PAINTED IN BLOOD

PART 2 (Chapter 7: One Question, One Answer)

"It's a condition." He stood, straightening his jacket with the precise economy of movement that characterized everything he did. "There are things you need to know about Lucian and what he wants from your bloodline. Things that will change how you understand the situation." He paused. "And things you need to know about what I am. Not guesses. Not deductions from blink rates and old photographs."

I stood as well.

"When?" I said.

"Tomorrow evening. Eight o'clock. The gallery." He glanced at me. "Come through the main corridor on the third floor. Don't use the east stairwell after seven."

"Why not the east stairwell?"

"Because one of Lucian's people uses it to access the third floor between seven and nine in the evenings, and I have not yet decided how to handle that particular problem, and I would prefer you were not present while I'm deciding."

He said it with such complete calm that it took me a moment to process the full weight of it.

"You're going to confront them," I said.

"I'm going to have a conversation." He said it in the tone of someone for whom conversations and confrontations occupied the same general territory and he had simply stopped distinguishing between them. "Tomorrow. Eight o'clock."

He walked away across the courtyard — unhurried, as always, the dark jacket and the autumn light and the leaves on the ground around him.

I sat back down on the bench and opened my sketchbook.

The leaf was still there, pressed between the pages.

I picked up my pencil and, without quite deciding to, began to draw.

Not the building. Not the courtyard. The line of a jaw, sharp and composed. The set of shoulders that had stood in a courtyard in 1991 between two figures and a door, holding a line in the dark.

I drew for twenty minutes without stopping, which was the longest I had managed without scraping the canvas or turning the page in a week.

When I looked at what I'd done, I understood what had been missing from the painting in Studio Three.

I had been trying to paint something true.

I had been trying to paint the feeling of standing at the edge of understanding something — of knowing a thing was real before you had words for it.

What I had actually been trying to paint, without letting myself know it, was this.

Him.

I closed the sketchbook.

Sat with that for a moment.

Then I went back inside, walked past the east stairwell without using it, and spent the rest of the evening doing something I was very good at:

Pretending I hadn't just realised something significant.

Cora was in the room when I got back, lying on her bed with her sketchbook on her stomach, staring at the ceiling. She looked at me when I came in with the particular attention of someone who had been waiting.

"You spoke to him again," she said.

"Does it show?"

"You have the face you get when you've been trying not to think about something." She sat up. "Good conversation or complicated conversation?"

I sat on my bed. Looked at my sketchbook.

"He wants to tell me the full truth tomorrow night," I said. "About Lucian. About what he is. All of it."

Cora was quiet for a moment.

"Are you going?"

"Yes."

She nodded slowly. Not surprised. Not disapproving. Just absorbing.

"Layla," she said carefully. "My grandmother's notebook. The last line — trust the one who stays. I've been thinking about it." She looked at her hands. "She wrote it as advice. As a warning to trust him." A pause. "But she also left Aldermoor. She trusted him and she still left."

I thought about that.

"Maybe," I said slowly, "trusting him and staying were two different choices."

Cora looked at me.

"Yeah," she said quietly. "Maybe they were."

The fairy lights came on. Outside, the wind moved through the oak in the courtyard, and the last of the leaves came down, and somewhere below the building — faint, at the very edge of hearing — something that might have been music drifted up through the old stone floors and disappeared before I could be certain it had been there at all.

Tomorrow. Eight o'clock.

The full truth.

I wasn't sure I was ready for it.

I was absolutely going.