Chapter 5
That night, Lily lay very still beside her mother and listened.
The footsteps came again at half past eleven. Slow, then faster, then slow again, back and forth across the main corridor without pause and without rest. Victor was not sleeping.
Victor would not sleep.
And in her small chest, in the dark, Lily understood with a clarity that no three-year-old should ever possess: the deadline was tomorrow. Tomorrow was the day he stopped asking.
She would not let tomorrow come.
At two in the morning her eyes opened.
Elena slept beside her, breathing long and slow, one hand flung out across the quilt toward the place where Lily lay. Lily slid out from under the covers without moving it. She stood for a moment beside the bed, looking at Mimi, who lay against the pillow with one soft ear flopped forward and the button eye catching a thin line of moonlight.
A soldier does not carry a stuffed rabbit into the last battle.
She left Mimi there.
She took nothing at all — no bread, no water, no bottle in her sleeve. Only her bare feet on the cold wooden boards and the memory of every board in this house that would betray her and every board that would hold its tongue.
Down the servants’ stairs. Through the dark kitchen, where a single copper pot caught the moonlight and threw it onto the wall. Into the upper cellar. Through the hidden door, which opened at the touch of her small hand on the latch, as though it had always known her.
She had just set her foot on the stone floor of the lower room when the door above her head groaned.
She dove behind the third empty rack before her next breath.
Three sets of footsteps came down the stairs. One pair ahead, two behind. In the corner chair, the night man in his brown mustache rose when they came and sat again when they left.
Victor stepped into the lamplight without his jacket. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. In his right hand, held loose against his thigh, he carried a small glass syringe.
The liquid inside caught the lamp and burned amber-gold.
He stopped in front of the cage and smiled the smile that did not reach his eyes.
“It is past midnight, brother. Today is the deadline.”
His voice was soft. Almost a lullaby.
“No codes, no numbers, no empire for me to inherit the clean way.” He turned the syringe once between his fingers, watching the light move in it. “So tonight, or tomorrow, you may finally rest forever.”
Dominic lifted his face.
He did not beg. He did not speak. His bruised eyes held his brother’s with a stillness that unsettled the two men behind him more than any shouted threat ever could.
Victor laughed once — a small, amused sound, as though something had been said that was in rather poor taste.
He slipped the syringe back into a slim leather case and tucked it into his inner pocket.
“Sleep well, Dominic. You will need it.”
He turned. The black overcoats followed.
The hidden door closed. The latch dropped.
Lily held her breath until the footsteps above had faded into nothing. She counted breaths in tens, over and over, until she had lost the numbers and found them again.
Then she crept out.
Dominic was already looking at her. His eyes met hers across the stone floor, and the two of them understood each other without a single word spoken.
“Tonight,” he whispered.
Lily nodded.
She slipped back up the stone stairs, through the hidden door, across the upper cellar, up the servants’ stair, into the small room, and climbed back into the bed. Her mother stirred in her sleep, and one warm hand found Lily’s hair and settled there.
She lay in the darkness under that hand and waited for three o’clock, the hour when the house slept hardest.
At three in the morning, the house was as still as a house can ever be.
Lily eased her mother’s hand off her hair and laid it on the quilt. Her bare feet found the cold boards and knew which ones would betray her and which would hold their tongues.
She crossed the small room like a shadow between shadows.
At the door she paused. She laid her small palm flat against the wood and whispered the words she must not forget.
“Risotto alla Siciliana.”
Then she slipped into the dark corridor.
The night guard was asleep.
He sat slumped in his wooden chair in the corner of the lower room, his chin sunk against his shoulder, one hand still curled around a worn paperback that had slipped open across his knee. The small radio on the desk was silent. His coat had slid off the back of the chair onto the floor without his noticing.
Lily crossed the stone without a sound.
She reached the little wooden desk. The top drawer was open the width of a child’s wrist, as it always was, and inside, on a square of felt worn thin by the thumbs of many men across many years, lay a single brass key.
She lifted it.
It was cold. It was heavier than she had expected — so much heavier than a key should be — and it smelled faintly of oil from years far older than her whole life.
She turned.
Past the first empty rack. Past the second. Past the third, where she had hidden twice now and knew the pattern of the dust by heart.
She stepped into the lamplight in front of the cage.
Dominic was already awake. He was always awake now. His eyes went wide when her small figure entered the light, and for a long moment he could not seem to breathe.
She knelt before the iron lock. She held the key in both hands and found the keyhole in the cold black iron and slid the warm brass into the dark.
Her small fingers were steadier than any grown man’s hands had been in that cellar for a week.
She turned it once. Nothing.
She turned it the other way. Nothing.
She bit her lower lip, pressed the key deeper, and tried again.
Click.
A tiny, ordinary sound. The kind a kitchen drawer makes when it closes. The kind a hallway light makes when it goes out at night.
And yet in that stone room it rang out like the breaking of an ancient world along a seam no one had known was there.
The cage door swung open on its silent hinges.
For a moment neither of them moved.
Then Dominic Moretti laid a trembling hand against the bars and pulled himself up. His left leg carried his weight for less than a second before it buckled. He gasped once and held on, and the iron held him.
Lily stood at his side with her small hand in his. It weighed nothing. It was the only thing in the room he did not want to let go.
“Wait,” he breathed. “Not yet.”
He did two things before he moved. He dragged the filthy sacking he had slept on into a heap against the back bars, so that from a distance it might pass for a man lying down. Then he pulled the cage door to behind him and left the heavy lock hanging open on its hasp, so that at a glance it looked exactly as it always had.
They had crossed half the stone floor, Dominic with one hand on the dusty wood of each rack in turn and his good leg doing the work of two, when the door above their heads began to groan.
Lily did not think.
She moved.
She tugged at his sleeve toward the deep hollow between the third and fourth racks, where the stone wall curved inward and the lamplight did not quite reach. Dominic understood. He lowered himself into the shadow with his teeth shut on a sound, and she pressed her small shoulder against his good side and went perfectly still.
Heavy boots came down the stairs. Slow and bored — the round of a man who had walked this room a thousand times. At the foot of the stairs he swung a flashlight toward the cage. The beam found the gray heap of sacking against the back bars and lingered on it.
“Still sleeping, Your Majesty,” he muttered.
The beam swung away. It swept across the desk, across the slumped figure in the chair, and the man made a sound of disgust.
“Brown-mustache, you dog.”
He did not wake him. He stood there for the length of a long breath, two steps from the hollow where Dominic’s ruined leg lay folded against the stone. His shoulder brushed the edge of the rack. He did not look down.
Then he began to climb the stairs again.
The hidden door above closed with a soft, heavy sigh. The latch dropped.
Lily waited until she had counted ten breaths, ten times.
“This way, Mr. Dominic.”
He did not answer. His breathing had gone strange and shallow.
At the foot of the stairs he looked up at the twelve stone steps the way a man looks at a mountain. He climbed them the way a small child climbs, sitting, pushing himself up one step at a time with his hands and his good leg, while Lily went ahead and held the little door open and watched the dark above. It took them almost ten minutes. Neither said a word.
May you like
At the top the upper cellar lay quiet, barrels and shelving and dust. She did not lead him toward the main stairs and the great hall. She led him across the cellar to the narrow coal stair behind the barrels, the one Paulo used to carry up the logs, steep and cramped and never watched by any camera, which came up beside the scullery into the servants’ corridor.
The servants’ corridor.
