Chapter 8

Eve's POV

I turned to Pearl.

"Thanks for your help." I said. "I think I'd like to get settled on my own for a bit, if that's okay."

"Of course," Pearl said warmly, already moving toward the door.

Then she stopped, and turned back around, and there was something genuinely careful in her expression, the look of someone who wanted to make sure you had the right information before you needed it.

"I just want to mention," she said, keeping her voice low and kind, "the Alpha doesn't really like locked doors. In any of the rooms. I'd hate for it to cause you any trouble."

She meant it well. I could hear that plainly.

I looked at her, then at the door, then back at her.

"This room does," I said.

Pearl opened her mouth, then closed it.

"Yes, miss," she said, and pulled the door shut behind her without another word.

She pulled the door halfway closed behind her as she left.

I stood there alone in the quiet room and didn't move for a little while.

Then I opened the suitcase.

The leather folder was at the bottom, the way it always was, wrapped in a soft cloth and tucked inside a zippered inner pocket.

I unwrapped it carefully and took out the single folded page inside, smoothing it flat against my knee.

The paper was old.

The edges had gone soft and the ink had faded in places, but the notation was still legible if you knew what you were looking at.

Lyre's handwriting was small and precise across the top of the page, and the melody ran for three and a half measures before it simply stopped.

He'd never finished it.

I hummed the first note quietly, just to hear it in the room.

Then the second. The third. The melody was simple, almost plain, the kind of thing that didn't announce itself as extraordinary until you were already inside it and couldn't find the door.

I got to the end of the second measure and my throat closed up a little, that familiar heat behind my sternum, and I tipped my head back against the wall and blinked until it passed.

I promised. I wasn't going to do that here.

I remembered the afternoon I took it.

I'd been fifteen and I'd just played a full chord progression without stopping to correct myself in the middle.

And Lyre had looked at me with this expression like I'd done something genuinely remarkable, and he'd said, you have something in your playing that I can't teach you, it was already there, I just didn't want you to lose it.

I'd thought he was being nice.

It took me a long time to understand that Lyre didn't say things he didn't mean about music.

He was too careful about it for that.

"I'm in a strange place, the whole house runs on a kind of power I don't have a name for and everyone in it knows the rules except me." I said to the empty room.

My voice came out quieter than I expected, a little rough.

"You'd hate it here, but I can see you more clearly here than I could anywhere else."

I paused.

The lamp threw its circle of light onto the floor and the orange outside the window was deepening toward something closer to red.

I thought about that winter he got sick.

After he'd given me his coat without thinking, without asking, just draped it over my shoulders and stood there in his thin sweater like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

He'd told me later that he hadn't thought about it at all, that he just hadn't wanted to watch me be cold.

I'd been furious with him.

Genuinely, bone-deep furious, the kind that comes from fear wearing a different face.

He knew what his body was.

He knew what his body was.

He'd told me once, offhand, that his health had never been great, like it was just one of those inconvenient facts you learned to live around.

I hadn't understood what that meant until the day I went with him to see a doctor, in the corridor outside, heard the doctor tell him in that careful, measured tone that thirty was probably optimistic.

He knew all of that and he'd still handed me his coat without a second thought, like his own life was just a minor variable in the calculation.

He was an idiot.

He was seventeen when he died.

The cause of death wasn't disease.

Because of me.

I pressed the score against my chest, not hard, just resting it there.

Outside the high window, the light had been shifting without me noticing, the gold of late afternoon pulling toward something darker, the particular orange that happens right before the sky decides it's done for the day.

"I'm okay," I added. "I'm going to live happily. Just like you wanted me to."

Which was maybe also almost certainly a lie, but it felt important to say.

I folded the score carefully, the same fold it had lived in for years, and wrapped it in the soft cloth and tucked it back into the zippered inner pocket of the suitcase.

I pressed my palm flat against the outside of the pocket for a moment, just briefly, and then I stood up.

The phone was still on the floor.

My phone screen lit up.

Five missed calls.

All from the same name.

Renault.

My stomach dropped.

Five.

Which meant he'd called, gotten nothing, called again, gotten nothing again, and kept going until whatever patience he'd started with was long gone.

I knew what five unanswered calls looked like on his end.

I was in trouble.