I lift my head and arrange my face into the kind of calm that they all have come to expect from me. Oh, I know it unnerves them. I know they expected emotion, tantrums, something more akin to a fight. Perhaps this silent refusal to behave the way they expectismy protest – the problem is, I have no way to come up with any alternative. My mind spends most of my waking hours spiralling. This outward calm is the only way I can at least pretend I’m not already giving in to the tamest form of torture there is.
“You have a visitor,” she says. She glances at the pale welt on my finger, and her mouth twitches with the ghost of satisfaction.
“Who?” I ask, keeping my voice level.Who on earth is permitted to see me?
Her eyes shift to something behind her shoulder. “Mr Macrae.” She says in a tone of reverence I’ve never heard from her before.
It takes a second for the name to stand up, to clothe itself in the figure that follows into my room.
The Kingmaker; Antonio Macrae.
The man who arranges outcomes the way people arrange flowers, who deals with people the way someone dead heads roses.
My stomach flips when I see him, as if I’m having some visceral reaction. I know this man, I’ve already encountered him so many times, in some many horrific moments.
He was there, back at our safe house, after Devin Blake had almost slit my throat and then tied me and my mother up. He was there too, all those months before. Meeting with my father, drinking with him, laughing with him, plotting to make him Chapter Lord. And he was there when they took my father, when they locked me and my mother in cages and they all sat around, feasting on the pieces of our despair.
He moves as if there is invisible music and he is perfectly tuned to it. His suit is the kind that looks hand-stitched, the dark wool drinking the white into itself.
“Grace,” he says, with a voice like velvet.
He says it like we are old friends and he is sorry the sea has been rough. He has that scent that men acquire when they have lived too well for too long -bergamot, cedar, something ink-dry and ridiculously expensive.
I let the silence hold him at arm’s length. I gather the blanket around my knees as if cold ought to explain everything. Mrs Vale hovers like a guillotine waiting to cut me down an inch or two the moment I fail to show the appropriate level of respect.
“You may leave us,” he says without looking at her.
She stiffens, and I see the slow calculation, the way her eyes go to the camera in the corner and then back to him.
It is one of those moments when a rule buckles. She pouts her lips with a quiet, spiteful precision and leaves. The door clicks shut softly enough to sound harmless.
Antonio walks to the chair opposite my bed and sits, composed, as if he has all afternoon and perhaps a little of the evening to waste on little old me. He is not young and he wears it without apology, a face that has contained the processes of ambition until they have sculpted it. His hair is threaded with silver the way some cliffs are threaded with pale quartz.
“This room,” he says, looking around with a sympathy he makes you believe is personal. “It does not suit you.”
I make a small sound that could be a laugh, but it’s been so long since I had anything to laugh about. “What does suit me, Mr Macrae?”
“Call me Antonio.” He corrects me gently. Too fucking gently.
“Is that what my mother did?” I can’t keep the bite from my voice, and I realise quickly I’m making a huge mistake already. He may be my enemy, but this man holds the fate of countries in his hands. With barely a word, he could destroy half a continent.
I need to be smart here. Very fucking smart, and careful too.
There’s no way this visit is just a frivolity. He wants something, and though I have no clue what that is right now my best game is to play docile, to continue being that meek little girl they all see me as.
“Antonio…” I murmur the name as if trying it on, testing it, apologising too in some small way.
He inclines his head with a sprinkle of amusement in his eyes, and then he looks about again as if he sees something I don’t. But there’s nothing here but walls. White, clinical, boring as hell walls.
“Congratulations,” I say. “You are now one of the five living people to see me in this habitat. Does it live up to the legend?”
“Legends are for men who need to believe in what they do,” he says gently. “I prefer accuracies.”
“And what is your accuracy today?” The questions are the only weapons I am permitted, have ever been permitted. I learned a long time ago that their sharpness depends on my ability to say them with the right amount of polite inquiry.
He watches me the way men watch an incoming storm: with seriousness, aware that something they cannot control is nevertheless their business. “That you have been wronged. That you have been isolated as a method, not a happenstance.”
The room tilts.
