Chapter3
1096 Words
Nina told no one.
She spent the next morning turning that decision over in her head while Marta walked her through the parts of the manor she was permitted to access, which was most of it but not all of it, and the exceptions were interesting.
"The north corridor," Marta said, stopping in front of a door with an iron bar across it. "You don't go in there."
"What's in there?"
"Nothing that concerns you."
"That's not an answer."
"No," Marta agreed. "It isn't."
Nina filed it away and kept walking.
The manor was larger inside than it appeared outside, which should not have been possible but somehow was. There were rooms that felt older than the rest, where the air was heavier and stiller, like air in a place where many things had happened and none of them had ever been forgotten.
"Marta." Nina stopped walking. "What happened to the other brides. The real answer."
Marta stood with her back to Nina for a moment. Then she turned around.
"The first one lasted four days," she said. "We found her in the eastern forest on the fifth morning. No wounds. Just no heartbeat."
"And the second?"
"Three weeks. She jumped from the balcony on the south tower." Marta paused. "She was a soldier's daughter. She was afraid of nothing."
"And the third?"
The pause this time was longer.
"We don't speak about the third," Marta said.
Nina looked at her face and decided against pushing further. There was a line there that said: this is the edge of what I will give you this morning.
"Okay," she said. "Show me the kitchen."
The kitchen was warm and smelled like bread, and the woman managing it was named Cora, who looked at Nina the way you look at someone you have been expecting for a long time.
"Sit," Cora said. "You didn't eat enough last night."
Nina sat and ate what was put in front of her and asked the question she actually wanted to ask.
"What was Eli like? Before."
Cora's hands slowed on the counter. Just slightly. Then continued.
"He was the kind of boy who noticed everything," she said. "Quiet. Watchful. He used to sit right where you're sitting and read for hours." She paused. "He was kind to the wolves that weren't allowed in the house. He'd bring them scraps."
"When did he get sick?"
Cora turned around and her face had closed like a window shut against weather.
"Don't ask Mr. Draven that question," she said. "Don't ask him anything about before."
"Before what?"
Cora picked up a cloth and began wiping a counter that was already clean.
Nina finished her breakfast.
Victor summoned her at three in the afternoon. His study was lined floor to ceiling with books that looked read rather than decorative, and on his desk were three phones and a stack of files, and on one of the file tabs was a name that made Nina go still.
CARLOS , NINA. ORIGIN ASSESSMENT.
He moved it to a drawer before she could say anything. "Sit down."
She sat, because she needed information more than she needed to make a point.
"Last night," she said. "After the ceremony. Eli opened his eyes."
The silence that followed was one of the most interesting silences she had ever sat inside. For three full seconds, something moved across Victor's face that he could not quite control. Not surprise. Something older than surprise. Something that looked almost like dread.
"That's not possible," he said.
"I know what I saw."
"You were tired. The candles burned during the ceremony contain compounds that cause mild hallucination in humans."
"He said my name," Nina said.
Victor went very still.
"He said my name," she repeated, "and he said I had come back to him. Like he knew me."
Victor stood and walked to the window. His shoulders did what she had already learned they did when he was reorganizing information he hadn't prepared for.
"Eli's condition can produce involuntary vocalizations," he said. "Episodes that resemble consciousness. They are not meaningful."
"They felt meaningful."
"They always do." He turned around, his face back in order, but his eyes doing something underneath she couldn't read. "If you believe you are seeing signs of awareness, you come to me. You don't engage with it. You don't encourage it."
"Why?"
"Because the last woman who thought she was connecting with him is the reason we don't discuss the third bride." He held her gaze. "She spent hours at his bedside. Talking to him. Believing they had a connection. Two weeks later we found her with her hands around her own throat. She had no memory of it."
The room was quiet.
"Eli is not safe," Victor said. "Whatever is happening inside that body is not something you can reach or rescue. Do you understand?"
"I understand what you're telling me," Nina said.
Which was not the same as saying she believed it. And something in Victor's expression told her he caught the difference.
She did not go to the secondary library he suggested.
She went back to Eli's room.
She sat in the chair and she thought about origin assessments and files and a woman who had woken up with her hands around her own throat. She thought about the way Victor's face had moved when she said the word eyes. She thought about Marta's sleep lightly and the way Cora's hands had stilled at the question about before.
Everyone in this house was carrying the same secret from a slightly different angle.
Outside the windows the eastern forest was going dark, the trees turning to silhouettes, and somewhere out there the wolves that weren't allowed in the house were moving between the shadows.
"I don't think you're dangerous," she said quietly. "I think someone needs you to be."
The light changed as the sun dropped, going from gold to grey to the deep blue of winter dusk, and Nina sat in the shifting light and watched his face and waited for something she couldn't name.
At the exact moment the last light left the sky, his hand moved.
Not toward her. Just a small shift of his fingers against the sheets, like someone adjusting their grip on something they were holding very tightly.
And from somewhere deep and far away, barely more than the idea of sound, she heard it.
Not words this time. Just her name.
Nina.
Like someone calling from the bottom of a well.
Like someone who had been calling for a very long time.
- Writer
