Page 52 of Cruel Rite

I choose the second, and I name the reason to myself in words I recognize as his before I recognize them as mine: if I walk in there right now I hand him a version of this shaped by fear, and fear is the one thing I have never let him see the shape of.

Two documents landed in one afternoon and neither one is undoing itself. I hold, folded flat against my ribs, dated and figured proof that my marriage was built fifteen months before my father was killed—the case I’ve built all year, closed now, on paper. And somewhere in a locked drawer at Kholm House is a four-year indenture with my roommate’s name on it, and she doesn’t know it exists, and I don’t know how to tell her without also telling her what it means that I know.

Ravelin Hall is quiet when Maksim’s driver leaves me at the gravel—too quiet for two in the afternoon, no one at the door, no word yet of a wrecked car on the Ashfen road reaching a house that hears about everything before I do. I go up to my own room first. I take the record out from against my ribs and put it somewhere only I know, under the loose board I found in November and have never once used, and it’s the first time all year I have chosen to sit on evidence instead of using it the moment I got my hands on it. Every other document I’ve ever gotten this close to, I’ve spent within the hour. This one I hide from the man it’s about.

I give myself the hour. Then I go looking for my husband, on my own timing, the door already closed between us until I decide to open it myself.

I walk the length of the third-floor corridor, past every door between mine and his, the record’s absence a strange lightness against my ribs where its weight was a minute ago, toward the one door in this house that has never once, in five months, been left open—not by him, not by staff, not by anyone. The radiators have gone quiet somewhere behind the wall. No voice comes from inside. No light shows past the frame.

The door at the end stands open.

Chapter 33: Since October

The phone goes off on the desk at 2:40, and it’s Rook, not Tomas, which is already wrong before I’ve picked it up.

Tomas is the one who calls when the car’s running late. Rook doesn’t call about cars. Rook calls about things that have already happened.

“Say it in order,” I tell him, before he’s finished the first sentence, because he’s giving it to me backward—Isadora, then the road, then Tomas—and I need it the other way, the way it actually happened, or I’ll spend the next ten minutes putting his sentence back in order instead of using what’s in it.

He starts again. Slower, which for Rook is its own kind of warning.

The Ashfen road, a mile short of the headland turn. A car came up fast on the blind bend, didn’t swerve, didn’t slow. Clipped the Rover hard enough to spin it sideways into the guardrail. Whoever was driving got out before the dust off the shoulder had even settled—which tells me, before Rook says another word, that nobody in that car was worried about being seen doing it.

Tomas took the wheel and the door frame. There’s blood, a lot of it, and he isn’t answering when spoken to. The campus medical service is already on scene, faster than any call could reasonably have gotten them there. I file that fact and step over it. It isn’t the one that matters right now.

Isadora isn’t with him.

“Say that part again,” I say, and my own voice comes out flat and even, which is how I know how far from flat and even I actually am.

“She’s not there. Two men came for her. Not Tomas’s men.” A pause—half a second, no more, but I’ve had this man beside me since we were fifteen and I have never once heard him take that half second before giving me a fact straight. “Kholm’s driver has her, not Tomas’s. That’s confirmed.”

I don’t ask a follow-up question. There isn’t one that changes anything I can do about it.

I know before Rook says another word which direction this goes, because there’s only one direction anyone takes a Corvane wife without asking first, and it isn’t a direction I hold a key to. Rook is at the house inside twenty minutes, standing in the doorway of the president’s rooms with his coat still on and his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, which he does when he hasn’t had time to think about how he looks, and I make him tell it to me again in person, start to finish, in case the version on the phone left something out that his face would give me and his voice didn’t.

It doesn’t. It’s the same report. It’s just worse the second time, the way anything is worse once you’ve had ten more minutes to understand what it means. He doesn’t sit. He stands the way he stands at every door in this house, like a man built to be load-bearing, and for once he doesn’t have an opinion about the rota or anybody’s boat to hide behind. He just watches me do the thing I’m about to do, which is start making calls I already know won’t work.

I make three calls myself, because I don’t hand this one to anybody else to make. The medical service confirms Tomas stable and alive and gives me nothing past that—I’m not next of kin, and whoever’s on that line has been told, apparently, not to volunteer more than she’s asked, which means somebody at Kholm House thought ahead about what I might try. The gatehouse confirms no car has cleared Ravelin Hall’s own grounds in either direction in the last hour, so whatever this is, it didn’t originate here and it isn’t coming here either, not yet. I call Maksim’s line directly, the number he’s never once in six months bothered to have changed on me, and he doesn’t pick up. Not the first time. Not the third.

I sit at the desk with the lamp on and the drawer shut. Her phone’s in there, from this morning—I put it there myself, before either of us had said a word about it, and I don’t open the drawer now, and I notice myself not opening it, which is its own kind of admission about what I think I’d find if I did.

Somewhere below us the house has gone quiet in the specific way it goes quiet when it’s started listening for a car it hasn’t heard yet—no argument in the halls, no staff moving between rooms, nothing but the radiators and the long wait underneath them.

I go through what I own the way I’d go through a ledger, top to bottom, looking for the one line that still pays out.

There isn’t one.

I own the road that runs past Kholm House and I do not own the house itself. I own twenty-one men in this house who would walk into fire if I told them to, and not one of them can set foot on Ashgrove ground over a stretch of bad luck on a public road, because “an unfortunate bend, drivers take it too fast” is deniable and Maksim knows it’s deniable and I know he knows, and a president who sends soldiers onto another president’s land over something that thin is a president handing his enemy a grievance with his own name already written on it. Maksim didn’t take her. He collected her—two men, a courtesy, a driver who says Mr. Zharov would like a word like he’s offering her a seat at dinner—and the courtesy is the whole message. He’s telling me he can do this, in daylight, on a public road, and I can’t call it anything a Rite would hear.

I have spent six months building a structure for exactly this afternoon. The house, the gate, the men on the road, the standing order that nothing touches her that hasn’t already gone through me first.

All of it. And it did not survive contact with a man being polite.

I’d almost admire that, if it weren’t happening to me.

The radiator down the hall knocks twice and goes quiet, the way it does every afternoon at this hour, and I sit there listening for the sound of a car on the gravel that hasn’t come yet, and it occurs to me that I am doing the exact thing I’ve watched her do since September—counting, cataloguing, running a number backward and forward looking for the place it doesn’t reconcile—except she does it because she’s never in her life been able to afford not to, and I’m doing it because for the first time in mine, I have nothing else to spend an hour on.

The window’s cold light goes from white to grey while I work it, the way it does every March afternoon this far north, and I work it backward the same way I work everything backward, because working it backward is the only thing left to do with my hands.