Page 92 of The Witch They Crave

I blink, tears streaming down my face. My entire body deflates.

"You," he says. "You were the child."

"I didn't—" My voice breaks. "I didn't… I couldn't—"

"I know." He says it so simply. "I've always known. That's the part I could never reconcile. If you'd been a monster, I could have hated you clean. But you were a child who couldn't help what she was, but my sister is still dead. Someone has to be responsible, Calypso. Someone has to be. Because if it's no one—if it was only chemistry, only a wrong place, wrong time situation—then there's no one left to blame but me. I'm the one who brought her there. I'm the one who left her on this floor and promised her she was safe."

I swallow hard, the lump in my throat aching as a silent sob falls out of me.

"So it’s been you. For twelve years, it’s been you. I needed it to be you."

Eleven, they told me. Eleven people. A number small enough to hold and too big to feel. And now one of those eleven has a face. A vampire girl told to wait somewhere safe, and I unmade her without ever knowing she was there.

Leopold's spent twelve years turning that into a life spent hunting me and suddenly everything makes sense. My hands are shaking in their bindings as I suck in a sharp breath and break down.

"So all of it—" My voice isn't working right. I can barely breathe around the ache in my chest. "The sponsorship. The debt. Bringing me into your house. None of it was ever—"

"It was always this room," he says. "Everything was always this room."

And I understand that I have spent months being walked, step by careful step, back to the scene of the thing he needs me to answer for. That the whole architecture of my life this year was a hand at the small of my back, steering me back here.

"But you didn't just want to bring me back," I say, because there's more, there's the folding chair and the thing under his palm and Kage in silver and none of it is explained by grief. "You want something. Grieving men don't chain people to walls."

"No," Leopold agrees, a soft smirk. "They don't."

And then, behind me, from the doorway I'm not facing, a voice I would know at the bottom of the deepest sedation they ever poured into me says, very quietly: "Let her go, Leopold."

My stomach clenches.

Aamon.

He's here. I don’t know how he found me, but he's here, unmade, his shirt wrong and his hair out of its severe line. The exact way he looked the night he came through my door because I screamed inside my own head and he couldn't stay away.

Because I screamed inside my own head.

Something cold begins, very far down, to move.

"Ah," Leopold says. He doesn't stand. He doesn't look surprised—and that's the detail that turns my stomach. "There he is. Right on time." He looks at me, almost kind. "I told you I was counting on it."

Right. This was his plan from the beginning.

"Aamon," I say. "Don't—it's a trap, he wants you here, he planned—"

"I know." Aamon's eyes never leave Leopold. He's very still, the stillness that in him means he's closer to violence than he'll ever show, but under it—I can read him, I've spent months learning to read him—under it there's something that isn't calculation. Something like dread. "I know what this is. Let her go, take me, and we'll end it here."

Aamon shifts his weight—barely, a fraction, the beginning of a step toward me—and Leopold moves faster than I've ever seen him move. He's out of the chair and behind me in the space of a blink, one cold hand fisted in my hair, my head wrenched back, the line of my throat bared to the room.

I whimper as pain shoots through my scalp.

"Move any closer," Leopold says, pleasant as ever, his mouth near my ear, "and I'll open her throat and drink her dry where she kneels. You'll cross the room in time to watch the light go out. Do you want to test how fast you are against how fast I am? With her life as the wager?"

Aamon goes absolutely still. Every line of him, locked.

"No," Leopold agrees, as if he'd answered. "I didn't think so."

For a long moment he holds me there, my pulse jumping against his fingers, letting Aamon look at exactly how close his hand is to my throat. Making sure the lesson takes. Then, satisfied, he releases me—unwinds his fist from my hair one strand at a time, almost tender—and steps back around the chair and lowers himself into it.

"You offered to trade yourself for her," he says to Aamon, and he sounds delighted, because we've circled back to the thing he actually wants. "You see, that's the piece I couldn't be certain of, all this time. Whether I was right.”