The Gilded Wolves (32 page)

Three months later …

Laila stood in the hallway outside S
é
verin’s office. In her hands, she carried the latest stack of reports. He’d told her there was no need to send them by personally, but she couldn’t keep herself away any longer.

Sometimes she wondered if grief could break someone, for all of them bore fractures, new hollows. Enrique hardly left his research library. Zofia
lived in the laboratory. Hypnos’s charm seemed knife-honed, desperate.

Grief snuck up on her sometimes, and she was not sure how to defend herself from the force of its surprise. Just last month, she had started crying because the cocoa in the kitchens had gone stale. No one ever drank it but Tristan. And then there was the stray Night Bite she had found, gathering dust beneath her bed. She had
stopped wearing black crepe two months ago, but that did not stop her from
wandering the gardens of L’Eden, as if she might still catch a glimpse of a fair head and the edge of a laugh.

But lately, Laila wasn’t sure what to do. S
é
verin sent her objects to read, but she was beginning to think grief had sapped her abilities.

It all started after the funeral.

Laila had gone to Tristan’s workshop.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Some token, perhaps. Something happy that might keep at bay the last image of his death, blood caking his hair, gray eyes dimming, S
é
verin’s face a mask of broken dreams.

But what she found was not happiness.

It was a secret drawer, one that not even S
é
verin had known about. Within it lay the pinned bodies of wingless birds. Laila had shuddered at the
sight. Here lay the mystery of the birdless grounds of L’Eden. Slowly, she had touched one of the iron stakes pinning them in that rictus of death and an image rose to her mind. Tristan laying traps. Tristan catching them, cooing to them, weeping when he tore out their feathers, cushioning the small worlds that he crafted with such love in the dark of his workshop. She heard how he whispered to
the struggling creatures: “See? It’s not so bad … you don’t have to fly.”

Against her will, she remembered Roux-Joubert’s words in the greenhouse …

“His love and his fear and his own cracked mind made it easy to convince him that betraying you was saving you…”

She’d burned it. All evidence of it. And now she couldn’t even tell if what she had seen was true. When she reached for the memory of
it, it was like kneading a fresh bruise. She never told S
é
verin. She could not bear to let him see this. Already, he walked through the halls of L’Eden as if he had seen enough ghosts for a lifetime. Why give him demons to see too?

Laila faltered at the door, about to turn when it suddenly opened.

S
é
verin stood wild-eyed before her, shocked at her presence. Her face burned. That moment where
she’d leaned over him, that evening where he’d hungrily whispered “make it worth my while,” now felt like antiques of a different era.

“Laila,” he said, exhaling it like a curse he wished to be rid of. “What are you doing here?”

Laila had been waiting for this. She’d gathered every scrap of courage to speak these words. For the past two years, she thought that having a deadline on her life should
make her pull back … but Tristan’s death changed that. She didn’t want to glide through life, unfeeling. She wanted to know everything while she could. She didn’t want the ghosts of thresholds not crossed hanging over her. She didn’t want one night. She wanted a chance. It was that conviction, more than anything, which made her drop the reports to the floor, step toward S
é
verin, and kiss him.

S
é
verin’s seventh father was Lust.

Lust taught him that a broken heart made a fine weapon, for its pieces were exceptionally sharp.

One day, Lust became obsessed with a young man in the village. The young man shared his affection, and both S
é
verin and Tristan spent many a night laughing at all the strange sounds that echoed through the halls. But then one day, the young man
came to the villa and said he had fallen in love with a woman of his family’s choice, and he was to marry her within the fortnight.

Lust was furious. Lust did not like to be jilted, and so he found the young woman. He made her laugh, made her love him. And when she told him she carried his child, he forsook her. The girl took her own life, and the young man she would have married went mad.

So, S
é
verin suspected, did Lust. He spent days sitting on the stone balcony, his feet dangling out, his whole body tipped forward as if he were daring the world to give him wings at the last second.

The day before S
é
verin and Tristan left for Paris, Lust whispered to him:

“
Lust is safer than love, but both can ruin you
.”

