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She dragged her crying boy from the store, slamming the door in her wake.
Devere’s shoulders heaved as he sighed. He did not have the personality of a salesman, or anyone who should be dealing with the public regularly, but he wasn’t trying to be mean.
“Why didn’t you tell them you’ve always made the toys, not Jacapo?” I asked, entering the storefront.
He glanced over. “You know?”
“I guessed. You made my bird, and you made Hush. Perhaps Jacapo did make toys for his original market stall, but you’ve made them all ever since you were old enough to hold the tools.” All of these amazing creations were his. Even the clocks.Especiallythe clocks. That was why they were so vibrant, so brilliant, so perfect. And why Jacapo’s World of Toys was so renowned that word of its amazing creations had even reached Massalia. Devere was its heart and soul. He put all of his color and life into the toys. Knowing that, I knew Devere better too. He wasn’t as cold and distant as he tried to present to others.
I picked up the train the boy had so desperately wanted.
Devere folded his arms. “You’d better pay for that.”
“I dare not ask how much.”
“If you have to ask—”
“—you can’t afford it,” I finished, echoing my father’s words.
He plucked the train off me, like he had the boy, and set it down upon its tracks, setting it off on a loop around the miniature Minerva town, through tunnels, puffing smoke and tooting its horn.
“I don’t make them,” he said, moving to the door where he turned the lock and flipped the sign to CLOSED. “Not anymore.”
“That’s a shame. Because they’re lovely.”
He gave me an oddly frustrated look and stood in the middle of the store, like a smudge of dark ink in a cascade of bright crayons.
“There’s a little piece of me in all of them,” he said. “But I have nothing left to give.”
“Do you not want to make them?”
“I did… at the start.” He set about tidying a display of jigsaws. “A few here and there, but it was never enough. He wanted more and more, and I… I lost my love for them after you… After I was alone.”
After I left.Or was that wishful thinking? Devere’s life did not revolve around mine.
“Jacapo forced you to make them?” Which might explain why I’d fished his father’s photograph out of the fire.
Devere fixed the display and stepped back, then snarled at it and moved off, heaving toward a part of the shop full of sparkling ornaments. “You were right. I’m not his son. I never was. It’s rather obvious, as we’re nothing alike. He… he owned me, so I made the toys because he wanted them, and I’d hoped if I could please him, it might one day be enough.”
“It wasn’t, though?”
“No.” Devere picked up a crystal butterfly. “Near the end, we rather hated each other. I reminded him of his debts, and he reminded me of how I would never be free of him.”
Devere had been trapped, and I’d left him here, alone, all those years ago.
“But you didn’t kill him?” I asked softly and shifted closer.
“I wish I had. But not for the reasons you think. He was just a lonely man full of sorrow and regret.”
“Do you knowwhokilled him?” I asked carefully.
He stared at the crystal butterfly, then crushed his fingers closed. Scarlet blood ran between his knuckles and dripped down his arm, soaking into his shirt sleeve.
“Devere?” I reached for him.
He brushed me off and hurried to the counter, then dropped the broken crystal butterfly in the trash and wrapped his hand in a cloth. “You’re not supposed to be here, Valentine. You should leave, for your own sake.”
“I think I tried that, and it did not end well. Minerva won’t allow it.”
