Cal had been watching the dwindling level of his father’s glass, and listening to his growing bluster. When he reached over for a refill, Cal got to his feet, nudging Nadine to hers.
“Leaving so soon?” his father remarked.
“History won’t price itself,” Cal said easily, though he tightened his grip on Nadine’s arm. “And luckily for me, neither will my clients.” He tugged firmly, in unspoken command.
She followed him meekly from the room under the study of three pairs of eyes. Cal considered returning to their rooms but his baser appetites were sated for now, and even after all that wine, he was too agitated to retire. It felt too much like hiding.
His feet carried him determinedly through one of the galleries, into the parlor. A familiar path, taken many times when he was a boy. The trophy cabinets and mounted heads should have been off-putting to one so small, but he had been raised in the midst of it, and found the gamey smell of old, dusty fur a strange comfort.
When he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that they were breathing once more, surrounded by the pine planks taken from the ghosts of a decimated forest.
“I used to hide in here as a child,” he said, looking at the head of a grizzly. Not sure why he was telling her this, he continued awkwardly, “Odessa used to tell me that the animalswould come alive when no one was looking. I wanted to see them. Catch them.”
“Dead things don’t come back to life when they’re dead,” Nadine said bitterly.
“Yes, I know that now. My father is a diligent teacher in that regard.”
“He doesn’t like me.” Nadine was looking at the picture of Evangeline and Cal noticed, with a flash of unease, that she bore more than a passing resemblance to Caledon’s second wife.
“Oh, I’m afraid he likes you well enough. Although perhaps not in the way you’d think.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“It means he’d like to fuck you before he kills you,” Cal said bluntly, driven by the various discomforts bubbling up inside him to wound in return. “And my brother is the same way. That’s why I bit you. That’s why I marked you. My father was going to give you to Ben to play with—right up to the moment he shot you after the festival.”
She stared at him in horror. “And your mother . . . is okay with that?”
“She’s a sparrow. She made her choice. She knows full well what we are. Believe me.”
Did she, though?A nagging voice whispered. He recalled his mother’s expression as his father forced her to recount the night of their courtship, the trembling of her hand as she kept up a brave face for the benefit of his father’s captive audience.
“And that’s what you do?” Nadine was asking. “You just run around—fucking and killing and hurting everyone, and the people you drag into this mess just have to sit there and watch?”
She thinks you’re a monster. A bitter satisfaction steeped into his bones as he straightened.
“It’s tradition, Nadine. The past follows us wherever we go. It dictates the fucking future thanks to that will and its codicils. Everything that happens outside of these walls, is, ultimately, meaningless.” He grabbed her hand before she could back from him, pressing it to his cheek. “Look at me. I’m my great-great-grandfather’s spitting image. Everybody says so.”
Her hand made a fist against his jaw. “That doesn’t mean you have tobehim!”
“My brother’s right for once. You do have a tender heart. It almost makes me want to spare you, just so I don’t have to watch it break.”
“Then let me go. Help me get out of here.”
Cal was tempted. He’d been tempted before at the restaurant in Arboreus, too. Part of him had considered leaving her there at one of the weathered old inns. It wasn’t escape, but at least it would have been out of Argentum, and this fucking place.
But that was the thing about his family: they were hunters, all of them. Even if he released her, it would still be open season. Some of them would even relish the challenge. And now that he had marked her, he could not quite bring himself to let her go.
“Maybe I’ll marry you,” he mused. “Do you think you could satisfy me, Nadine? I’m willing to let you try.”
“You said you would show me what happened to Noelle.”
“Yes. I also said you would have to give me something in return.”
“What do you want?” She was trying to be brave but her strength was flagging. The girl who had marched in heredetermined to drag her sister out of hell, like Orpheus with his poor doomed Eurydice, was turning into a shade of herself. “I’ll do it.”
“You’d sign yourself away to me so easily? What if I asked you to be my sparrow?”
“Even that.” She sounded resigned.
