The captured-on-film version of himself leaned in and kissed her, and he abruptly remembered the real scene. The morning after their wedding. A conversation about howmuch he loved her, how he intended to kiss her right there—the possibility of hidden cameras be damned—because no one could make hay of it anymore.
The picture shuddered, flipped, vanished, the buzzing machine clicking off.
A more subtle sort of torture indeed.
“Just for the record,” Peter said, voice shaking, “that didn’t happen. It didn’thappen.As you well know!”
“Of course it happened,” Whitaker said. “You just saw it happen with your own eyes. No jury in the world would acquit your wife. An open-and-shut death penalty case.”
“You … youevil?—”
“So let me reiterate: You will come and work on the project until we say we are satisfied. You do that, and this evidence will never get out. Do we see eye to eye now?”
“Do you think I’m a fool? I’m supposed to take you at your word? You’re a liar!” He was yelling. Losing it. Oh God,Beatrix!
“Blackwell—”
“I need aVow.A binding Vow with”—sudden inspiration—“with thevice president.” He took a breath, the rest of the plan coming to him. “Draden will take no actions to harm my wife and he will proactivelystopanyone else from doing so.”
“Blackwell—”
“Make that happen and I’ll do what you want. Otherwise, go to fuckinghell.”
“Are you quite done?”
He scowled at Whitaker, clenching his teeth to stop the fearful trembling. At all costs he had to protect Beatrix. He’d utterly failed to keep her sister safe, he hadn’t been able to do a thing to prevent Rosemarie’s murder, but he would be damned if he let the magiocracy ruin her life any more than it already had.
Whitaker crossed his arms. “I’ll see what we can arrange.”
“The vice president,” Peter said, voice raised. “No one else.No one.”
Whitaker gave him a fleeting look of annoyance—yes, howirritatingthis all was, the way he was reacting to the complete devastation of everything he cared about—and swept from the room.
Leaving him alone with Morse.
“Mrs. Blackwell?”
She opened her eyes and stared in confusion at Senator Gray. Had she fallen asleep on the job? Then she remembered that he’d fired her weeks ago, and?—
She sat up, gasping for air. She was on a cot at the end of a hallway in what looked like a hospital.“Lydia!”
“In surgery,” Gray said quickly, putting a hand on her shoulder as if he feared she might run off.
She grasped his other hand with both of hers. “She’s…alive?”
“Yes. They think—well, they haven’t lost hope that she could pull through.”
“Oh,” Beatrix sobbed, relief and anxiety buffeting her from all directions. Then she considered how very simple it would be for wizards to intervene at this stage—for someone to make sure her sister did not beat the odds. She leapt to her feet. “Where is she?”
He pointed. “In there.”
Four feet away stood a door with a small, square window. She stepped up to it, fear gripping her, and looked through.
Nearly everything inside was an antiseptic white—the doctors’ scrubs, the nurses’ dresses and caps, the operating table, the painted bricks on the wall. Lydia’s auburn hair looked far too colorful to be allowed. Her face, however, was almost pale enough to match the room.
She was turned in such a way that her wound was not visible, but the memory of how it looked was seared in Beatrix’s mind. She pressed her hands against the door, feeling as helpless as she had on the platform. How could she keep wizards out? All that occurred to her was a surreptitiously cast shielding spell on the room. But that required demarcation stones, and Peter had them in his?—
The rest of the attack on Lydia came back to her. She stumbled to the cot, dizzy and sick.
