The room was small—smaller than my bedroom, smaller than the library, smaller than any room I'd seen in this house. There was a crib in the corner, white and delicate, draped in lace. A rocking chair beside the window. A mobile hung from the ceiling, carved wooden animals—horses, cows, a pig with a curly tail—that turned slowly in the breeze from the heating vent.
This had been Gabriel's room, once. Or Nathan's. Or both. It smelled like dust and lavender and the ghost of something that had once been alive.
I sat in the rocking chair and looked at the crib.
I thought about my mother. About the fever. About the winter that took half a dozen souls from the valley. I thought about Mercy, the calf I'd delivered when I was ten, the way she'd looked at me with those dark, wet eyes.
I thought about the future Aleksander was building for me. Vet school. A degree. A life.
And I thought about the cages. The women. The things I'd seen in the warehouse that I couldn't unsee.
"You shouldn't be in here."
I turned. Nathan was standing in the doorway, his shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed over his chest.
"It was open," I said.
"It's never open. The servants must have forgotten to lock it."
"Whose room was it?"
"Mine. Gabriel's. We shared it when we were young. Before my mother..." He trailed off. Didn't finish the sentence.
"Before she died."
"Yes."
He walked into the room. His footsteps were soft on the carpet, almost silent, but I felt every one of them. He stopped beside the crib, his hand resting on the railing, his eyes fixed on the mobile.
"She used to sit in that chair," he said. "Rocking us. Singing. I don't remember the songs, but I remember the sound of her voice. Low. Soft. Like she was telling us secrets."
"You miss her."
"Every day."
I looked at him. Really looked. At the sharp line of his jaw, the hollows under his cheekbones, the way his hands gripped the crib like he was holding onto something that was trying to slip away.
"You're not what I expected," I said.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone harder. Someone colder."
"The night is young." He turned to face me, and his smile was back—that sharp, dangerous smile. "I can still be cruel, if you'd like."
"I'd like you to be honest."
"Honest." He considered the word like it was something he'd never tasted before. "All right. Honest. I don't trust you. I don't trust anyone who gets this close to my father this quickly. You're either the luckiest woman in the world or the most dangerous, and I haven't figured out which yet."
"What if I'm both?"
"Then you're even more interesting than I thought."
He walked toward me. I stayed in the rocking chair, my hands folded in my lap, my heart beating faster than I wantedit to. He stopped in front of me, close enough to touch, close enough to kiss.
"My father adopted you today," he said. "Made you a Mire. Gave you his name."
"He made me his ward."
