Chapter Six: The Dead Woman's Name

She found him at breakfast.

He was already at the table when she came down, jacket on, coffee poured, a stack of documents open beside his plate like a man who had never once considered that a morning could be anything other than productive. He looked up when she walked in.

"You slept," he said.

"Barely." She pulled out the chair across from him and sat. She did not pour coffee. She looked at him directly and said: "Tell me her name."

The room changed.

It was not dramatic, he didn't flinch, didn't move. But something in the air shifted the way air shifts before weather, and she felt it in her wolf the same way she'd felt his territory the night she arrived. Old pressure. Something with history behind it.

"Belcalis—"

"Yesterday you told me the last companion didn't survive it." She kept her voice level. "That's not a thing you say and then we move on from. Tell me her name."

He looked at her. She looked back. Neither of them broke it.

"Mira," he said finally. Quiet. Like the word cost something.

"What happened to her?"

"That's not a conversation for—"

"For breakfast? For me? For what?" She leaned forward slightly. "You told me enough to be afraid. Now you owe me the rest."

His jaw moved. She had learned already that this was how he looked when he was choosing between two answers, the real one and the easier one.

"She was killed," he said. "Not by accident. Not by something she walked into. She was targeted, specifically, because she mattered to me." He picked up his coffee. Set it down without drinking. "That's all you need."

"It's not."

"Belcalis."

"Who targeted her?"

He looked at the window. When he looked back his face had the quality she was beginning to recognize, not coldness. Something older. A door closing on something he had decided long ago not to open.

"An enemy," he said. "One I believed was dealt with. I was wrong."

She felt the answer that wasn't there. "He's not dealt with."

"No."

"And you knew that when you bought me at the auction."

A pause. "I had suspicions."

She sat back. Suspicions. He had suspicions she might be walking into what had killed the last woman, bought her anyway, and said nothing. She held that and did not speak, needing to decide what she actually felt before she put it in the room.

What she felt was not what she expected.

She wasn't afraid. She was angry, sharp and clean and useful.

"You should have told me," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at him. He didn't dress it up. He didn't offer reasons. He simply agreed, and held her gaze, and let her decide what to do with it.

"I'm not leaving," she said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not invoking the exit clause over this." She pressed her palms flat on the table. "But I am not going to be managed. You don't keep things from me because you think you're protecting me. We clear?"

"We're clear."

"Good." She picked up the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. "Now tell me the rest."

"There isn't more I can tell you right now."

"Can't or won't?"

"Both." He met her eyes. "Not because I don't trust you. Because some of it I haven't said out loud in forty years and I need to choose how to do that." A pause. "Give me that."

She looked at him, ancient, controlled, impossible, asking her for something small and human, and felt the pull again, low and warm. She wanted to be unmoved by it. She was not.

"Fine," she said. "But not forever."

"Not forever."

They ate. He went back to his documents. She drank her coffee and looked out at the grey grounds and thought about a woman named Mira and what it meant that she was sitting in her place.

After breakfast she found Dara in the corridor outside the east wing.

Dara was carrying linens and turned at the sound of her step, and something in Dara's expression, a micro-movement, gone in a second, told Belcalis that Dara had been expecting this.

"You know who she was," Belcalis said.

Dara's hands stilled on the linens. "What did he tell you?"

"Her name. That she was killed. That the person who did it isn't gone."

Dara looked down the corridor in both directions. Then she said, quietly: "Come with me."

She followed Dara to a small windowless room off the service hall. Dara closed the door and looked at her with the expression of someone who had been carrying weight and had just been given permission to set it down.

"Her name was Mira Voss," Dara said.

The sound went out of the room.

Belcalis heard her own blood.

"Voss," she said.

"Yes."

"That's my—"

"Your family name. Yes." Dara's voice was careful. "Mira was your grandmother's younger sister. She came here sixty years ago, not so differently from you. She and Charles, it was real. Varro found out it was real, used her to send a message, and she died on the east lawn." Dara pressed her lips together. "Charles hasn't had anyone here since. Until you."

Belcalis stood completely still.

Her grandmother's sister.

The woman in the portraits she hadn't recognised. The room she'd felt watched in. The family name on the door of something Charles had locked and not opened in forty years.

"He didn't know," she said. It wasn't a question.

"That you were her family?" Dara shook her head slowly. "He knew the bloodline existed somewhere. He didn't know it was you until the auction." A pause. "I think it may be why he couldn't stay his hand when the bidding started."

Belcalis thought about that moment in the auction hall, the silver eyes finding her across the room, the pull she'd felt before he'd even raised a paddle. She had thought it was chemistry. She had thought it was the wolf.

She had not thought it was grief.

"Does he know that I know?" Dara asked.

"Not yet."

Dara nodded once. "He should hear it from you. Not from me."

"I know." Belcalis moved toward the door. Stopped. "Dara. The man who killed her. Varro."

"Yes."

"Is he actually gone, or is Charles hoping?"

The silence before Dara answered was its own answer.

Belcalis walked out of the room and down the corridor and stopped outside the library door, and she stood there with her hand against the wood and felt the weight of it, the name, the connection, the sixty years between a dead woman and this hallway.

Then she pushed the door open.

Charles looked up from his desk.

"Mira Voss," she said.

His face went completely still.

"You know," he said. Not a question.

"She was my grandmother's sister." She stepped into the room and let the door close behind her. "Which means you've been looking for my bloodline since before I was born." She held his gaze. "Start talking. All of it."