The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(108)

But as Dalton hadn’t prevented any indication of his approach, she discarded the reflexes people usually wanted to see from her.

“For what it’s worth, it’s not for lack of interest.” She simply had other things on the mind, like whether the collision that was Tristan Caine and Libby Rhodes was about to finally come to fruition.

Dalton shifted to lean against her table in the reading room, folding his arms over his chest.

“Ask,” said Parisa, flipping the page in her book. Blood curses. Not very complex in the end, except for the costs to the caster. Those who cast a blood curse almost always went mad, and those who received them almost always broke them eventually, or at least bore progeny who would. Nature craved balance that way: with destruction always came rebirth.

“We knew about your husband,” said Dalton, evidently speaking for the Society on high. “Not your brother or your sister.”

That wasn’t the question in his head, but Parisa wasn’t surprised he had to work up to it. There were clouds of discomfort hovering around in Dalton’s mind, thick layers of stratosphere to reach through.

“That,” said Parisa, “is because nothing happened with my brother.” She flipped another page, scanning it. “There would have been nothing worthwhile to discover.”

Dalton sat in silence a moment. “Callum seemed to find quite a bit.”

In Parisa’s mind, which thankfully Dalton could not read, Amin was always soft, Mehr always hard.

You are the jewel of the family; so precious to me, to us.

Kindness that was actually weakness: I admire you enough to want to possess you, control you. You are a whore, a bitch, you corrupted this family!

Cruelty that was actually pain: I despise you for making me see my own ugliness, the value I lack.

Parisa closed her book, glancing up.

“Warfare is like compromise. Both parties must lose a little in order to win,” she said impatiently. “If Callum gained access to my secrets, it is only because I saw the purpose in him doing so.”

Dalton frowned. “You think I blame you?”

“I think you think me weak and now hope to comfort me, yes.”

“Weak? No, never. But would I be wrong to try for comfort?”

When Parisa didn’t answer, Dalton remarked, “He killed you with those secrets.”

“No,” Parisa said. “He didn’t. I did.”

Dalton cast a glance to his hands, his folded arms. A tacit if you say so.

“Ask,” Parisa said again, impatiently this time, and Dalton’s attention slid to hers. Every now and then she saw glimpses of his insidious fractures, the memory of him she’d found locked away. She always found them in the most interesting places. Never academia; Dalton never resembled his spectral self when discussing books or thoughts. It was only ever in moments like this, when he looked at her with an intensity he didn’t realize was hunger. When he was searching for something blindly in the dark.

“You told me not to interfere,” he began, and Parisa stopped him with a shake of her head.

“Yes, and it was a good thing you didn’t. Someone—Callum, for example—might have noticed where we were if you had, and then I might have lost.”

Dalton applied a manufactured tone of amusement. “I thought you said he won?”

“He did. But I did not lose.”

“Ah.”

He turned to stare straight ahead, and Parisa paused to look at him.

“Why stay here?” she asked him. “You had the world at your feet.”

“I have the world here,” he said without looking at her. “More than.”

“You have only that which the library chooses to give you,” she corrected him.

“Better that than what I must take from the world.”

“Is it better?”

At that he finally met her eye, casting his attention to hers like a weight.

“What did you find in my head?”

Finally. The real question.

“Something very interesting,” she said.

“How interesting?”

“Enough to compel me to stay, don’t you think?”

“Would you have left otherwise?”

“Would I? Maybe. It is barbaric, this Society.” If it required death purely for entry, it would surely require more. Even if this was the extent of their sacrifice, they were contributing to something incomprehensibly vast; a tradition that had lasted centuries, millennia. Principles of magic bound them to someone’s intent, and there was no telling if those origins were the philosophers of Alexandria or the administrators of the library itself. Perhaps it was the same someone who determined which pieces of the library they were able to receive; perhaps they were all indebted to the magic which bound them.

Gods demanded blood in almost every culture. Was magic any different?

If it was, Dalton wouldn’t tell her.

Not this Dalton, anyway.

“Let me go back in,” Parisa suggested, and Dalton’s brow furrowed. “I would understand better what’s there if you let me.”

“You say that like it’s a minotaur,” Dalton said wryly. “Some monster inside a labyrinth.”

“A princess in a tower,” Parisa corrected, reaching up to brush the fabric of his collar. An intimate gesture, to remind him of their intimacy. “But princesses can be monstrous at times.”