Page 44 of Lair

But Mrs. Colding folds her hands neatly in her lap and sighs, as if she cannot be bothered to be offended. “Anger is to be expected, but let’s dispense with the sarcasm, shall we?”

Even here, even now, my cheeks can flush, I can feel the sting of embarrassment. But I am not to be so easily fended off. “How often does this happen?” I push on, holding her eyes.

She blinks, swallows. A tiny crack in her composure. “More often, lately.”

I think back on red blood on white snow, red stains on white sheets, and gooseflesh prickles my arms. “So Emmie wasn’t a hallucination, then,” I whisper, frigid with fury. “You gaslighted me—”

“Aurora...”

“You let me think I was going insane—”

“I... feel remorse about that. I had to protect my employer.”

“Your employer,” I scoff, and shake my head. When I speak again, my voice is more controlled. “Who else knows?”

“Just the captain and I.” She is smooth and to the point, on firmer ground now. We are having a perfectly normal conversation. “Jason has his suspicions.”

Oh, I bet he does. I think of his attempt to warn me at my cabin door, and draw in a measured breath. “How long have you worked for him?”

Her mouth twitches faintly. “A long time.”

I can summon it now: the full force of my disgust. “How?” I breathe. “How can you?”

She does not rise to this. Instead, a pitying contempt enters her eyes. As if to say, How can this little girl possibly know? How can she know how mysterious this world is, with its humbling, harrowing events that shape us into much larger versions of ourselves, full of a terrible capacity for acceptance and compromise?

But in the end, all she says—all she has to say—is this: “I know what it’s like to lose someone, and be forced into becoming a stranger to yourself.”

I blink as if struck. “Lose...?”

She arches a brow, a delicate movement. “Did he not tell you about his wife?”

My gut tumbles. His wife?

Her eyes glint, she sighs. “Like all of us, he has his reasons for why he is the way he is.”

My throat is suddenly dry. “What—what was she like?”

I am regarded with a cool distance, as if I have asked a question we both know I will not like the answer to. “Very beautiful,” is the pithy reply. “Her name was Evangeline. She was fiery, strict, obsessed with order. Musicians usually are.”

Insides still twisting pathetically with jealousy, I think of Adrian’s mournful piano playing haunting the Lair. “She was a pianist?”

Mrs. Colding nods. “A sensation, by all accounts. When she’d perform, the stage would be buried in roses.”

Roses.

“What happened to her?”

Mrs. Colding hesitates, brushes at her skirt. “They were to begin a new life together,” she says finally. Her voice is light, carefully detached. “They were madly in love. He wanted to support her in touring her music, and she wanted to give him a family, as he’d always wished to be a family man. They had never been happier in their lives. And so it was that they set sail on a ship on their wedding night, and in the dark hours, as they were strolling the deck, something white as chalk dropped down on them out of the shrouds...”

My blood runs cold.

Mrs. Colding shifts in her chair, clears her throat. “It was... one of them. You may have heard him mentioned last night—the Commodore.” Her throat bobs again. “Volok is his name.” I feel a shiver, as if a cold wind had blown into the room, and Mrs. Colding shivers herself at the invocation of the name. She glances about, as if, absurdly, someone may have heard, and continues. “He is the oldest of them. And the most feared. And that night, he was hungry...”

No.

“That silent drop from above knocked Voper unconscious. When he came to, Volok was feeding on her. He was feeding on his wife. Her eyes open and staring at him, unblinking, as her life pooled out on the deck...”

I shut my eyes, hearing it. The howl of despair.

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