Miraculously, no broken bones. But hell, I’d beg for broken bones over this unconscious shit. A clear bag of IV fluid hangs above her, and countless machines beep, their pattern never changing. She’s breathing, yet she barely seems alive.
There might not be a hospital in Brume, but the fancy university clinic more than makes up for its absence. The rooms are so new they sparkle, and the bathrooms . . . they rival mine back in Marseille. If the University’s short on funds, this place is why. If only they’d allocated ten euros of the cash spent on decorating this joint to replace the hairy soap-on-a-stick in my dorm’stoilettes hommeswith liquid soap dispensers.
Two hours and thirty-six minutes.
You deserve to die, Rainier told me when Cadence was transported in here.
I didn’t disagree. No matter what kind of weird shit he did with my money, no matter how easily he left me to the sharks in the system, no matter how often he’s lied, it doesn’t matter.
Iput on the ring.Istarted this whole mess.
And thenthe one timeI needed to be by Cadence’s side, I forced her to go off on her own. And she ended up here.
When the fire brigade broke down the temple door, I set out like a doped-up racehorse leaping out of a starting gate. On the temple steps, a paramedic was shining a pen light into Bastian’s eyes and asking him questions. He was conscious and answering accurately.
Still, I asked him to list the foster parents we’d had. Once he’d spoken all their hateful names, I’d raced across the quad toward a site of such destruction that my heart didn’t beat once on the way there.
The Beaux-Arts veranda was gone, thousands of shards of glass glinting like diamonds on the snow as the firefighters swept over the area with their flashlights. The building itself had caved in, now resembling a Roman ruin with its smashed pillars, uneven sections of gray limestone walls, and arches of tenacious ceiling.
Two men grunted as they lifted a slab of slate roofing.
“We have something!” one of them yelled.
I ran toward where they stood. When I reached them, reachedher, my breaths stopped short in my lungs. For an eternity, I stared down at her unmoving body. And then something in me snapped, and I lunged. Before my fingers could brush over her bloodied cheek, seek out her pulse, Adrien and one of the firemen cuffed my arms and hauled me back to let the paramedic do his job. I spit obscenities at them, roared to be released.
“Slate, calm down. Cadence would want you to calm down.”
“Calm down? Are you fucking kidding me? How am I supposed to fucking calm down, Prof?”
“I have a pulse,” the man kneeling beside her exclaimed.
I stopped fighting and gulped back the jagged lump stuck in my throat.
“Should he be touching her?” Adrien asked.
I was about to go off on him when I understood what he meant. If she was clutching her piece, he’d be cursed.
“Too late now,” I murmured.
They dug out her legs, then brought over a stretcher and laid her unresponsive body out. Her red coat was white with powdered plaster, her leggings dark with blood, and her fingers limp, devoid of any golden leaf.
“Could she have put it inside her pockets?” Adrien asked.
I grazed both. Empty.
I wanted to accompany the firemen wherever they were taking Cadence, but Adrien tipped his head to the rubble of glass, snow, and stone. “We need to find it.”
We spent hours, Adrien and I, on our knees. At some point, Bastian and Alma joined, and even though I growled at them to get the fuck away, they didn’t.
The sun was rising when we finally gave up, my death warrant signed and sealed.
But, like I said, doesn’t matter.
As long as Cadence lives . . .
Rainier rolls up to me now, an odd gentleness to his voice. “There’s rooftop access in this building. Gives onto the rocks below.”
His blue eyes, so many shades darker than his daughter’s, stray to the bay window with a panorama of the mist-cloaked, icy lake. It’s such a different view than the one from his office. Perhaps because the clinic’s perched on Fourth, and his manor—Cadence’smanor—sits on the lowest circle of this town.
