His Love Is a Cage with My Name on It

Chapter Eighteen: The Rule We Broke

We did not sleep.

We sat in the orangery until the sky went grey, the diary and the ledgers and a hundred and forty years of stolen life spread between us, and we said the unsayable things out loud one at a time.

"She has poisoned me for eight weeks," I said. "Whatever's in me is in me. Three of them died four months after the last cup and none of them knew they'd been poisoned at all, so nobody ever looked for a cure."

"You'll have every specialist in Europe by Friday."

"Yes. And in the meantime she's downstairs in her parlour, and she is not afraid of us, and I want to know why." I pushed my hair back. "Damian, she showed us. Willingly. She walked us down there and told us she murdered four women. Why would she do that unless she is completely certain that knowing changes nothing?"

He had no answer. I did not have one either.

What I had instead was this: dawn coming up green through the orangery glass, my hands cold around a cup of coffee I had made myself, and my husband across the table with a hundred years of obedience lying in pieces on the floor between us.

"I've been thinking about the one thing she never accounted for," I said.

"Which is?"

"That she designed the whole machine around a woman who doesn't know." I set the cup down. "Elara Ashe didn't know. The second bride didn't know. The third one worked out the tea and died of it in secret. Every version of me has died alone with a piece of the truth, Damian, and none of us has ever had the whole thing while we were still alive. I have it. I have all of it. That's new. That's never happened."

"And it buys us what?"

"It buys us the ability to stop obeying the rule," I said, "on purpose, in full knowledge, together. Which is the one thing that a hundred years of her arithmetic has never once had to survive."

He looked at me across the table for a long moment.

"You understand what you're asking me to risk."

"I understand what she's already taken. Four lifetimes. Yours too." I stood, and my legs were not entirely reliable. "She kept you cold for a century so I'd have no one but her. I am not going to hand her the fifth one, Damian. Not to be careful. Not to buy three more months of you flinching away from me in doorways."

He stood too.

"Then say it plainly," he said. "Whatever it is. Say it the way she'll hate most."

So I did.

"I love you," I said. "Not her memory of you. You. The man who moved my studio without asking and researched my work stool. The man who was unbearable to me at dinner because it was the only way he knew to keep me alive. I have known you eight weeks and about a hundred years, and I am done being starved so that a murderer can be the only warm thing in my house."

The orangery was absolutely silent.

And then Damian Vale crossed the two steps between us and took my face in both his hands, and for the first time in four lifetimes, my husband kissed me.

It was not gentle. It was a hundred years of held breath. His hands shook, which undid me completely, and when he finally pulled back far enough to look at me he said, in a voice I had never heard from him and will never forget:

"Say it again."

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you, Damian."

Somewhere beneath us, deep under the foundations of Vale House, something made a sound.

Not the pipes. Not the wind. We both felt it come up through the floor of the orangery and into the soles of our feet: a long, low, structural groan, like a great weight shifting after a very long time of being still.

Damian's arms tightened around me.

"You said there was nothing under the house," I whispered.

"She said," he said. "She said there was nothing under the house."

And from the doorway of the orangery, where she had been standing for God knows how long, Madame Iris said, in a voice with all the warmth gone out of it at last:

"Oh, you stupid children. What have you done?"