Page 88 of The Witch They Crave

Seconds tick by. I realize it was just the house settling. Just old wood in the cold. I breathe out and keep going.

Correspondence is locked separately, a slimmer drawer with its own mechanism, and I don't have another lock-break in me that isn’t tempting fate to bring the roof down, so I leave it. But my eyes keep going back to the bottom of the cabinet, to the last drawer, the one my gut flagged the second I walked in.

No label at all. The only unlabeled drawer in a room where everything is labeled.

That's the one. Things you don't name are the things you're most afraid of.

I crouch. I get my fingers into the pull. It's heavier than the others, or locked, or both—it doesn't want to come—and I brace and work it and feel it start to give, a quarter inch, half, the runners groaning, a folder edge showing pale in the dark—

The overhead light snaps on.

"You know," Leopold says from the doorway, "I truly hoped you'd be better than this."

I freeze, my heart stalling in my chest.

Oh god.

I straighten, take my hand off the drawer, and turn. He's taken his jacket off since dinner, cuffs turned back. His eyes are trained to my every move, but his gaze isn’t angry.

It’s tired.

"How–how long have you been standing there?" I ask.

"Long enough." He steps in and pushes the ruined door closed behind him as far as it'll go, which isn't all the way, not anymore. "Long enough to watch you go straight for the one drawer that matters. No hesitation. Straight to it." He tilts his head. "I keep making the same mistake with you. I keep expecting you to be boring like the others. A weapon points where it's aimed. It doesn't go looking."

I clear my throat, my heart pounding in my throat. "What's in the drawer, Leopold?"

"You already know, or you wouldn't have skipped dessert to destroy my door." His eyes drop to my hands—still, not shaking, and something in his face flickers at that. Almost approval. "Your friend. The little Seer. Yes. She comes here. She has an arrangement, like the rest of them, and it's entirely voluntary, and it's killing her by degrees. I could have told you that, if you'd asked. Instead of this." A pause. "But you don't ask. You break in."

"You're feeding on her."

"I’m not." He says it flat, and the awful part is I believe him. "I don't share. But I have associates, and they have appetites, and a house like this runs on the quiet accommodation of appetites. Your friend made a bargain with one of them. A foolish one. They're always foolish." He moves deeper into the room, unhurried. I hold my ground, because backing up is what prey does. "And when she'd been used up—when she stopped being worth the upkeep—I'd have helped him make her disappear. Cleanly. No body, no questions, no grieving little coven asking where their Seer went. That's how it's done. That's how it's been done, quietly, for centuries, in houses exactly like this one."

The floor drops out of me. "You'd have killed her."

"I'd have solved her." He says it without heat, and that's the horror of it—the total absence of cruelty, like I'm the strange one for flinching. "You look at me like that's monstrous. It's natural, Calypso. Not every witch is worth the trouble of keeping." His eyes settle on me, and something in them shifts, goes almost soft, and it's so much worse than the coldness. "Not all of them are you."

"Then why do you look like you’re about to do something ugly to me?"

The performance drops. The face underneath isn't a monster's. It's tired. Ancient. Done. He’s out of patience and he’s done pretending.

"Because you forced my hand," he says.

My eyes narrow as I look at him. For the first time, I take a step back. My shoulders hit the filing cabinet and I flinch. "I–I didn't force you to do anything."

"No?" Something moves behind his eyes. "I had time. A plan that ran for months, that accounted for every variable—the Council, the tribunal, your inconvenient guardians, all of it. And then you started pulling threads. The vault. Now this. You can't leave anything alone, can you?" His hand lifts, and I see it—a small glass vial, a syringe, tucked against his palm.

I swallow hard, my stomach dropping.

"I'd have given you a gentler version of tonight. I want you to know that. But you've made gentle impossible. So."

Everything in me goes cold. I can already feel the sensation–another needle prick. A thousand needle pricks. They never get old.

"No." I'm sliding against the filing cabinet, trying to put distance between us, prey be damned. "Not that. Anything but that."

"I know what this is to you." He shakes the syringe. "I’ve read every single page of your file, Calypso. I know exactly what this does to you—which is why it has to be this, and not—" he tips his head, and I understand he means his teeth, means the faster way, the kinder way, "—the alternative. I need you to understand I know precisely what I'm choosing. I'm choosing the thing you fear most, on purpose." A breath. "You did this. Remember you did this."

I run.