It can’t be.
“Arabella.” Gideon’s breath is a whisper on my neck. “Please, say something.”
I can’t. I don’t have words for this. How can I speak when my heart is shattering?
Gideon steps out of the elevator, sweeping his hand around the room. His smile is just as smug as always but his eyes fix on mine, raw and panicked. “Welcome to Sanctus Club. Otherwise known as La Petite Mort, version two.”
37
Gideon
Celeste:You’re going to be amazing tonight. I think she’ll love it!
Alaric:If you hurt her, I have the testicle-severing blade ready.
ARABELLA GLARES AROUND THE REPLICAof her theatre, her lips pursed tightly together.
“I’ve stunned the great Arabella Lestrange into silence.” I try to sound flippant, but my pitch rises, betraying my fear. I don’t know yet if this is good speechless or if she’s going to use her sword necklace to carve out my spleen and force me to eat it.
Her obsidian eyes narrow on me. “How?”
The question throws me. In the gaping chasm of secrets between us, she’s opted to grasp for something almost… benign. “I remembered.”
“How?” she repeats, stepping into the club, her fingers grasping the back of a velvet-clad sofa. “IcreatedLa Petite Mort and I don’t remember it this well.”
I shrug. “A hundred and fifty years of dreaming about this place, of grieving the woman who owned it, of wishing I could be back here with you, of hoping foolishly for a second chance to make it right.Alaric helped me to translate my memories into pictures. Claude and Édouard left behind sketches of some of the interiors, and they helped fill in the blanks.”
“You did this.”
Her words are a serpent kissing my skin, cold and dripping with venom.
“Before you rip my head off and pickle it in absinthe, please, let me ask you a question. Why do you think I built Sanctus Estate?”
She scoffs. “To make millions of dollars. It’s precisely what I would have done if I had the resources to achieve it.”
“I’m touched by how little you think of me.” I flop down on one of the velvet sofas so she won’t notice how much my legs are trembling. “The money is a part of it. I won’t lie. I like nice things. I like feeling safe in a world that hasn’t always been safe for us. But the reason I built this place is because of you.”
“Me?”
I pick up an absinthe glass and fill it with soda. I need something to do with my hands so they’ll stop shaking. “Everything in my life has been penance for what I did to you. When Lucien turned me into a vampire, it messed me up because I always thought I had the power. But for women, it’s all so normal as to be completely mundane.”
“What’s normal?”
“Someone taking what isn’t theirs. For you to then have to rely on that person. For you to scream into the night but no one hears you, or they hear you but they don’t care. I thought about you, and about everything you’d said about La Petite Mort being your home, something you created for yourself, and I realised that even if you’d sent that scarred creature after me—”
“I didn’t.”
“—that you did it because you’d been trying to build something without him, and I ruined it all. I met vampires in Vega’s business who were there not because they wanted an afterlife of crime but because they had no other option if they wouldn’t – or couldn’t – be part of a court. I tried to give them options. My own home had never been a place of sanctuary, so I tried to offer sanctuary for those who wereoutcasts even among our kind. And yes, along the way I busted a few kneecaps and turned a few enemies’ skulls into fine tea sets. When this land came up for sale, I sold all my shares in Vega Enterprises and founded Sanctus. I wanted it to be a place where all vampires could feelsafe. And meanwhile, you were out there, alive, doing such amazing things that you put my little efforts to shame.”
Her voice tinges with sadness. “I make rich vampires richer, Gideon. I’m hardly creating world peace.”
“That’s not what I heard.” I grin. “I googledla dame fléau de la Salpêtrière.”
Arabella lets out a slow breath. Her body stills, her hand clasping the sword at her throat.
“Arabella.”
“Yes?”
