Page 94 of The Witch They Crave

"I stopped you." The words come out of me hollow. Not tonight. Whatever it is. Give me tonight without it. My own fingers against his mouth. I built the wall myself. I chose not to know. "I stopped you."

"Yes."

No. I couldn’t have known he was keeping something like this from me. Keeping something so massive, so invasive…

"How long?" Tears are streaming down my face. My breathing is choppy. My body is shaking.

"The day you arrived." Quiet. Wrecked. "You were on the front steps, about to walk in, terrified out of your mind. And I heard all of it. I didn't decide to speak—it just happened." He stops. "Oh. That was the first thing. Do you remember? Before I even knew I'd said it, you were reacting."

I remember. God help me, I remember. You ARE strong, aren't you. The first warm thing anyone had said to me in twelve years, and it felt like being found.

"I told myself I'd only listen," he says. "Only make sure you survived. And then you were so alone, and I couldn't stop." His voice frays. "It was the only kindness I had that wouldn't get you killed. And by the time I understood how much of you I'd let myself have, telling you would risk everything."

I loved him.

I think I loved him.

I gave him my body. I gave him the truth about the vault. I gave him the thing I don't give anyone—I let him in—but he was already in. He was in before I chose it. He's had a key to to my head since day one, and I no longer know who wrote a single feeling I've had since I got here.

I can't find the seam. There's never a seam.

It will be real, Odette's note said. It won't always be theirs.

My chest feels like it’s cracking open, my heart being squeezing in a vice.

“Fuck–” I breathe.

Because I don't even know whose grief this is, cracking me open on the floor of my worst nightmare. Mine, or the tether's, or his, bleeding across the wire he never told me existed.

"Beautiful," Leopold breathes.

I had forgotten he was here. I had forgotten all of it—the danger that I’m in—in the private wreck of the last thirty seconds, which was, I understand now, exactly what Leopold wanted. He wanted me broken open and looking the wrong way.

Because while I was looking at Aamon, Leopold has lifted the thing off his knee.

It's small. Older than the room, older than anything. A disc of dark tarnished metal worked with figures worn nearly smooth, strung on a chain, sitting in his palm like a coin he's about to spend. My magic, even sluggish, even drowned, flinches toward it and away from it at once, the way it flinched at the vault door.

"You recognize it," Leopold says, watching my face. "Some part of you does. You should. You freed it."

The vault. The thing he went straight to, seemed to be searching for the whole time. I broke that door open for him but never saw what he recovered. I just knew it was important to him.

Important enough to be locked in that vault.

"You made me open a vault," I say, "to get that?"

He turns the disc in his fingers, and there's something almost boyish in his face now, the pride of a man showing off the prize he's waited a lifetime for. "Witch-forged. Centuries old. Made in an age when my kind and yours were at open war, when a witch needed a way to unmake a specific vampire's hold on the world. It's keyed to a single bloodline." His eyes flick to Aamon, and back to me, bright with satisfaction. "It binds. It transfers. It controls."

"Leopold." Aamon has moved—half a step, no more, before he catches himself, because he's already been shown what the next step costs. His hands open at his sides, helpless, all that centuries-old power with nowhere to put itself. "Whatever you think that does—"

"I know what it does. I've known for years what it does. I simply couldn't reach it." Leopold stands. "The council put a leash on the most dangerous witch alive and handed the other end to you. The fail-safe. Her suppression. The one thing keeping her survivable, and your one shred of leverage. The reason you've been able to protect her at all." He lifts the disc. "I'm going to take it off you. I will to control her fail-safe."

And I understand, all at once, sitting on the floor of the room where I killed his sister, exactly what I have done.

I armed him.

I handed him the final brick he needed for his master plan.

My own magic did this.