Chapter 12

Chapter 12

The spoon is cold in my fingers.

Eight faces watch me. Giulia's smile has not changed, and her eyes still have not closed. I can feel the system waiting at the edge of my mind with its price tag.

[Antidote available: 3,000 points.]

[Current balance: 3,150.]

If I buy it, I am down to almost nothing. If I do not, I am eating poison in front of the whole family. There is a third option, and I take it before I can talk myself out of it.

I put the spoon down.

"It looks lovely," I say. "But I couldn't possibly take the first bite."

Giulia's head tilts. "It is tradition."

"Then let me honor it properly." I slide the bowl across the linen toward her, slow, until it stops in front of her pearls. "You've been in this family longest, Zia Giulia. A bride should be blessed by the eldest woman at the table. Please. Eat first."

The room goes very quiet.

Dante's coffee cup comes down on its saucer with a small click. Marco's smile, which had frozen, thaws into something nervous. Rosalind looks at her plate as if she wishes she could climb into it.

Giulia does not touch the bowl.

"That is not how it is done," she says.

"Then I'll do it the way my family does," I answer. "We never ask a guest to eat what the host won't."

[Truthfulness: 100%.]

It is a lie that sounds like a rule, and the system lets it pass because I said it like a fact. I did not know it could do that. I file it away for later, with my pulse going hard in my throat.

Giulia's fingers rest on the tablecloth. They do not move toward the spoon.

"I am an old woman," she says. "My stomach cannot take pomegranate."

[Skill 'Read Lies': "My stomach cannot take pomegranate." Truthfulness: 4%.]

At the head of the table, Luca puts his fork down.

I did not expect it. I did not expect him to be listening. For the whole meal he has been silent, one hand on his cup, eyes drifting between his family members like a man reading weather. Now he looks at his aunt, and the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.

"Zia," he says. "My wife offered you the honor."

"Luca, caro, I told you, my stomach."

"You have eaten pomegranate at every family breakfast since I was six years old." He says it pleasantly, almost fondly. "I remember you taking the largest bowl."

Marco laughs, a hollow sound. "She has been unwell, Luca, you know how it is with the old ones, surely there's no need to..."

"Bruno."

The driver steps away from the wall.

"Bring me a clean spoon," Luca says. "Zia Giulia will eat from my plate, then."

A breath moves around the table. Nobody speaks. Giulia sits like a statue, and for the first time I see something crack in her face. Not fear. Calculation, fast and ugly, behind the thin polite mouth.

Bruno does not go for a spoon.

He walks straight to the table, reaches past Rosalind, and sweeps the bowl off the linen with the back of his hand.

It hits the marble. Porcelain explodes. Red seeds spray across the floor in a bright spill, and a long silver serving spoon spins away under the sideboard, where it lies gleaming and then, slowly, begins to turn black along the edge.

Nobody moves.

Then Luca is on his feet.

"Bruno."

"Don Vescari." Bruno's voice is calm and hollow, as if he has already left his own body. "It was me."

My breath stops.

"Explain," Luca says.

"I put it there. The poison. I prepared the bowl myself in the kitchen this morning." Bruno's eyes are fixed on the middle of the wall. He does not look at me. He does not look at Giulia, either, which feels deliberate. "The Signora Elena was never meant to leave this house alive."

[Skill 'Read Lies': Bruno's statement, 'It was me.' Truthfulness: 100%.]

[Skill 'Read Lies': Bruno's statement, 'She was never meant to leave.' Truthfulness: 100%.]

[Notice: Bruno is telling the truth. Bruno is not telling the whole truth.]

Something cold and familiar moves in my chest.

I look at his hands. His left hand, the one he used to knock the bowl, has a faint scar across the knuckles. A thin white line. I have seen it before.

I saw it in the first life. On the stairs. Wrapped around the grip of a gun.

[Warning: Target 'Bruno' matches the Host's first-life executioner.]

[Memory cross-reference: 98% confidence.]

[Recommendation: Do not look at him directly.]

I look away. It takes everything I have.

Don't. That was what he mouthed to me at the table. Not an order. A plea. He was telling me not to eat it.

The same man who killed me in another life stood by the door while his own hands prepared my poison, and he stopped it at the last second with a thrown bowl and a confession.

Why?

"You will be dealt with," Luca says, in a voice so level that it is worse than shouting. "Reyes. Take him to the cellar."

The lawyer rises from his seat.

"I would like to speak first," Bruno says.

"You have spoken."

"I would like to say who gave the order."

The room stops breathing.

Giulia's hand drifts up toward the pearls at her throat. Marco has gone the color of old paper. Dante stares at the floor as if the marble might open.

Luca does not move. "Say it."

Bruno finally turns his head. His eyes find Luca's across the long white table, and for a moment I see the man behind the blank face, a man who has spent a long time carrying something too heavy.

"You did, Don Vescari," he says.

My skin goes cold.

"Last night. In your study. You called me in after the wedding, and you told me to see that the new wife did not last the week."

[Skill 'Read Lies': Bruno's statement. Truthfulness: 100%.]

The system chimes it in my head, bright and clean and impossible.

Luca stands completely still.

I watch him, because I cannot look anywhere else. I have known this man for three years in one life and one night in another, and I have never seen what crosses his face now. Not guilt. Not rage. A blankness so deep it looks like a man falling.

"I never said that," he says.

[Skill 'Read Lies': Luca's statement. Truthfulness: 100%.]

Two true sentences. Both of them certain. Both of them impossible.

I stare from Bruno to Luca, my pulse hammering, and then I feel it. A faint pressure at the edge of my System, like someone sliding a thin cold blade between the pages of what I can see.

[Alert: Memory manipulation detected.]

[Source: Second System.]

[Target affected: Bruno.]

[Target affected: ———]

The second name is scrambled again.

Across the table, Giulia has finally blinked. Once. Slowly.

And she is looking at me, not at either of the men, with a satisfied little smile that tells me she knows exactly what I just worked out.

Someone in this room can rewrite what a person remembers.

And I have no way to know whether I am still remembering my own death correctly.