Chapter 17: The Name He Never Finished

"Rhys!"

The scream tore out of Elara before she knew she had drawn breath. It rang through the nave, cracked and ragged, and above her in the loft a boot scraped stone.

She did not look up. She pressed both hands over the wound in Augustin's chest, and warm blood welled between her fingers.

"Stay with me," she begged. "Please. Stay with me."

A door banged somewhere overhead. Footsteps pounded down a hidden stair, fast and light, and faded. The shooter was gone.

The chapel door crashed open.

Rhys came down the aisle at a dead run. He did not shout. He did not slow. He dropped to his knees beside the pew, and for one dreadful second his hands hovered over his grandfather's body as if he were afraid to touch him.

"Grandfather."

"Not so loud," Augustin whispered. His eyes fluttered open, cloudy and blue-gray. A faint, dry smile touched his lips. "I am not yet dead. It was a poor shot. Through the shoulder, I think. The lung, perhaps."

"Priya's men are on the road," Rhys said hoarsely. He ripped off his scarf and pressed it against the wound beside Elara's hands. "An ambulance is three minutes away. Don't talk."

"I have been silent for twenty-five years, Rhys." Augustin's chest rattled. "I think I will talk."

Elara's vision swam. She could smell blood, thick and metallic, and under it the old man's skin, paper and lavender and age. And something else, faint and sweet, drifting from his coat.

Last Light.

He had been wearing it too.

Augustin's gaze found her face. "Child," he breathed. "Forgive me. I meant to tell you gently."

"Tell me what?"

His fingers closed around her wrist with unexpected strength.

"Conrad Hart made the solvent," he said. "Conrad Hart paid the men who cut the fire doors. Conrad Hart carried you out because he needed a witness who would remember a kind voice." His breath hitched. "But Conrad did not light the match."

"Then who did?"

Augustin's eyes moved past her.

He looked at the tall, white-faced man kneeling at his side, and his own face crumpled, all the cold authority of House Calloway dissolving into grief.

"I am sorry, my boy," he whispered. "I should have told you long ago. I could not bear it."

Rhys's hand stilled on the wound.

"Told me what?"

"It was your father."

The chapel went silent.

Somewhere outside, a bird sang. A thin shaft of dawn crossed the altar and lit the dust in the air. Elara felt the words land in her chest, one at a time, like stones into deep water.

Your father.

Rhys did not move. He did not blink. His face had no color left in it at all.

"My father died in a car accident," he said. His voice was perfectly flat. "I was thirteen. I stood at the grave."

"There was a grave," Augustin said gently. "There was a coffin. It was empty."

"No."

"Edmund survived the fire, Rhys. He was burned. I hid him. I told myself it was mercy." A tear slid down the old man's temple into his white hair. "He was my son. And I let him live, and your mother weep, and the Quinn woman's child grow up without her. I have been a coward all my life."

"No," Rhys said again, softly, almost gently, like a man refusing a gift he could not afford.

Elara's mouth had gone dry. She looked at the man beside her, the cold man in the black coat, who had told her at dawn I am still here. Who had laid his coat across her shoulders. Whose key had opened the door to the room where her mother's last work lay waiting.

His father had killed her mother.

She was kneeling in a church with the grandson of her mother's murderer, and his hands were wet with his grandfather's blood, and she had signed her name on a contract to marry him.

"Where is he?" Rhys said. His voice was barely audible. "Where is my father?"

Augustin's grip loosened on Elara's wrist.

"You've met him," he breathed. "Rhys. You've been drinking his tea for eleven months."

His hand slipped from hers.

His eyes closed.

And from the open chapel door, a cold new voice said, "Step away from him. Both of you."