17. Too Clean

(Maxine)

Morrison had listened to the entire call from the edge of the room, out of the camera's line, arms crossed, saying nothing. He waited until I ended it. He waited until I set the screen down. He waited long enough that I knew he was loading a question I wasn't going to enjoy.

"You want to say something," I said. "Say it."

"The theory's clean," he said. "That's what bothers me. It's too clean."

"It's clean because it's true."

"It's clean because it explains everything and costs your family nothing. Stolen blood. No suspect. Nobody in your house has to have done a single thing except get robbed." He kept his voice level, which was worse than if he'd pushed. "The best possible version of events, handed to you by the one man you'd least like to doubt, at the exact moment you most needed to hear it."

"Careful." The warning walked into my voice on its own. "That's my uncle."

"I know."

"He half raised me. He sat with Theo through nights the doctors had already given up on. You met him ninety seconds ago through a screen."

"I know that too." Then, quietly, because he isn't a coward even when I wish he were: "It sounds a great deal like what I said to you about Seraphine. Doesn't it."

I opened my mouth to tell him it was completely different. I shut it again, because it wasn't, and we both knew it wasn't, and the only thing worse than Morrison being right was Morrison being right and kind about it at the same time.

"So what," I said. "We suspect everyone? Your mentor, my uncle, my father, the entire population of two kingdoms? That's not an investigation, it's a nervous breakdown with a filing system."

"No. We suspect the people we love first. Everyone else in two kingdoms still gets to trust their own. We're the only two who don't."

It was the most unfairly reasonable thing anyone had said to me in years, and I resented it with my whole body. He wasn't wrong. That was fast becoming his worst quality, the being-right, worn like it cost him nothing, when I knew for a fact it was costing him a mentor and me an uncle and both of us the last comfortable lie we had left: that the danger was out there, external, someone else's doing, somewhere we'd never have to look straight at the people we'd never think to check.

We were standing close by then. I don't know when that happened. Arguing with Morrison kept collapsing the distance between us; every time I tried to back off to make a point, I somehow ended up making it from six inches away, near enough to hear his heart doing the thing it did when he stopped trusting his own control.

His gaze dropped to my mouth. Mine had already made the same trip to his. The marks on our hands were humming, reaching for their missing halves the second we got close enough to remind them, and it would have been so easy. It's always so easy with him, that's the whole problem. The pull is built into our skin now, and neither of us signed up for it.

Every argument we'd had this week ended in this same half-inch of not-yet, both of us breathing too carefully, the whole room narrowed to the question of who moved first.

We stopped. Both of us. At the same moment, which was somehow more humiliating than if only one of us had managed to be sensible.

"We keep doing that," I said. My voice had gone rough. "The almost."

"Yes."

"One of these days we're going to run out of reasons to behave."

"Probably." He stepped back, and I hated the six inches, which was its own piece of information I chose not to pick up. He dragged a hand down his face, and whatever he'd been about to say, he put it down and reached for something better instead.

"Tomorrow," he said, "we're going to see Theo."

Of all the things he could have chosen. With an argument still open on the table and every reason in the world not to walk into the vampire kingdom whose blood had turned up in the weapon that came through his wall. He picked Theo.

I married this man to take something from him. I kept forgetting to keep that straight, and he kept making it harder, and tomorrow we're going to see Theo undid me more completely than anything he could have managed with his hands.