Page 87 of The Witch They Crave

"And your friends? The little witch you eat lunch with. The Marchand girl."

Something in me goes still at friends, at the specificity of it, but I keep my fork moving. "Nellie's fine. When you’re not threatening her, that is."

"Good. It's good to have people." He says it like a throwaway line. "It gives a life shape. Stakes. Something to lose." He sets down his knife. "I've been thinking a great deal lately about the things we're willing to do for the people we can't afford to lose. What we'll break. Who we'll become." His eyes lift to mine. "Haven't you?"

The wine sits untouched in front of me. I don't trust my hand not to give something away if I pick it up. "I don't know what you mean," I say.

"No. I don't suppose you do. Not yet." He smiles, and it's almost fond, and it's the worst thing I've seen on his face all night. "Eat, Calypso. You'll need it."

And that—you'll need it—changes the vibe from being off to straight up wrong.

He's in a mood, and he's stopped hiding it. Whatever patience he's been performing for me these last weeks is gone tonight, worn through, and something about the empty house and the wine and the digs tells me I'm running out of time to be useful to him.

Which means I need to make my move.

Half the staff gone. Aamon out past midnight. Leopold parked at this table with his whole attention on me instead of on wherever he keeps his secrets. I won't get a night like this again—an empty house and a locked study and no one in the halls to stop me.

Whatever he's hiding, I have to find it before whatever's coming gets here. My gut's been screaming it since I walked in the door.

"May I be excused?" I say, in the flattest, most exhausted voice I own. "I've got reading to finish and a headache building. I won't be good company."

He studies me a moment. Then, magnanimous: "Of course. Rest. Tomorrow's an important day."

I don't ask what makes tomorrow important. I take my bag off the chair and I go, and I make it look like I'm going up to my rooms right until the landing, where I stop, and wait, and listen, and don't.

I go up the first flight, past the landing, and then—when no sound follows me, when the dining room stays quiet and Leopold stays in it—I double back down the servants' stairs instead.

Everyone underestimates the same thing about me. It can be a gift if you use it right. Leopold included: I don't leave locked boxes alone.

I couldn't leave the vault door alone. I can't leave Shandy alone—possibly caught in something with teeth that runs straight back through these walls. And I can't leave alone the study Leopold keeps locked. Whatever he scored from behind that vault door is important–maybe enough to be behind lock and key.

The halls are dark and dead. Lights banked to nothing, no bodies at their usual posts, the whole ground floor holding its breath. I move barefoot along the runners, having kicked my shoes off for stealth purposes at the top of the stairs. I count doors, and I find the study. East wing, ground floor. A door heavier than the others, locked, of course.

I don't know the first thing about picking a lock.

But I know how to break things. It's the only thing I've ever been reliably good at.

I can’t help but smile. It’s worth a shot.

I wrap my hand around the knob and reach for the fire behind my sternum. Slow, careful, a trickle and not a flood—the way Aamon taught me, observe, name, meter it out—and the heat crawls down my arm and pools in my palm until the light of it bleeds white between my fingers, throwing my own shadow hard against the wall. The metal warms. Then it gives, softening at the edges, and I grit my teeth and haul back on it with everything I've got.

The knob tears out of the door in a shriek of splintering wood and a fistful of ruined brass.

The door drifts open on its own, nothing left to hold it shut. A laugh falls out of me like an exhale.

Jackpot.

Inside: a desk, shelves, a bank of filing cabinets along the far wall, the held-breath quiet of a room nobody's supposed to enter. Moonlight through the shutters lays it out in bars of silver and black. I leave the lights off as if the darkness might protect me.

I go straight to the cabinets.

They're labeled—luck for me, or arrogance on Leopold’s part. Household. Accounts. Correspondence. I start with Household and it's exactly what it says, staff files, wages, contracts, and I almost move on before a word snags me: half the files aren't employment records at all. They're donor records. Names, blood types, feeding schedules, a column tracking something labeled decline. Page after page of people logged like livestock.

I make myself keep turning. I don't have time to be sick.

Accounts is money—vast, ugly amounts of it, routed through names I don't recognize and a few I do. I file the ones I do.

The house creaks somewhere above me and I freeze, every muscle locked, listening. A bead of sweat rolls down my spine as I hold my breath.