The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(103)

The matriarch did not look at Séverin; her lips were clamped in a tight line. Séverin stared at his desk. Here it was, the moment that he had worked for … a repeat of the two Rings test. He had imagined this moment a thousand times. His blood—the same blood denied and deemed false—smeared on their Rings, the blue light that would spiral up his arms, sink through his skin. He imagined it would feel like deliverance. Like wings shaking loose from his skin. The impossible made possible—the world turned edible, the sky a cloth he could drag down and wrap around his fists. He had not imagined it would feel like this. Hollow.

“What’s a little more bloodshed,” he said, pushing the Rings across his desk.

Hypnos stared at him oddly. “I thought you wanted this.”

Séverin watched the Rings roll across the wood. He blinked, and no blue light swam behind his eyes. He saw fair hair, nails with crescents of dirt. Downcast gray eyes.

Why can’t this be enough? Sometimes I wished you didn’t even want to be a patriarch.

A memory came to him, unbidden, of the day Hypnos had tricked him into an oath. Séverin remembered looking at Zofia, Tristan, Enrique, and Laila through the glass door. They had been drinking tea and cocoa and eating cookies. He remembered wishing to grab that moment and press it beneath glass. And look at where it had gotten him. He had sworn to protect Tristan, and now Tristan was dead. He had promised to look out for the others … and now the Fallen House, who had seen each of their faces, was still out there. Waiting. Without them by his side, they’d never find the Fallen House. And with them at his side, they walked with death ever at their shadow. He couldn’t let them get hurt. But he couldn’t let them get too close either. When he blinked, he remembered Laila’s body beneath his, the cadence of her heart. A siren song. Guilt snapped his thoughts. For the song of her heartbeats, he’d never wash Tristan’s blood from his hands.

The matriarch’s eyes widened.

“Do you?” she asked. “Do you want this?”

“No.” He stood abruptly and walked to the door, ushering them out. “Not anymore.”





37





LAILA


Three months later …

Laila stood in the hallway outside Séverin’s office. In her hands, she carried the latest stack of reports. He’d told her there was no need to send them by personally, but she couldn’t keep herself away any longer.

Sometimes she wondered if grief could break someone, for all of them bore fractures, new hollows. Enrique hardly left his research library. Zofia lived in the laboratory. Hypnos’s charm seemed knife-honed, desperate.

Grief snuck up on her sometimes, and she was not sure how to defend herself from the force of its surprise. Just last month, she had started crying because the cocoa in the kitchens had gone stale. No one ever drank it but Tristan. And then there was the stray Night Bite she had found, gathering dust beneath her bed. She had stopped wearing black crepe two months ago, but that did not stop her from wandering the gardens of L’Eden, as if she might still catch a glimpse of a fair head and the edge of a laugh.

But lately, Laila wasn’t sure what to do. Séverin sent her objects to read, but she was beginning to think grief had sapped her abilities.

It all started after the funeral.

Laila had gone to Tristan’s workshop. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Some token, perhaps. Something happy that might keep at bay the last image of his death, blood caking his hair, gray eyes dimming, Séverin’s face a mask of broken dreams.

But what she found was not happiness.

It was a secret drawer, one that not even Séverin had known about. Within it lay the pinned bodies of wingless birds. Laila had shuddered at the sight. Here lay the mystery of the birdless grounds of L’Eden. Slowly, she had touched one of the iron stakes pinning them in that rictus of death and an image rose to her mind. Tristan laying traps. Tristan catching them, cooing to them, weeping when he tore out their feathers, cushioning the small worlds that he crafted with such love in the dark of his workshop. She heard how he whispered to the struggling creatures: “See? It’s not so bad … you don’t have to fly.”

Against her will, she remembered Roux-Joubert’s words in the greenhouse …

“His love and his fear and his own cracked mind made it easy to convince him that betraying you was saving you…”

She’d burned it. All evidence of it. And now she couldn’t even tell if what she had seen was true. When she reached for the memory of it, it was like kneading a fresh bruise. She never told Séverin. She could not bear to let him see this. Already, he walked through the halls of L’Eden as if he had seen enough ghosts for a lifetime. Why give him demons to see too?

Laila faltered at the door, about to turn when it suddenly opened.

Séverin stood wild-eyed before her, shocked at her presence. Her face burned. That moment where she’d leaned over him, that evening where he’d hungrily whispered “make it worth my while,” now felt like antiques of a different era.

“Laila,” he said, exhaling it like a curse he wished to be rid of. “What are you doing here?”

Laila had been waiting for this. She’d gathered every scrap of courage to speak these words. For the past two years, she thought that having a deadline on her life should make her pull back … but Tristan’s death changed that. She didn’t want to glide through life, unfeeling. She wanted to know everything while she could. She didn’t want the ghosts of thresholds not crossed hanging over her. She didn’t want one night. She wanted a chance. It was that conviction, more than anything, which made her drop the reports to the floor, step toward Séverin, and kiss him.