Page 32 of The City Of Fractured Memory

I internally berate myself for not asking after her more often. “Can I help at all? I’d love to see her.”

“I’m sure she’d love that. I can take you when we’re finished here if you like?” he says, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes, so I quickly nod my agreement and take the hint, turning my attention back to the bodies. I take my time inspecting them, but frustratingly, I don’t see anything new that stands out. Those tattoos, however—the dark and curling ink that adorns both their wrists—refuse to stop drawing my eye.

My brow furrows as I gently run my finger over one. “It’s on both of them,” I mutter, tracing the air just above the skin. “They’re identical, even the numbers under the magpie. They have to mean something to each other, or to whoever did this. I asked around to see if anyone recognised it, but all I got were refusals to co-operate or threats. This is too significant to be a coincidence, and given people’s reluctance to help, I think it could be a crucial lead.”

Silence follows. Too much silence. I glance up.

Xavier isn’t studying the marks. He isn’t even looking at the bodies. He stands a step back, arms folded tightly across his chest, eyes a shade too careful as he looks at an apparently very interesting spot on the wall.

What are you hiding Xavier?

My stomach tightens. “You’ve seen this before,” I say slowly.

His jaw shifts. “Not exactly.”

I straighten, my eyes narrowing on him. “Don’t lie to me, Xavier. If you know something, you need to tell me. You told me before that you didn’t recognise it.”

He blows out a breath and rubs the bridge of his nose, avoiding my gaze. “Fine. I may have seen something like it years ago. On women–” His voice dips lower as red flushes his cheeks. “In a brothel.”

Well… that was unexpected.

My eyebrows shoot up. “A brothel?”

He nods once, clipped and tight. “Discreet place. One of those that thrives in the shadows of Aethermere. Some of the girls there had tattoos like these. Not all of them…just a few.”

My eyes narrow as the silence thickens between us, then a sly smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. “A brothel, Xavier? I didn’t realise that was your, err…taste?”

His head snaps up, dark eyes flashing indignantly. “It isn’t like that. I was there on a case.”

“Oh, of course,” I say, my voice lilting with mock sympathy. I fold my arms and tilt my head. “Always the noble knight, swooping into the dens of sin purely for duty.”

He scowls at me. “It’s the truth.”

But I’m already laughing softly, shaking my head. “By the Veil, Xavier, I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re hiding something. You sound exactly like one of those guilty husbands the wardens drag in at dawn.”

“I–” His shoulders tense as he looks away, the tips of his ears faintly red. I can’t help the laughter that bursts out of me, leaving me feeling light and unguarded for the first time in days.

“Gods, I needed that,” I chuckle, though my gaze lingers on the tattoo, and my smile quickly falls. “But if you really did see this tattoo there, it could mean there’s a connection between the murders and that brothel. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“No,” Xavier admits. “I don’t either.”

I let the silence stretch for a long moment, my mind racing. If the murders connect to the brothel, then we aren’t looking at random victims. This could be pieces of a much bigger pattern. One that Xavier clearly knows more about than he is letting on.

I catch his eye again, serious this time. “Right, I don’t care whether or not you were ‘just working a case’ there, that’s your business, but you’re going to tell me everything you remember. No more evasions.”

I’ve never heard a silence so thick, pressing against my ears as if even sound refuses to linger in a place so haunted by decay.

Xavier locks the heavy door behind us with a small key and says nothing as we stand in the empty hallway of his house. The air inside is faintly sweet and cloying, like honey mixed with the sickroom musk of herbs and dying roses. I follow him up a narrow stairwell, the wood polished to a mirror shine from years of obsessive care. The house feels like a mausoleum dressed as a home, and I realise now why, despite our long friendship, he’s never invited me in here. I can’t help but feel like I’m trespassing, to the point that I start to wonder if I shouldn’t have intervened in their predicament in the first place.

At the top floor, Xavier pauses before a door carved with a faint sigil that pulses once beneath his hand. He hesitates, before looking back at me with a grimace. “Vesper has good days,” he murmurs. “Today…may not be one.”

He pushes the door open and I slowly follow in behind him, my gaze immediately catching on the grand bed in the middle of the room, shrouded by a canopy of gauze. The curtains glow faintly from the smog-filtered sunlight, casting an almost sacred glow over the young woman tucked into the sheets. She’s still as beautiful as I remember, but now in that tragic, fragile way of those who have known pain too long; skin pale as crushed pearls, obsidian hair broken at the ends, her eyes flickering faintly like the light within her is fighting to stay alive. Threads of runes crawl up her arms and neck, the faintly black veins of Riven’s curse winding beneath her skin.

I freeze at the sight, and for a heart-stopping moment, I can’t breathe.

“We were sixteen when it took hold,” Xavier says quietly, his voice flat with the kind of exhaustion that’s long ago bled into acceptance. “Riven wanted to make a point. He always does.”

Sixteen? I bury the hurt at him lying to me for so long as I move quietly to the bedside, my hand hovering above Vesper’s wrist. She’s practically a ghost of her former self. “This isn’t just a curse,” I growl. “It’s a slow execution.”