No, it was done as an act of power exerted over St. Silas—an act of degradation.
“As you please,” he said, as if indulging a small child. The Duke of Fray shifted, discomfited by the subtle amusement in his tone; St. Silas never gave him the satisfaction of his anger.
He handled the ledger with his gloved hand.
He read the secrets, the tragedies, written in his own practical script. The captured emotions within those ledgers, the ones he’d withdrawn so meticulously—the grief, the shame, the agony. The ledgers were demon-crafted, created using a powerful ancient curse that only a few demon nobles could enact, which bound and trapped emotions in physical objects. In a desperate bid for his own survival, after seeing all the other boys in white either buried in the soil orthe ocean, St. Silas had devised the idea to feed the demons through secrets rather than the emotions stolen from his own body. Trapping the secrets in the ledgers would mean that the Duke of Fray could feed from an entire city, no longer needing to be confined to the seven boys he used to keep.
It had been a successful bid.
With every secret released, St. Silas saw the physical effects it had on His Grace: the faint wash of pink that now colored his pale skin, his back straightening away from its previous hump, his tongue snaking out of his thin lips as he fed with greed, his pupils expanding to hide the whites of his eyes.
It was a reminder to St. Silas that the reason the Duke of Fray continued to live was because of him. Because of whathefed the Duke. The irony was never lost on him that St. Silas prolonged what he wanted to kill.
“Halt,” the Duke of Fray said suddenly, a grimace twisting his face.
St. Silas raised his brows expectantly, but he felt a dullness in his chest.
“Yes, Your Grace?”
“That secret you fed me just now was a lie. It held no emotion.”
St. Silas paused, glancing at the paper. Although he was very accomplished at discerning lies, and had made his reputation widely enough now that most wouldn’t even attempt it anymore, a few still slipped through the net. He would cross-reference his notes to see which customer had dared collect his coins and confess a false secret. Arthur would deliver the false confessor to him for retribution. Or perhaps the Al-Sayer boy, now.
“Bram, Bram, Bram.” The Duke of Fray shook his head. “You know that I do not take kindly to liars.”
“A virtue, Your Grace.”
The Duke paused, his eyes flickering to the timepiece on St. Silas’s chest. “You were always guarded, even as a child. The other boys…what a sight you all were, dressed in a sea of white. How Imiss it. I used to smell their fear from across the canals, but not yours. Never yours.” He sighed, and the throw fell from his shoulders, revealing a wasting body that yearned to have been buried decades ago. “A secret for a secret. Your deal with me still stands.”
St. Silas bowed his head again. “At your service.”
He had been young the first time the Duke fed on him. At the time, it had felt like aloss,anundoing,adeath.Something had shifted inside him that day. No longer was he the young child who had entered the stone halls of the Duke’s estate, but anger and vengeance and survival wrapped in a boy’s skin. He had learned to control his emotions. Knew when to hide them, and when to reveal them. From then on, any secret he fed to the Duke was an emotion he hadchosento give. Nothing could be stolen from him without his permission again.
St. Silas plucked one of the glass ornaments from the side table—a cube that reflected a beam of light across the walls—and played with it carelessly. “Nearly two weeks ago, I shot a boy in the forehead.”
“And do you regret it?”
It is customary for the people of the Aksari Mountains to plant Rosethorns over the graves of loved ones, symbolizing that if such a flower can endure the harsh winter of the mountains, so can the spirit find peace in the coldness of the earth.
“I do.” St. Silas threw the trinket in the air and caught it with ease. “I’ve never cared for violence—as you are aware, Your Grace. Still, it was necessary. I always do what is necessary.”
He fed the Duke the remorse that had been wrapped around his throat for the past fortnight.
St. Silas clenched the glass cube in his bare hand as the emotion ripped through him, and when he looked down he noticed that he’d cut his palm. A trail of red dripped down his wrist. Discreetly, he hid it behind his back. The wound didn’t matter to him because it was over. St. Silas had revealed only as much as he’d intended to reveal.
“Why did you feel it was necessary?” the Duke prodded, searching for a way to prolong the feed.
Leena.
Her name came to him with so much force that he could not bar it this time. It filtered through. The Duke grasped at it, leaned forward, excitement curdling his face.
“What wasthat?”
St. Silas did not allow a break in his composure; years of experience had taught him to keep a firm hold on himself. “Your Grace?”
“I tasted an odd feeling from you, something completely foreign to your nature. What was it?”
St. Silas’s glance was half lidded. “Ah, that. I’ve hired a new secretary, Your Grace.”
