All Chapters of THE SONGBIRDS CAGE: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

DarioAn hour earlier, I was standing in my sister's kitchen with a burner phone in my hand, telling myself I was a man in control of his own life.The message had come in at 11:52. No name. A number I didn't know. Six words.Boathouse. Now. See your bride.I read it four times. The first time I thought it was a joke. The second time I thought it was a trap. By the third, I knew it was both, and I still couldn't put the phone down.Here is what I'd been carrying for six months, and never said out loud to Elena or anyone else. I was in love with a woman I'd been ordered to marry. I don't mean the polite, dutiful fondness you're supposed to feel for a wife you didn't pick. I mean I had started taking the long way through the east hall so I'd pass her office door. I knew she took her coffee with too much sugar and hid it from people because it made her feel like a child. I knew she hummed when she read contracts, without a tune, without noticing, and stopped the second she caught anyone

KiryanI didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of the narrow bed with an ice pack going warm against my face and watched the sky over the lake turn from black to iron to a thin, cold grey. The sheets still smelled of her. I didn't change them. I told myself I was being sentimental. Then I told myself the truth, which was that I had waited nine years for that smell and wasn't ready to wash it out.Around four I stood at the window where she'd stood and let myself have one minute. Just one. The lake. The last of her warmth in the blanket. The tin box on the shelf, its lid still crooked where she'd pushed it shut. Nine years of paper folded small, and she had read every scrap and hadn't looked away. I laid my palm flat on the cold glass. Then I put the minute away, because something was wrong with this night, and I could already feel it, like the pressure before a storm.At half past five I went out and checked the boathouse road.Whoever used the lake had been careful. No footprints on the sh

DarioHospitals have a smell that never goes away, and I've hated it since I was nine years old.At eleven that night I was sitting on a plastic chair in a hallway that smelled just like that, with my sister's blood drying stiff on my cuffs. My father died in a hallway like this one. Elena held my hand the whole time. She was seventeen. She told me it would be all right, in a voice so steady I believed her. Then she went into the bathroom and I heard her throw up for ten minutes.She raised me after that. Not our mother, who left before I could walk. Elena. She didn't know how to braid anything, so she cut my hair herself with kitchen scissors and cried when she got it crooked. She taught me to shoot at twelve and to lie at thirteen and to count the exits in every room I ever sat in. People call her cold, and I don't argue. They never saw her outside a locked room at four in the morning, sewing a button back on my school jacket because she wanted me to look like somebody's brother and

KiryanWren told me at dawn, in the cold, under the boathouse eaves, holding a black notebook against her chest like a child holding a broken toy.She didn't cry. That was what scared me. She read me the entries in a voice with all the colour drained out, then closed the cover and said, "I need you to follow her.""Wren.""I can't do it myself. If I look at her, I'll know. If I look at her and I'm wrong, I'll never forgive myself. And if I look at her and I'm right" She stopped. Her whole face shook once and then went still. "Please, Kiryan. I need someone who can watch without hoping.""That isn't me.""It's the closest thing I have."I told her I would do it. I didn't tell her I was praying it would come to nothing. I've done a lot of things for Wren Castellane in nine years, but that was the first time I ever asked God for anything on her behalf.Talia left the estate at ten past noon in her little blue Fiat, wearing sunglasses and a scarf. I followed on a borrowed motorcycle with

Wrens Kiryan found me on the landing.I don't know how long I'd been there. My cheek had gone numb against the brick. A neighbour had come down the stairs, taken one look at me, and gone back up without a word. When the street door finally opened, I heard boots taking the steps three at a time, and then he was on his knees in front of me, his hands hovering as if he was afraid to touch me."I'm all right," I said."You're not.""No. I'm not." I let out a breath that was half a sob. "But I'm going to be."He gathered me in. He didn't say anything clever or soft. He just held on, one hand cupping the back of my head, his chin on my hair, and let me shake. In that quiet I understood what nine years of loyalty had really been made of. Not devotion, Patience. The kind that sits outside a door until it's needed. I thought of him in the reeds all night, and of every night before that, and how I had never once asked what it cost him. It was a great deal to owe one person.When I could talk a