His sharp focus never wavered from her face. “Oh, Miss Al-Sayer, I wouldloveto give in to sweetness.”
Leena’s wild heart, nearly beating out of her chest, knew in a way only a woman can that he was not speaking of anything but her. The very real fact that she wasnotfrightened by the idea terrified her.
There would be no sleep for her anymore. Not tonight.
He must’ve seen her bewildered look, for another slow smile crept across his face, transforming his harshly handsome features into something almost otherworldly. “Do not be frightened, Miss Al-Sayer. I was only curious, nothing more.” He threw the end of his cigarette on the floor, turning back to the door. “You only take your coffee black. What doesthatsay about you?”
“Well, itshouldsay that I am unsentimental, but I am not.”
That halted him again. It seemed that twice now curiosity had got the better of him. “How so?”
“Tonight felt like the completion of a circle.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t allowed to be with Rami the day the surgeon came. That’s always lived with me. Tonight, I…” She trailed off.
The silence was soft.
“You did well, Miss Al-Sayer.” The acknowledgment of her service was also a stark difference for him, when only a few weeks ago he could not speak enough of her uselessness.
The words were like a balm, releasing a ghost she did not realize had haunted her ever since that day Rami’s arm was amputated.
It took a moment before she could speak steadily again. “Thank you. You did well, too. Without you, the boy would be dead.”
He bowed—one of the few times he’d ever done it without a trace of mockery—but he stilled when he looked up at her again.
When he spoke next, St. Silas’s voice was low and rough. “You should be wary of how you are looking at me.”
“How am I looking at you?” Leena asked softly, arms still wrapped around herself in a protective gesture.
“Like you no longer loathe me.”
St. Silas knewhow to be a ghost.
Just as he knew how to make his presence felt, feared—a shudder in the spine, a dread in the bones—he also knew how to be invisible. When he walked in Bastmore, the underworld, he kept to back alleys, hands shoved in pockets, gait fast. It was not because he feared the other world—boyish fears belong in the past—but because he understood the practicality of moving unseen.
The sky was ink by the time he reached the Duke of Fray’s estate. They didn’t name estates here in the underworld. Bad omen, they thought, to give an object such power. Instead, everything was possessive. It was the Duke of Fray’s township. His Grace’s mansion. His servants.
The boys all in white? Yes, they are His Grace’s boys.
It was here that St. Silas had been presented at twelve years of age, alongside Theodore Daye. Previous to that, they’d grown up like brothers, playing soldiers on the rocky beaches to which they were both born. Theo was a year or two younger than him, though his exact age was unknown—he had been abandoned on the stepsof Weavingshaw as an infant—a perpetually gaunt and skinny boy no matter what he ate.
Theo’s greatest misfortune had been knowing St. Silas, for he was traded alongside him.
For years, St. Silas had buried and burned all the memories. Hearing that name again had jarred him, awakening an old beast.
Theo Daye had died, and St. Silas had lived.
Theo should not have died—he had been nearing the end of his contract—but the Duke of Fray’s feeding always intensified near the end. Desire to bleed his boys dry, until they were shaking corpses—anything to prolong the Duke’s life by even a few more days. This was how Theo had died, weeks away from the termination of his contract, when freedom and another lifealmostawaited.
With effort, St. Silas locked away the remorse of hearing Theo’s name once more; that sort of rawness was a weapon down here. Instead, he organized his emotions, setting the expression on his face to mirror mild contempt.
St. Silas lifted the stone knocker and looked toward the canals that circled the township like a writhing snake pit as he waited for the footman to answer the door. The air smelled stale here, the island in a constant state of decay. It was those damned waterways, releasing the odor of rot and churning bodies. His clothes would have to be burned once he returned home. The demons never seemed bothered by it. They bathed their babes in the freezing water on their seventh day of life. He’d seen them plunge the screaming infants in by their heels before dragging them out again, like a second birth. To his knowledge, no baby had drowned yet from the practice. Children were rare here and kept tightly to their mother’s breast.
“I’ll never understand how humans treat their young,” the Duke had said to him once. St. Silas had been a boy then, only a few months trapped in the underworld, still clutching at the straws of his old life that burned at his fingertips.“I have been to your world a few times—always a dreadful business—and it shocks me to see the state of your children.Barefoot. Dirty faces.”He fingered St. Silas’s white collar—part of the pristine porcelain shirt and trousers he and the rest of the boys were forced to wear. “How blessed you must feel to be here.”
St. Silas was only twelve at the time, but he already knew to bend his neck to hide the malice in his eyes. “What a blessing indeed, Your Grace.”
The Duke’s estate was cut entirely out of stone—a complicated maze of hallways that extended beneath the ground; every corner, every stairwell, every doorway a marvel of architecture. Gold was worth very little here, as common as iron in the above-world, although the demon nobility guarded it very carefully. They knew what gold meant to humans, how the promise of it could lure anyone into signing impossible contracts. It was how St. Silas continued his trade. All the candelabras and sconces were molded from it. Colored glass windows reflected halos on the floors. All was aesthetically pleasing, all was artwork—and he would set fire to it gladly.
His eyes barely flickered past the rows of paintings hung on the walls of the east wing; he’d seen them so often the bloody depictions had little effect on him. The pictures showed the Morish Saints in various forms of tortured death—all poetic embellishment, and all of it a lie. The demons were not fond of the Saints and wished to rewrite their shared history.
