Page 39 of The Witch They Crave

"Leave them."

Leopold. Crossing the floor with that unhurried glide, sliding neatly between me and the iron like he's stepping in to help. He looks at the cuffs in Zeva's hands with something like distaste, and then he looks at my wrists, at the dozen small punctures still weeping into the cuffs of Nellie's black shirt, and his face does something soft and terrible.

"She's not a criminal," he says. "She's my ward now. We don't chain guests." A pause, warm, pitched for the room. "Those are for transporting the condemned. Miss Dellaby has been spared that. Haven't you, Calypso?”

He says my name like he's tasting it.

"Of course," he adds, quieter, only for me, as Zeva steps back, "the irons stay in the house. Should you ever give me reason." The smile never moves. "I do hope you won't."

"Reason like what," I say. "Existing? Because I've got a real talent for it lately, and it seems to bother a lot of people."

His smile doesn't move, but something behind his eyes warms up, pleased, like I've just done a trick he was hoping for.

"There she is," he murmurs. "I was worried the cellar had dulled you."

Corvin and Zeva flank me one last time on the way out—habit, or orders that haven't caught up to the new arrangement yet. At the courtroom doors Corvin stops. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the middle distance the way he does, the way that used to make me think he wasn't paying attention until I understood that Corvin is always paying attention, that the flat affect is the disguise.

"Miss Dellaby." Formal. For the record. Then, lower, under the noise of the emptying gallery: "You've been a quiet assignment. Predictable. I like predictable." His eyes come to me then, just for a second, and there's nothing flat in them at all. "New house. New staff. New everything. But some of us are harder to reassign than a set of quarters. You understand me."

I swallow against the lump in my throat.

I do. I understand him completely.

He knows that I know he's been reporting to someone who isn't the council. And he's telling me, in the only language he's allowed to use in a room full of ears, that the walls of my life are changing but not the eyes in them—that wherever Leopold puts me, Corvin will still be watching, through whatever means necessary, for whoever it is he actually answers to.

"Take care of yourself," he says, and then he and Zeva peel away and I never do get to say anything back. That's probably the point.

Zeva catches my eye as she goes. She doesn't say a word. But she tips her head, one degree, the way she did in the cellar the night everything went wrong—it really was peaceful down there.

Aamon reaches me before Leopold can, cutting the distance without seeming to hurry, the way he does. He doesn't touch me. He just puts himself at my shoulder, close, his voice low enough that it dies before it reaches anyone else.

"I've got you," he says. "Whatever you need. I'll bring it. Give me a day to see the shape of the place and I'll have everything sorted." A breath. "You're not walking into that house alone. Do you hear me?"

I hear him. I don't trust the warmth it puts in my chest, because trusting him has cost me before—but I hear him.

"They're not going to make this easy on you either," I say.

"No." Almost a smile, there and gone. "Leopold would never."

Then, speak of the devil, Leopold is there, and Aamon steps back into the exact distance the council requires of him, and the warden slides down over the man like it was never gone.

∞∞∞

After the Inquest, I’m left with nowhere else to go but… with Leopold.

He walks me to the house himself. He doesn't have to—he’s got a whole group of staff who accompanied him—but he sends them ahead and offers me his arm, bent at the elbow, courtly, like we're going to dinner. I don't take it. He smirks, lets it fall, and matches my stride anyway.

The campus watches us go. The same students who called me murderer this morning watch me cross the north lawn toward House Vassard now, and I can see them trying to work out whether I've been punished or promoted. Leopold soaks it up. He nods to people. He knows their names. Out here in the light he's the most charming man in Louisiana.

"You spoke well in there," he says. "The staff in combat class. The boy handing you one when no one else would. That got the mother—I watched her face." He says it like a critic marking a scene. "Real, was it?"

"Every word."

"Mm. It shows. You could have played the victim. Half that room came in ready to hand it to you—the provocation, the sealed file, the poor sedated girl. You didn't reach for any of it." A glance sideways, appraising. "The whole circle lit up under your feet and you held your magic back anyway. Gave them nothing to be afraid of. That's the part I liked."

"I did it for me. Not for the room."

"Better still." He's delighted. Genuinely. "A woman who performs for herself is a woman I can work with."