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I commit all of the fencing sins on that very piste. I turn my back on my opponent, I throw off my helmet, and I step off the piste before the bout is done. The crowd and the judges watch me open-mouthed. I find that I don’t care at all—not for their opinions, not for my opponent’s. I don’t even care about winning the competition. The championship means less than nothing.
My apathy is a sort of thick, enveloping fog, and I want nothing more than to let myself be absorbed into it. The world doesn’t let me. My phone rings incessantly, voices clamouring for my attention.
Lawyers, public relations, my father’s stern voice dictating orders: what I should say and how I should say it, where I should be seen and what I should be seen doing. I obey him more out of a lack of will to fight than duty or devotion. He tells me he’s going to have to cut ties with me, publicly, to save the family name, to keep Novus safe in its cocoon.
I’m cut out of Novus’s board like severing a rotten limb to salvage the body. My father’s disappointment is etched in every part of this decision, but the decision itself is swift and final. Ultimately, nothing more than a business transaction to preserve an empire.
I understand the logic of it, and I understand my father’s choice. His disappointment doesn’t quite reach through the fog of my dispassion. The noise of my downfall is a dull rumour, a distant murmur. I barely seem to hear it.
My father echoes Woodrow’s words. He promises this is temporary, that the world will forget, that all I need to do is play my cards right and I’ll regain everything I lost.
Because my father looks at my downfall and sees numbers. The sunk cost of building then losing CHOKE. The downwardslope of Novus stocks if I should remain attached to it. All the settlements I’m made to pay, the cost of my sins tallied in zeroes.
“It’s just business,” my father says on the phone as he watches me bleed money. “Compensating the victims means their silence is assured, and that’s the best thing we could be investing in right now. Silence.”
But silence is all I know now. Before Willow, I never knew just how quiet my house was. Now, the silence is an unbearable screech in my ears. It haunts every minute I spend in the walls of my own house, it keeps me up at night.
The silence bleeds out of me, out of my house, my lands. I try to get out, to flee the silence, but it bleeds out into the city, all the noise and wilderness of London, now stifled like ruins under mountains of ashes.
My nights blend into days, my days into nights, a seamless blur. No rest, no reprieve—I chase the laughing, crimson ghost of Willow even in my dreams.
Woodrow and Nadine taketurns trying to pull me out of my cocoon. They suggest trips, retreats, holidays. A change of scenery might do me well. Somewhere private and warm, where I can rest and recover. None of their suggestions rouse me. I sense Nadine’s frustration at being paid to protect my safety when I do nothing but walk with my dogs and spend hours fighting shadows in my fencing room. I put her on paid leave despite her protests.
Woodrow shuts down the idea of me doing the same for him before I can even open my mouth to suggest it.
“While there is breath in your lungs and money in your accounts, sir,” he tells me with his back as rigid as a pole and his chin held high, “then I am still capable of doing my job.”
I don’t contradict him. After all, he’s the one managing all my communications. He’s the one handling the maintenance of my property, he’s the one keeping me updated with the settlements and legal proceedings. I don’t even talk to my lawyers anymore. I just let Woodrow summarise their emails and messages to me while I sit on the couch, flipping through Willow’s dirty comics with faint distaste.
Woodrow forces me to attend my doctor appointments, to take medication when needed, to not spend too long outside with the dogs. He forces me to take regular meals, and he’s the one who pushes for a prescription for sleeping pills when he realises my insomnia is making me lose weight.
“Sir, you have a guest,” Woodrow announces one afternoon, almost six months after Willow left.
I’m sitting in the living room with every blind drawn against the March sun, readingThe Divine Comedy. I tried to find the copy Willow stole from me, assuming she would have pawned it by now, but it’s nowhere to be found.
I don’t read it because I’m particularly fond of Dante’s dense verses but because Willow Lynch seemed to have a strange fascination for this book out of all the books on my so-called vanity shelf.
“A guest?” I echo Woodrow, looking up from my book with a frown.
Before he can answer, a lumbering shadow appears at his side, emerging into a thin bar of light left by a gap in the blinds. Two serious black eyes, dark hair shorn down to the skull.
“Oh,” I said with a shrug. “Hey, Kav.”
52
Hope Dies Last
Luca
Iakov Kavinski looks muchthe same as he always has, except not quite. He looks bigger than ever, a wall of muscles all in black. Where he used to be wound tight and on edge, there’s a new relaxed confidence in his gait. Parricide—if my assumptions are correct—suits him.
“Hey, Fletch.” He goes over to my bar, pours himself a drink and sits himself down on the couch opposite mine, just like he did what feels like a lifetime ago when he came to me looking for his dead sister and I leveraged his despair to catch Willow. “What are you reading?”
I raise my book, showing him the cover. He grins. “Zach put you up to it?”
“I’ve not seen the Bishop in almost a year.”
“Then what are you reading this boring shit for?”
