‘What do you want?’
‘Ah, a little late, now. You’ve ruined the moment. What do I want? Well, I suppose I want to kill you, Hannah.’ He paused. ‘Actually, that isn’t entirely true. I bear you no personal animosity. I rather admire you, if truth be told. Perhaps I should say instead, I wish to do my job.’
Even though she did not recognise this particular voice, she recognised, now, the soprano pitch of a castrated Merénylő.
It’s over, then. You can’t survive this.
‘What’s stopping you?’ she asked, gritting her teeth.
‘Unfortunately, not everyone in this splendidly dark world of ours is as efficient in their given tasks as I.’
‘Have you killed him?’
‘You ask a lot of questions,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘I hadn’t expected that. I’d expected a fight, actually. Perhaps even a chase. Although, considering your condition, a chase sorely lacking in any real sport.’ Through his nose, he made a peculiar snuffling sound. ‘Like hunting a stag whose hamstrings have been cut.’
‘Please. Where’s Gabe? What have you—’
‘Ah, there it is. Please. I thought I’d hear it eventually. Was Gabe the Irishman with the soulful blue eyes?’
She nodded, knowing that he toyed with her, lengthening her anguish, but she had no power in this exchange. None at all. ‘Have you . . .’
‘Questions, questions. Let me ask a few of my own. Here’s your first. It might be your last. Where’s Leah Wilde, Hannah? Where’s your daughter?’
Only the Örökös Főnök could instruct a Merénylő. Hannah knew that Catharina would never have sent this creature, which meant one of two things. Either the assassin was working on his own – unlikely – or the tanács had instructed him. If the latter were true, it meant Catharina had lost control of her council. Worse, it meant the tanács had discovered Calw’s secrets, and this was their brutal response.
If the tanács had acted here, they would have acted in Italy too. Hannah knew they would have timed their attacks to occur simultaneously. If the Merénylő was asking questions about her daughter, it meant Leah must have evaded capture. It also meant that now, instead of receiving a quick death at the assassin’s hands, Hannah was being recruited into the hunt. But if the creature in front of her thought she would become an accessory to that, he was deluding himself.
She felt the handle of the knife drawer pressing at her back. The Merénylő was still on the other side of the counter. She might just be able to yank the drawer open before he reached her. She could not hope to overcome him, but if she could find a blade quickly enough, if she could open her wrists . . .
And then Hannah realised something else: all he had to do was incapacitate her, and then he could pump his own vile blood inside her, reviving her for long enough to do as he pleased.
She shuddered. Remembered her urging from earlier: Don’t show your fear.
With a clearer voice, she said, ‘What you’re asking, is a trade.’
He paused a moment, and when he spoke next, it was around a smirk. ‘An unusual way of viewing it. Quite wrong, of course.’
‘It’s the only way you’ll get what you want.’
‘Again, quite wrong, Hannah. I know your story. I know what you’ve endured. But you’ve never endured me. Come, don’t prolong this. Tell me what I need to know.’
‘Is he dead? Gabe? Tell me that, at least.’
She heard him sigh. When she realised he was enjoying the cut-glass shrill of silence that followed, she felt a hatred for him so extreme that had it found physical release, he would have dropped to the floor with every bone in his body shattered.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I can’t quite remember what I did with poor Gabriel. Perhaps you could help me jog my memory. Perhaps we could start by talking about Leah.’
‘Is he dead?’
Another sigh, followed by a flutter of air as he plucked the phone from her fingers. ‘I’ll indulge you, why not. Allow me to go and bring you what’s left.’
Even though she heard nothing to mark his departure, she knew, from a subtle change in the silence, that she was now alone in the room. She heard one of the chalet doors unlocking. Heard a few muffled sounds, something heavy being dragged across the floor.
She sensed Gabriel then, caught his scent: the peculiar sharp maltiness that belonged only to him.
The tornado swirl of emotion nearly knocked her off her feet: elation, that her lover still lived; horror, at what might already have happened to him, and what she might be about to witness.
