PAINTED IN BLOOD

Chapter 7: One Question, One Answer

I didn't tell Cora about the mark on the wall.

Not because I didn't trust her — I trusted her more than anyone else in this building, which was not a high bar given the circumstances but felt significant anyway. I didn't tell her because she had spent the night sitting upright in bed after hearing Lucian's voice through the door, and the fairy lights had stayed on until morning, and I had watched her spend breakfast moving her food around her plate with the careful focus of someone keeping themselves very deliberately together.

Cora was brave. Cora was also, underneath the sketchbooks and the skull mug and the quick dark humour, frightened. And she was frightened because she had come here knowing more than I had, which meant she understood more precisely what the thing in the corridor was capable of.

I would tell her. Just not yet.

The mark on the wall was gone by morning.

I checked on my way to breakfast — walked past the alcove with my heart doing something loud and my face arranged into the expression of a person taking a perfectly ordinary route for perfectly ordinary reasons. The wall was clean. No brushstroke, no dark residue, nothing that suggested anything had ever been written there.

Which was, in some ways, worse than if it had stayed.

It meant someone had cleaned it. Which meant someone who worked in this building — one of Lucian's people on the inside — had been awake in the early hours of the morning removing evidence. Moving through the corridors that I moved through every day with the same apparent normalcy.

I thought about the woman at reception.

I thought about the maintenance staff I passed sometimes in the mornings, who nodded without making eye contact.

I thought about how many ordinary faces a building this size required to function, and how many of them might have made an arrangement with something old and patient and very good at offering things people wanted.

I went to breakfast and ate everything on my plate and told myself that being frightened was fine as long as it made me careful rather than still.

He found me this time.

I was in the east courtyard after my afternoon studio session, sitting on the same bench where Cora and I had talked on the second day — the stone one near the old oak that had lost most of its leaves by now, carpeting the ground in dark gold. I had my sketchbook open but I wasn't drawing. I was thinking, which sometimes looked the same from the outside.

I heard him before I saw him — not footsteps exactly, more the particular quality of attention that arrived slightly ahead of him, like the air knew he was coming.

He sat down on the other end of the bench.

Not close. He was very deliberate about distance, I had noticed — always leaving enough space to make clear that proximity was a choice, not an accident. Like a man who had learned to be careful about the difference.

For a moment neither of us said anything.

A leaf came down from the oak and landed on the open page of my sketchbook. I looked at it. Didn't remove it.

"You checked the wall this morning," he said.

"You were watching at that hour?"

"I watch most hours." He said it without particular weight, like a statement of logistics rather than anything more. "It's gone."

"I noticed." I closed the sketchbook, leaf and all. "One of his people cleaned it."

"Yes."

"Do you know which one?"

A pause. "I have suspicions. Not certainties."

I looked at him sideways — the sharp profile, the composed stillness, the way he sat on a stone bench in an autumn courtyard like he had sat on a thousand stone benches and would sit on a thousand more and none of them required any particular adjustment from him.

"You've been doing this alone for a very long time," I said.

"We've had this conversation."

"We've been adjacent to this conversation. I want to have it directly." I turned on the bench to face him properly. "You watch most hours. You move through this building at night. You've been getting people out for forty years and taking whatever Lucian does to you when he gets close enough, and you've been doing all of it without telling anyone the full truth of what's happening here. Not the students, not — whoever might help." I paused. "Why?"

He was quiet for a moment, looking at the courtyard.

"Because the more people who know the full truth," he said, "the more people Lucian has leverage over. Knowledge is not safety in this situation. Knowledge is a target." He glanced at me. "You are a significant argument in favour of that position."

"I'm still here."

"You're still here because I have been paying close attention." Something in his voice shifted — just slightly, the composure thinning at one edge. "Do not mistake survival for safety, Miss Blackwell. They are not the same thing."

I thought about pushing back. I thought about pointing out that survival, in this context, was doing reasonably well and that I had contributed to it actively rather than passively, and that there was an argument to be made that more information had made me more careful rather than less.

Instead I said: "Ask me one question."

He looked at me.

"You gave me one question in the gallery," I said. "One truthful answer. It seems fair to return the arrangement." I held his gaze. "Ask me anything. I'll answer truthfully."

A long silence. The oak above us shifted in some small wind.

"Why are you still investigating?" he said finally. "Not why are you curious — I understand the curiosity. Why are you continuing when you understand the cost?"

I had expected something about my blood, or my family, or what I knew about Lucian. The question surprised me — the directness of it, and the way it was aimed not at the situation but at me specifically.

I thought about it honestly.

"Because thirty-two people were on a list," I said, "and most of them didn't have anyone who knew enough to help them. And I do." I looked at the closed sketchbook in my hands. "And because I think the reason you've been holding this line alone for forty years isn't that there was no one who could have helped. It's that there was no one who knew enough to try." I paused. "I know enough to try."

The courtyard was very quiet.

He looked at me for a long moment — the kind of look that had layers to it, that was reading something more than the surface of what I'd said.

"That," he said finally, "is either the most courageous thing anyone has said to me in forty years, or the most dangerous."

"Can't it be both?"

Something happened to his expression — brief, unguarded, a crack in the composure that let through something warmer and more complicated than anything I had seen on him before. It lasted approximately two seconds before the composure reassembled itself, but it was there.

I filed it away carefully.

"Miss Blackwell," he said. His voice had returned to its usual register but something in it was different — a degree less distance. The amount of warmth that a room acquires when someone opens a door briefly and then closes it again. "If you are going to continue investigating — and I understand that telling you not to is functionally useless — then you will do it with information. Correct information. Not whatever you piece together from archive photographs and yearbooks."

"Is that an offer?"