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I turn on him. “Where were you?”

He flinches. I hate myself for it, though I do not stop. “Where were you?”

“Edward,” Lazarus warns.

“He took her because we lost sight of her! Because of your explosions!” My voice cracks. “Because I lost sight of her.”

Alcott’s face drains of color. Then his expression tightens with that dreadful, brittle focus I know too well.

“We'll find her,” he says.

“How?” I snap. “Look around!”

The lawn is chaos as guards shout near the burning entrance. Guests are crawling into carriages that are overturned, damaged, fleeing too fast down the road, horses rear, and servants scream. Smoke folds low over the ground, turning everyone into ghosts.

Any one of those black carriages could hold her. My chest caves inward. I run. I do not know where. Toward the trees first, then the service road. Then back across the lawn when I think I see garnet silk tangled near a hedge. It is not her but it is a bloody torn curtain. I pick it up anyway, stupidly, desperately, as though it might become her if I need it badly enough.

“Olive!” Lazarus is shouting too now, moving through the fog with lethal precision, stopping servants, grabbing guards by the collar, demanding answers. Alcott has a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, searching faces and opening carriages, but I cannot hear them properly. All I hear is The Collector’s voice. Faster, dog. My vision blurs, I am no longer on the lawn. I'm in a room with no windows. I am twelve, again and Alcott is beside me, too silent, too small. Men are discussing debts, our parents are dead in another room, or dying or gone, but they were never truly parents at all.

Then Olive’s eyes flash through the fog. No.

But that was not a memory, it was real. I saw her. I saw her looking away. Why did she look away?

Because he threatened us. The answer hits like a brick, she did not scream because of me, for us. Because she knew he would kill us if she made a sound. A strangled noise leaves my throat.

Lazarus grabs my arm. “Edward, breathe.”

I shove him off. “Do not tell me to breathe.”

“You are spiraling,” he states, trying to hold his arms out in a form of plea.

“He has her!”

“I know.”

“No, you do not know.” I back away from him, shaking. “You do not know what he does to things he wants. You do not know what he does when he thinks he owns something.”

Lazarus’s face hardens. “I know enough.”

“No.” My laugh breaks apart in my chest. “No, you know death. You know grief. You know blood. But ownership? That man made ownership into a religion.”

Alcott comes closer. “Edward.”

I point at him, shaking my head. “Do not.”

His mouth closes. He looks shattered.

Good.

No. Not good. None of this is good. The manor groans behind us, another portion of roof collapsing into flame. Sparks lift into the night like burning insects and the fog begins to glow hauntingly orange.

Somewhere beyond the gates, a carriage wheel rattles over stone. My head snaps toward the sound and I run.

“Edward!” Alcott shouts.

The road is slick with mud and ash. I sprint down it until my lungs burn, until the iron gates loom ahead, until I reach the place where carriage tracks split into three directions.

Three. North road. Coast road. Forest road. I drop to my knees as mud soaks through my trousers. I press my hands into the tracks as though I can read them by touch.