me as I looked over at him. I managed a small smile and a deep breath, turning back to the crowd.
“My parents used to send my sisters and me to catch them. Whoever caught the most would get a bowl of wine-soaked peaches. Though, I suspect we got that anyway, since it would make the three of us little ones sleep very soundly by seven in the afternoon.”
That earned a few nervous shifts, and the stillness of my mother, apparently giving up on her damsel charade.
“My mother explained that these were pests of the nastiest kind. They ateeverything. Not just my mother’s fine silk or the foliage after harvest. No, they would eat the fruit, fresh or rotten. They would eat the insulation of the house, the grains in the pantry, even the meat hanging for preservation,” I explained.
I stepped to the very edge of the stage, my shoes between two lanterns, my skirt nearly touching.
“You’ve always been shortsighted,” my father said. My mother tensed beside him, but she didn’t take her eyes off me. So stubborn, standing by his actions until the end.
“I accepted the way this family works for longer than I should have.” I was firm with my words. “If your actions are just and good, why not tell the public?”
“There is a reason there are very few people who change the world.” He leaned back in his chair, wincing against the rope restraints. “Not everyone understands when evils are necessary, they only recognize the rewards after.”