From the floor, Gabriel whispered her name. She sank to her knees and embraced him. His flesh was cold, shockingly so. Hannah ran her hands over his face, across his cheeks. Finding his ear, she murmured into it. No words, just comforting sounds.
‘You know, Hannah,’ the Merénylő said, ‘the tanács are terribly upset about this litter of kirekesztett bastards you’ve unleashed on the world. I’ve never studied the text of the Vének Könyve, so I couldn’t comment on their justifications, but they do intend to wipe the slate clean of them.’
‘They’re crazy.’
‘It does seem that way, doesn’t it? But I want you to know that they gave me no instructions about what to with Gabriel, here. The discretion is mine. OK, here’s the question, and before I ask it, let me remind you of this.’ She heard two hard strikes: edged steel rapping against the formica countertop. ‘You’d be surprised what a blade this sharp can do to a man. So tell me, Hannah Wilde. Where can I find Leah?’
She took a shuddering breath and thought of her daughter, out there somewhere in the world. Tightening her arms around Gabriel’s body, she felt his shoulders tremble.
The two people she cared most about, and both of them beyond her protection. It was, even as she considered it, a ridiculous thought. What protection could she have hoped to offer either of them? She couldn’t even protect herself any more.
Even in her grief, a thought formed. Her own life, she knew, had begun to wind down to its conclusion the moment she had entered this room.
She didn’t really believe the Merénylő’s words about Gabriel. Despite what the assassin had said, she suspected he would take as much pleasure in ending her lover’s life as he would in ending her own. But there was always a chance.
If Leah had managed to evade her pursuers, then perhaps Hannah could give this creature a snippet of information and secure Gabriel’s safety without endangering her daughter’s.
Decision made, she swallowed, lifted her head. ‘Italy,’ she said. ‘That’s where she is. Villa del Osservatore, on Lake Como.’
The Merénylő’s fist struck her cheek, hard enough to fracture bone. Her head snapped backwards.
‘I know she was at Villa del Osservatore, Hannah. But she’s not there now, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. What I want to know is where she’s going.’
He tapped the blade of his knife against the countertop, and when he spoke next, there was a hardness to his voice that had not been there before. ‘Oh, this is growing tiresome. You have until the count of ten.’
Etienne stared out of the window at the passing scenery as the van rolled along the road, her body so weighted by helplessness that she felt as though she were sinking into the seat, as if the world’s gravity had magnified, sucking her down.
For so many years she’d lived a life absent of emotion or companionship or love. She’d functioned as an automaton, acting out her part without feeling, lacking even the introspection to ask why she’d cast herself in this role, or where it all might end. It hadn’t even been a lonely existence because she felt no loneliness; she felt nothing. Whereas now, she felt everything. Emotions festered in her; fear pecked like a carrion bird, guilt ripped and chewed. And, at her core, that crushing sense of hopelessness, threatening to consume everything that she’d started to become.
In the drawing room of her Mayfair town house, she’d been incapacitated by terror as the tolvaj approached: crippled by it. She’d wa
tched, rigid, as the creature reached into her son’s crib and spirited the boy away.
Etienne had never heard of a baby being taken. An infant, yes, but not a newborn: the tolvaj would be trapped inside its host for years until its physical body matured; the nest they’d stirred up must be desperate indeed. She wondered whether that offered Elijah any hope – whether, just possibly, he was for the tolvajok an insurance policy; a plan B.
Elijah.
The source of every single one of the myriad emotions that churned in her. In his few short weeks of life Elijah had swept out the lightless chambers of her heart, had filled her with a glow so intense she’d been surprised not to see it radiating from her skin – a sense of rightness with the world; a wholeness; an unbroken chain of candlelight encircling her; a crackling bonfire of red flames and heat.
And despite all that, she’d done nothing to save him. Jakab had held her back, admittedly, but she had not really wanted to intervene. She’d watched that abomination cradle her son to its chest, watched its eyes appraise her as its tongue flickered over its lips, triumphant. It had turned away and stalked from the room, and she had done nothing.
