Chapter 14: What Rhys Remembered

The cellar felt very small.

Elara stood with her back to the copper still and the cobalt bottle wrapped in her scarf, and she looked at the man who had just handed her a second brass key. She could not smell him. She could not read the truth in the air around him. For the first time in her life, her gift gave her nothing.

"Explain," she said.

Rhys did not flinch. "I will tell you everything I remember. It is not much."

"Start with the night of the fire."

He set the key on the workbench between them, as if it were something that might bite.

"I was twelve. My grandfather had been working late for weeks, and he looked ill. That night, I followed him. I thought it was a game." His mouth twisted. "I came down the back stair to this room. There was a woman at the bench, with dark hair and a laugh like yours. She was arguing with my grandfather. I hid behind the still."

Elara's breath caught. "My mother."

"I did not know her name." He stared at the bench. "Then there was a smell. I remember that, though I cannot remember what it was. Sweet. Wrong. The woman screamed. My grandfather shouted. I ran."

"And?"

"She caught me at the door." His voice dropped. "She knelt down. She put this key into my hand and closed my fingers around it. She said, Keep it until a Quinn comes. And do not give it to Augustin."

The words rang in the stone chamber.

Elara went very still.

"She told you," she said slowly, "not to give it to your own grandfather."

"Yes."

"And yet his handwriting is on that note. Welcome home."

"Yes."

She waited for the rest. Rhys shook his head.

"That is all. The next thing I remember is waking on the lawn with my lungs full of smoke and my sense of smell gone. I never told anyone. I thought it was a child's dream." His eyes finally lifted to hers. "I put the key in a drawer. I forgot it for years. I swear to you, Elara, I did not know what it opened until tonight."

She searched his face. His jaw was tight. The tendons in his hands stood out as if he was holding himself up by force.

She could not smell a single lie.

But she did not need to.

"I can't read you," she said quietly. "You know that."

"I know."

"So I'll have to do something I haven't done in a long time." She drew a breath. "I'll have to listen."

Something in his shoulders eased. He did not smile. But the cold, controlled stillness of his face softened just enough to show the boy he had been.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me. I haven't decided."

"No," Rhys agreed. "But you listened."

Marguerite rose from her chair, pale and unsteady. "You should both come upstairs. Theo will be watching the cellar stair. The kitchen is safer."

"No," Rhys said. "Nowhere in this house is safe tonight."

"Then where?"

Elara's phone buzzed.

Priya's name filled the screen. She answered at once. "Priya? Is Odette—"

"She's gone."

The words hit like a slap.

"What do you mean, gone?" Elara's voice cracked. "You were in her room. The guards—"

"We had the man in the gray suit in custody. We had two guards on the corridor. I stepped out to speak to the police for four minutes." Priya's voice was tight, shaking with something Elara had never heard in it before: real fear. "When I came back, the bed was empty. The oxygen tube was folded on the pillow. There was no sign of a struggle."

"Camera footage?" Rhys said sharply.

"I have it." Priya hesitated. "Rhys, you should see it yourself. I'm sending it now."

Elara's phone chimed. A video file loaded on the screen.

She tilted it so Rhys could see.

The hospital corridor, grainy and gray. A door opened. A thin, white-haired woman in a hospital gown stepped through it, leaning on the arm of a man in a long gray coat.

Odette was walking on her own two feet. She was moving slowly, but steadily, and she did not look afraid. She looked, if anything, like a woman on her way to a long-overdue appointment.

The man beside her kept his face turned toward the wall. He carried a cane. His coat was old-fashioned, expensive, and perfectly cut.

He paused at the corridor's end and, almost casually, tipped his head up toward the security camera.

Elara heard Rhys stop breathing.

The face on the screen was lined and pale, the eyes sharp as flint, the mouth set in the faint, sad smile of a man who had waited a very long time.

It was the face from the portrait over the Calloway fireplace.

"That's impossible," Rhys whispered.

On the screen, Augustin Calloway lifted a finger to his lips.

And walked Odette out into the night.