The Second Vow

Chapter 4: The Note in Her Own Handwriting

Josephine's POV

I had three old letters spread flat on my desk and the note from the dress box laid beside them, comparing the slant of one T against another, when the door slammed open without a knock.

"Your father collapsed."

Priya didn't wait for me to answer. She had my arm before I'd fully stood, pulling me toward the hall, and the letters scattered off the desk behind me, forgotten before they hit the floor.

"When?"

"Five minutes ago. Maybe less." She half ran down the corridor with my sleeve still caught in her fist. "He was in the study. One of the guards found him on the floor."

My legs moved before the rest of me caught up. Vivienne's whisper from the dinner was still looping somewhere behind my ribs, three words that had nothing to do with my father and everything to do with the note I'd left sitting on my desk, and now here was this, on top of it, both things crowding the same narrow space in my chest at once.

"Is he breathing?"

"He was when I left him." Priya's voice cracked once and she covered it by picking up speed. "Josephine, hurry."

We turned the corner too fast and my shoulder hit the wall. I didn't stop. Somewhere in the back of my mind, small and useless, I noticed the wallpaper in this hallway had a water stain shaped almost exactly like a rabbit, a detail that had absolutely nothing to do with anything and lodged itself in my head anyway.

Priya's hand caught my sleeve again at the next turn, and for half a second, without breaking stride, she retired the loose ribbon at my wrist that had come undone somewhere between my room and here. An old habit of hers. She'd been doing it since we were nine years old and I still hadn't asked her to stop.

I could have cried at that. Not my father. At the ribbon.

"Priya."

"What."

"If something happens to me before this is over, I need you to know I"

"Don't." She didn't slow down. "Don't do the goodbye thing. Not now."

I let it go, because she was right, and because I didn't have the rest of that sentence anyway.

We hit the study doors at a dead run. Two guards stood outside them, faces tight, and past their shoulders I saw my father on the floor, one hand pressed flat against his own chest, my mother's old physician kneeling beside him with a bag already open.

I dropped to my knees next to him.

"Dad."

His eyes found mine, unfocused, then sharper, like something in him was fighting its way back up through whatever had pulled him down. His hand found my wrist. Too tight for a man who could barely lift his head a second ago.

Before I could stop myself, I reached for something to hold onto, some scrap of my old life that might tell me what this meant, and I went looking for the memory of the dress Vivienne wore the night she killed me. I'd catalogued every detail of that night for months in my old life, replayed it enough times to wear grooves into it.

It was gone.

Not softened. Not blurred at the edges the way the proposal date had gone fuzzy. Gone, clean, like a page torn out of a book I used to know by heart. I hadn't spent that memory on purpose. I'd only reached for it, testing, and the reaching itself had been enough to cost me.

That was worse than I'd let myself believe. The price wasn't only for what I used. It was for what I touched.

"Josephine."

Griffin's voice, behind me, closer than I expected. He'd come in through the second door, and before I registered him crossing the room his hand found the small of my back, steady, warm, not asking permission and not needing to.

I didn't lean into it. I also didn't move away.

"What happened," he said to the physician.

"Heart, most likely. We won't know until he's stable." The physician didn't look up from what her hands were doing. "He needs quiet. All of you."

My father's grip on my wrist tightened again instead of loosening.

"Dad, you need to let go, they need to"

"Delacroix." The word came out of him cracked and low, barely a word at all, more like something forced through a door that didn't want to open.

I still went.

"What did he say?" Griffin asked.

I didn't answer right away, because I was too busy running that name through every version of my life I had access to, and it matched nothing. Not a pack. Not a person I'd ever been introduced to in either life. Not Griffin's family, not Vivienne's, not the council elders whose names I'd memorized before I could walk.

A stranger's name, from my dying father's mouth, three days before a wedding that had already killed me once.

"I don't know," I said. "I've never heard of it."

I lied before I'd finished deciding to. I had heard it, somewhere, some fragment I could almost place if I let myself reach for it the way I'd just reached for the dress and lost it. I could feel the memory sitting right at the edge of my grasp, close enough that going after it seemed possible.

And I knew, with total certainty, that going after it would cost me something else. I didn't know what. That was the horror of it. The system didn't ask permission and it didn't warn you in advance what it would take. It only took.

My father's eyes were losing focus again, his hand loosening around my wrist, and I understood I had maybe three seconds before he went under and this window closed. Maybe he wouldn't wake again in time to say more. Maybe this was my only chance to learn what Delacroix meant before I lost whatever thread connected it to everything else falling apart around me.

Griffin's hand pressed flatter against my back, grounding, patient, waiting for me to decide something he didn't know I was deciding.

Priya stood in the doorway with both hands over her mouth, watching my father's chest rise and fall too slow.

I had half a second.

I reached for the name anyway.