But what could you have done?
In the presence of a tolvaj, she was as powerless as any other. She had known that the instant she grasped the nature of what had walked into her house. But what clove her, what clawed and ripped and shredded and chewed, was the knowledge she had not even tried.
She found herself thinking of Hannah Wilde, the woman she had met in Italy. That was the difference, she realised, between the two of them. Hannah Wilde – even if she knew the odds of victory were precisely zero – would, at least, have tried.
Thinking of Hannah and her daughter opened a fresh wound. The two women had blessed her with a son, and she’d repaid them with treachery.
During the drive, with little else to distract him, Jakab had talked. He had told her the story of the mill fire in which he and Hannah had burned. Had told her how, as the flames of that inferno seared him, he had found a broken window and toppled into the waters of the Vézère. How he had floated, almost dead, until he’d been fished from its clutches by a group of Eleni who had not grasped the nature of their prize. And what had happened after that.
From the passenger seat, she glanced over at him. Hunched forward, hands tight on the steering wheel, eyes so red it looked as if tiny beads of blood were seeping from them, Jakab stared at the road, the expressions on his face twisting, cycling.
She had given up trying to work out his thoughts. His mind was a broken thing now, impenetrable to reason or inquiry. Her revelations back in London seemed to have tipped him over the edge. Emotions churned in him, too, just as fiercely. She saw rage compete with grief, hope compete with despair.
Outside, the wet black trunks of pine trees blurred past the window, the forest beyond as dark and threatening as those of any Grimm fairy tale.
They crested a hill, rolled down the other side. The road slung them around a curve, straightened. And there, to the left of the road, she saw it: a narrow scar in the press of trees.
Wide enough for a single vehicle to pass, the track was crowned by foliage so thick that the fading light fled from beneath it.
Etienne raised her finger. ‘In there.’
Jakab nodded, pulling onto the trail. They bumped along in silence. A few minutes later he stopped the van and turned to face her. Staring with those bloodshot eyes, he said, ‘I need to put you in the back.’
For one of the first times in her life – perhaps also for the last – Hannah had lost the ability to think. She could see no way out of this. No chance of redemption.
‘Six,’ the Merénylő said. His voice came from a different place each time he spoke, as if he danced back and forth inside that tiny space, restless for the violence she knew would follow. ‘Seven.’
Damned either way. She accepted she was already dead. If she didn’t cooperate, Gabriel would join her. Perhaps even precede her. The thought of witnessing his last moments made her so ill she thought her stomach might purge itself.
‘Eight,’ the Merénylő counted.
Even if she betrayed her daughter and gave the eunuch what he wanted, she knew he would renege on his promise; the idea that he would show Gabriel a sliver of mercy was farcical. At least it seemed Leah – either through resourcefulness or good fortune – had managed to escape.
She tried to conjure her daughter’s face from times past. Images rushed at her: the night they fled to Llyn Gwyr all those years ago, Leah sleeping in the back of their 4x4; the day they rode up to Llyn Cau, Leah standing beside Gabriel and staring out across the lake; Leah, among the machinery at Le Moulin Bellerose, hollow-faced as she sent Jakab crashing to his knees.
For more than half her life, the girl had been at the core of everything Hannah thought, everything she did.
‘Nine,’ the Merénylő said.
She buried her face in the clean scent of Gabriel’s hair. ‘You know I love you,’ she whispered.
‘Tell him nothing.’
Speechless, she nodded.
‘Ten,’ the Merénylő said. ‘Time’s up. I need to know where Leah’s gone, and I need to know now. One last time. Where is your daughter?’
How badly she had judged this. Only here, at the end, did she learn how little she understood the society of which she’d become a part.
Turning towards that voice, she jutted her chin, feeling the nerves in her face begin to twitch. ‘Make it quick,’ she said. Gritting her teeth, entombed in the darkness that had claimed her these sixteen years past, Hannah listened to the Merénylő hiss with excitement as he closed the gap between them.
