16. The Family Problem

(Maxine)

Telling my father that his family's blood had turned up inside a spell built to kill me was not a conversation I'd penciled in for my week.

He took the call from his study, seated in front of the wall of Varco portraits he liked to be photographed with, which told me he'd decided this was an official matter before either of us said a word.

"Maxine." No are you all right. No we saw the reports. Just my name, filed and dated. "I understand there's been a development."

"A development." I kept my voice as smooth as his. Two can play at emotionally unavailable, and he taught the master class. "Someone put a spell through my bedroom wall, Father. It was built to open me from the inside out. And the lab pulled Varco blood out of the middle of it."

A silence. Then, carefully: "Who else has that result?"

Not is it yours. Not who would do this to you. Who else knows. My father, in one question. Reputation first, daughter somewhere down in the footnotes.

"The result stays inside this family and the Coven until I've spoken to the crown," he went on, already three moves into damage control. "If the Marimir court hears that Varco blood was found in an attempt on a Varco bride, on Marwick soil, in the first fortnight of a two-hundred-year treaty, the questions won't stop at who did it. They'll go straight to whether House Varco can be trusted to hold a seat at all." A pause. "Are you somewhere secure?"

It was the nearest he'd come to asking after me, and even that had arrived bolted to the family's political survival.

"Dominic." A second voice, warm where my father's ran climate-controlled, and something in my chest let go before I'd given it permission. "You're interrogating her. Stop." My uncle Lucien leaned into the frame, set a hand on my father's shoulder, and gave me the look I'd been needing from someone for about two weeks straight. "Maxine. Sweetheart. Are you hurt?"

And there was the whole difference between the two men who raised what was left of me after our mother died. My father asked who else knew. Lucien asked if I was bleeding.

When I was small and my father was off being important, Lucien was the one who turned up. He taught me to pick a lock, read a room, and win at cards I had no business winning. He'd spent more nights on the floor of Theo's hospital wing than half the staff, telling him terrible jokes through the worst of it. If there was one Varco alive I'd have staked Theo's life on, it was the man watching me through the screen like I was the only item on his agenda.

I gave him the short version. The spell, the blood they'd found, the marks I didn't mention. Lucien listened with his whole face, quiet when I finished, and then he said the thing I'd been praying somebody would.

"That blood didn't come from any of us willingly." He said it gently, like he understood exactly what it would mean to me. "Think about how much Varco blood sits in the medical archives, Maxine. Every treatment Theo's had, every sample they've drawn from him for the research, all of it logged and stored and, it turns out, not half as secure as we were promised. If a person wanted Varco blood to frame a Varco, they wouldn't need to bleed one of us. They'd only need a key to the wrong cabinet."

It was a good theory. A great theory. It handed me back the two things I'd lost on that workroom floor, my family and my footing, and I wanted it so badly my hands itched.

So I took it. I decided to believe my uncle, because I'd already spent my whole month's supply of surviving unsurvivable things, and the version of the world where my own blood helped build the weapon that came through my wall was not one I could stand up straight inside.