Shadows & Secrets

Chapter 16

She went to her room instead, and Marcus came with her, and once the door was shut behind them he said, very carefully, "Do you want to talk or do you want me to sit here and say almost nothing for an hour?"

Aurora looked at him.

"The second one."

"Excellent. I'm exceptional at almost nothing."

He took the chair by the hearth. She sat on the floor with her back against the bed.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

The room darkened gradually around them, the last of evening thinning at the window.

Someone had lit the hearth while they were gone; the fire was small but steady, just enough to push warmth into the room and give the shadows shape. Aurora watched the flames move and tried, without much success, to imagine her mother's face.

Celeste.

She said the name silently a few times, as if repetition might summon familiarity.

It didn't.

But the ache of not knowing shifted. It lost some of its abstraction. It had edges now. The grief was no longer for a blank absence. It was for a woman who had a name and a bloodline and enough power that Bloodmoon still remembered her generations later.

That made it worse.

It also made it more survivable.

Because it was real.After a while, Marcus said, "You did the right thing not going to him tonight."

Aurora rested her head back against the bed frame.

"I know."

"You don't sound convinced."

"I'm convinced. I just also want to set something on fire."

"That's fair." A pause. "Preferably not this house, though. I think the cooks are starting to like me."

She let out a breath that almost qualified as a laugh.

Then silence again.

Finally she said, "I keep trying to understand what Mikhail thought he was doing."

Marcus didn't answer immediately. He was too smart for that.

"You mean with the Order," he said at last. "Or with you."

"Both."

He leaned back in the chair, watching the fire instead of her. "I think those are different questions."

Aurora considered that.

"Yeah," she said after a moment. "I think you're right."

Marcus nodded once. "With the Order, he's probably been doing what men like him always do when institutions start to rot. Patching. Maneuvering. Deciding which compromises are survivable and which aren't. Telling himself that if he keeps enough of the machine running, he can prevent the worst version of it from turning on everyone." His voice stayed even. "With you."

He stopped.

Aurora lifted her head slightly. "With me?"

Marcus looked at her then. "With you, I think he might have cared enough to become dangerous."

The words settled heavily between them.

Not melodramatic. Not exaggerated.

Just true in the particular way difficult truths often were.

Aurora looked away first.

That was the thing she had not wanted anyone else to say out loud.

Because once it was said, she had to reckon with it.

Mikhail's surveillance. His withholding. His management. The careful watchfulness since Mooncrest. The decision to keep her close.

Not because he didn't care.

Possibly because he did.

And that made the betrayal harder, not easier.

"It would have been simpler if he hated me," she said quietly.

"Yeah."

He let that sit.

Then, a little more lightly: "For what it's worth, Damien and Kiyiya seem less likely to make your life a strategic nightmare."

"That's not a high bar."

"It's still a bar", he joked with a shrug

Aurora closed her eyes briefly.

When she opened them again, the room had darkened further. The fire had burned lower. The day was finally releasing its hold on her.

"Go get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow I'll deal with Mikhail."

Marcus didn't move right away. "You sure?"

"Yeah."

He stood, stretched once, and crossed to the door. At it, he turned back.

"Aurora."

She looked up.

"Whatever your name was before," he said, "the person sitting in this room is still you. Don't let any of them make you feel like you've become a stranger to yourself just because they had a different word for you first."

Then he left.

Aurora sat alone with that for a long time, eventually undressing and laying down in the wide bed, not expecting to sleep.

The room was dark. The hearth had gone quiet. The window let in a thin band of moonlight that fell across the floorboards in a shape she did not entirely trust.

She thought she would lie awake until morning.

She thought she would spend the hours running the conversation with Damien over in her head and cataloguing what she had learned and what she still needed to learn and what she was going to say to Mikhail when the sun came up.

Instead she fell asleep between one breath and the next, the way exhausted people do when their bodies have decided for them.

She dreamed.