The Enemy's Vow

chapter 5

The Tracker

(Lyra)

I find the tracker by dinner.

It is not difficult. I have spent my whole life learning to notice the small mechanisms that keep me contained, because my father was never a man who trusted a locked door alone. He liked backups. Redundancies. A watch that recorded conversations. A car with a hidden GPS beneath the seat that he thought I did not know about, though I found it when I was sixteen and never once mentioned it, because knowledge you do not reveal is worth more than knowledge you use carelessly.

So when I sit alone in the room they have given me, a vast cold space with a four poster bed and windows that look out over grounds so large I cannot see where they end, and I turn the ring on my finger in the last of the daylight, I know exactly what I am looking for before I find it. The band is a fraction heavier than it should be. There is a seam along the inside curve that catches the light differently than the rest of the gold, if you know to look, which I do, because I have spent twenty-three years learning to look.

I do not remove it.

This is the first real decision I have made since the ballroom, and I make it slowly, turning the ring under the lamp, weighing the satisfaction of tearing it off and throwing it in his face against the quieter, colder pleasure of letting him believe it is working exactly as he intends. A man who believes he has control over you stops looking for the places where he does not. My father taught me that too, though not on purpose. I learned it from watching him fail to notice the daughter standing right in front of him.

Let Damien Blackwood think his little tracker keeps me contained. Let him check whatever screen tells him where I am in this house, satisfied, while I learn every hallway and staircase and locked door he does not know I have already tested.

I leave the room before I lose my nerve, because sitting still in that cold space feels too much like waiting to be punished, and I have never liked waiting.

The manor is enormous in the way old money likes to be enormous, all high ceilings and dark wood panels and portraits of Blackwoods long dead staring down at me from gilt frames like they already know I do not belong here. My footsteps echo too loudly against the marble. I pass a wing that has been closed off, heavy doors chained shut with a padlock old enough to have rusted at the hinges, and I make a note of it the way I make a note of everything, because a locked door in a house this size is never locked without a reason.

A maid rounds the corner ahead of me carrying a tray, and when she sees me, she stops so abruptly the china rattles.

"Mrs. Blackwood," she says, and the title sounds strange in her mouth, strange in my own ears too, a name that does not yet feel like it belongs to me. She does not meet my eyes. Her hands are shaking slightly around the tray.

"I didn't mean to startle you," I say.

"No, ma'am. Of course not, ma'am." She dips something close to a curtsy and hurries past me so quickly the tea sloshes over the rim of the pot, and I stand there in the corridor listening to her footsteps fade, replaying the fear on her face.

I hear them before I see them, two more staff members further down the hall, voices lowered but not lowered enough, the particular carelessness of people who assume a stranger to the house does not yet know its acoustics.

"—the Valdez girl, the one who shot him—"

"I heard she carries a blade in her garter, even now."

"My cousin works security. Says she didn't even cry when they tied her hands. Just sat there, cold as anything."

"They're calling her the witch, downstairs. Says she bewitched him into the marriage instead of a bullet."

I could correct them. I could step around the corner and tell them plainly that I am not a witch, that I am a woman who was handed a gun and a set of instructions and did the only thing available to a person with no other choices, that the coldness they mistake for cruelty is simply what is left of a girl who learned very young that crying changes nothing.

I do not correct them.

Let them whisper. Let the word witch travel through this house faster than any truth I could offer, because fear, I have learned, is a far more useful currency than pity ever was. Pity gets you sympathy and nothing else, soft words and softer treatment and people who look at you like something broken. Fear gets you space. Fear gets you left alone. Fear gets you a wide berth in hallways and servants who do not linger long enough to ask questions I do not want to answer.

I continue walking until the whispers fade behind me, past a library with shelves that climb two stories high, past a music room with a piano gone silent under a layer of dust, until I find myself at a set of tall windows overlooking a garden gone wild at the edges, hedges untrimmed, a fountain dry and cracked in its center like something here stopped being tended a long time ago and no one has cared enough to fix it since.

I press my palm against the cold glass and look out at the grounds that are, for the next year at least, the entire boundary of my world.

Somewhere in this house, Damien Blackwood is watching a screen that tells him exactly where his ring sits on my finger, and believing that means he knows where I am.

He does not know where I am. He knows where the ring is. There is a difference, and I intend to spend the next year teaching him exactly how wide that difference can be.

I turn away from the window and keep walking, mapping the house one hallway at a time, because a woman who knows every exit is never truly caged, no matter how many locks a man puts on the door.