Page 93 of The Witch They Crave

Aamon’s jaw clenches.

“Right about what?” I ask.

Leopold chuckles. “See, I had a theory. I couldn't test it without spending everything I had." He looks at Aamon as his lips pull into a sinister smile. "So I spent it. I took her. And here you are—miles from where you're meant to be, inside a sealed building you have no way of finding, for her." A pause. "No council warden does that. No council instrument does that. Only one thing does that."

"Leopold," Aamon says, and there's warning in it, and there's something else in it, something I have never once heard in his voice in all these months.

Fear.

"You want to know how I found this room?" Leopold says—to me now, only to me, like Aamon isn't in the doorway at all. "Room 714. The origin point. Where they found you sitting in the ash of my sister's whole floor?"

He stands. Unhurried. Crosses a slow step toward me.

"That detail wasn’t public. It was buried in your file—your beautiful, redacted file—sealed away where no grieving brother should ever have been able to read it." Another step. "And yet."

"Leopold." Aamon's voice, low, a warning.

Leopold doesn't turn to him. His eyes stay on me, and that's worse.

"Someone with access to that file has spent a year making very certain the council never saw what you truly are. A man who edits your records. A man"—he tilts his head—"who runs to you the instant you're frightened. From any distance. Through any wall."

Across the room Kage has gone rigid against the silver, his eyes cutting to me, to Aamon, doing the same math I refuse to do.

"A man, or should I say vampire, of a bloodline I looked into," Leopold says softly, "once I let myself suspect. A bloodline that has a particularly useful ability, Calypso."

I look at Aamon. He’s white as a ghost.

“A bloodline that can read minds.”

No.

"And speak into them."

No.

"The voice in your head," Leopold says gently. "The one you've never told a soul about. The one who has probably been speaking to you since you first stepped foot onto Devenir."

I shake my head, unable to look away from Leopold. No. No. Not this. Anything but—

"Ask him," Leopold says.

And I don't want to. Every part of me is bracing against it, every survival instinct screaming to keep my eyes on Leopold, on the threat, on the enemy—but my body turns me anyway, turns me toward Aamon in the doorway. I have to see his face, because I’ll know. I’ll know if Leopold is telling the truth.

I’ll know if this is all some kind of sick joke…

For one second. One single second. Aamon’s jaw doesn't do its tell, his thumb doesn't find his fingers, his face doesn’t go still—it does the opposite, it comes open, all the careful architecture I've watched him hold for months coming apart at once, and in the wreckage of it is the answer, plain as any words, plainer, because I taught myself to read the silence between his words and the silence is screaming.

It's true.

Aamon is the voice inside my head. He’s always been the voice. Every night it spoke to me, every impossible tender thing said into the dark when I had no one—that was him. The training. The grounding. Look at it, it's just light. The night of the nightmare when he told me the steadiness was mine, when I asked him if any of what I felt was real and he answered doubts I had only ever thought—

He heard them.

He heard everything because he could read my mind. He was inside my mind.

He has heard all of it. Every private thing. Every doubt I never said out loud. The one place inside me I believed was mine, and he has been standing in it the entire time.

"Calypso." Aamon says my name and his voice breaks on it. "Calypso, I was going to tell you. That night—I tried—"