Balázs Jakab moved through trees and ferns, over pine-needle mulch that oozed a brackish water as it sank beneath his weight. His breath plumed before him, a white smoke in the twilight.
The monstrous pain that had throbbed behind his eyes for the last eight hours still pulsed, but in the shadows of these trees its power seemed diminished, offering him an opportunity to think with a somewhat clearer head.
He had not slept, had not eaten. His eyes were so grainy that even in the forest gloom it seemed as though insects crawled across their surfaces.
He had found them. And he did not know how to feel.
For sixteen years he had lived in a world where Hannah Wilde was dead and Leah Wilde was forever lost. Now that world had folded inwards on itself and collapsed into the cold earth, leaving him in a place that was as alien and frightening as it was wondrous.
He had found them. And he did not know how to feel. Did not know how to separate those two creatures in his mind.
Leah Wilde, as bright and as flawless as a diamond. Hannah Wilde, as cold-blooded and as poisonous as a gutter of snakes.
She had tried to kill him. He remembered it clearly. She had tried to kill them both. She had set a fire burning in their flesh, had roasted them until their skin crackled and crisped, sacrificing them to the wrath of those flames and that heat.
And for what? He wished he knew the answer.
Had she suffered as much as he? Did she remember that blistering inferno as vividly? Did she relive it the way he did?
All that pain. All that torment. All those years hungry for vengeance, knowing that vengeance could never be served. And now . . . now the world had changed and the old one was gone. In this new reality, Hannah Wilde survived – untroubled, no doubt, by any shred of remorse for how she had brutalised him.
If that alone were not enough, Leah Wilde, shining beacon of innocence and grace, thrived in a place he could almost reach out and touch. Leah had been nine years old when last he had seen her; how she must have changed in those intervening years. How she must have blossomed.
He wanted to smile – or curse – but the pain behind his eyes had renewed its attack: a glowing cattle brand pressed to his brain. He raised a hand to his face, found tears tracing wet lines down his cheeks, and stumbled from the forest into the day’s dying light.
Ahead, in a clearing edged with gravel, stood the cluster of small chalets, just as Etienne had described. Jakab looked down at what he held. Tightened his grip.
What a reunion this would be.
The merest whisper of a draught as the Merénylő approached. Hannah could not tell from which direction he came. She felt nothing, smelled nothing, as if the room contained a vacuum that drifted steadily towards her. A faceless Death, silent and merciless.
She had promised herself she would hold onto Gabriel until the end. But she found, as another second ticked by, that she could not. Even if it was hopeless, even if all she did was prolong their pain, she could not stand here cowering and accept their fate without complaint.
Her father’s voice, inside her head: Keep fighting until you have nothing left.
Unfurling her arms from Gabriel, transformed suddenly from the pitiable creature she had been, Hannah pressed him down towards the floor.
She spun around. Yanked open the knife drawer. Pulled out the first blade her fingers touched. Lucky choice. A heavy-handled carving knife. It wouldn’t save them. But at least she’d die fighting.
Whirling back towards where she guessed the Merénylő lurked, she slashed out with the blade and met empty space, her arm swinging so violently it almost pulled free of its socket.
The Merénylő chuckled. The sound came from the right. She slashed again. Missed.
Another laugh. To her left this time? She bared her teeth, daring the darkness to attack. Angry now. Furious.
‘If we’re going to play that game,’ the Merénylő said, ‘then I believe it’s my turn.’
A whisper of air as his blade carved a searing line across her face. It was a deep cut, opening her cheeks, parting the soft flesh beneath her nose. A muscle below her eye went crazy, grabbing and releasing, tearing the skin even deeper. Blood gushed from the wound. She felt a sickening pain, dizzying and brutal.
Hannah lunged forward and stabbed with the knife, heard the Merénylő’s high-pitched cackle, felt the air part again, felt his knife gouge another channel across her face.
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