S
É
VERIN BROKE OFF
the kiss, startling backward.

“What the hell was that?”
he spat.

Confusion flickered on Laila’s face, but she masked it quickly.

“A reminder,” she said uncertainly, her eyes on the floor before she lifted them to him. “To live again…”

Live?

“Turning into ghosts is not what the dead deserve.”

She came closer. There was so much hope in her face that he felt the ache of it in his bones. Memory bit into S
é
verin. He remembered how he reached for her
instead of Tristan, how he shielded her against one he’d sworn to protect. How could she dare to speak of what the dead deserved?

Ice crept into his heart. A sneer twisted his mouth, and he laughed, walking back to his desk and leaning against it.

“Laila,” he said. “What do you want me to say? Would you like me to quote poetry? Tell you there’s witchcraft in your lips that resurrected me?”

Laila flinched. “I thought in the catacombs that—”

“Did you really think that kiss meant something?” he asked, smirking. “Did you think one night meant something? I can barely remember it. No offense, of course.”

“Stop this, S
é
verin. We both know it meant something.”

“You’re delusional,” he said coldly.

“Prove it,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

S
é
verin’s eyes flew open. She was
standing right in front of him, her footsteps silenced by the plush rug beneath them. He steadied himself as he reached out to touch her cheek. The slightest tremble ran through her body.

“You’re blushing, and I’ve hardly touched you,” he said. He forced
another sneer onto his lips even as his foolish heart leapt. “Do you really want me to go through with this proof? It will only humiliate—”

Laila wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him against her. S
é
verin’s hands gripped her waist, as if she were an anchor. As if he were drowning. And maybe he was. A sigh, once trapped in her throat, turned into a moan when his tongue slipped into her mouth.

“Laila,” he murmured. He said her name again, whispering it like a prayer.

He lifted her off the ground, turning sharply and settling
her on the desk. Her legs fell to either side of his hips. They were pressed so closely together that the light from his nephrite desk could not squeeze between them. He filled his hands with the black silk of her hair. This was what a kiss that meant nothing supposedly felt like. As if he could not touch her enough, taste her enough, as if this movement alone would leave his body riddled as an
addict’s. Her neck was hot silk against his lips. He felt drunk. And then, he felt her hand skimming to the space where his shirt joined his pants, and he stopped short.

He stepped back. Her legs, once wrapped around his waist, fell, and her heels hit the front of the desk.

“See?” he said hoarsely. “I told you. Nothing.”

Fury flashed across her face. “You know it wasn’t. And if you really think
that, you’re a fool,
Majnun
.”

He winced at the last word. When he finally looked at her, her sable eyes appeared raw. He didn’t even remember reaching for the words that flew out of his mouth, but their venom chilled his teeth. “Go ahead,” he said. “Call me whatever you wish. It’s impossible to be hurt by someone who’s not even real.”

He couldn’t doubt what he felt afterward. The lightning crack
in the air as something in Laila unmistakably broke.

Two months later … November 1889

S
é
verin held up a gigantic fur stole that, until very recently, might have been a silver fox. Or may have been a shiny weasel. He could never tell with these things. Glossy chips of garnet shone in the fur so that it looked blood-flecked.

“What the hell is this?”

“It’s your birthday present,
cher
!” said Hypnos, clapping his hands together.
“Don’t you
love
it? Perfect for our upcoming trip too. Russia is frigid, and the last thing you’re going to want at the Order’s Winter Conclave is to sound snobby through chattering lips. It just won’t suit.”

S
é
verin held the fur stole at arm’s length.

“Thank you.”

S
é
verin picked up the protocol of the Winter Conclave. They would be staying at a palace, it seemed, with separate suites allowed
for—S
é
verin squinted as he made out the world—
mistresses
. He rolled his eyes. Many of the Order factions of the Western world would be in attendance, particularly those factions which guarded a continent’s Babel Fragment. If the Fallen House sought to join all the Babel Fragments of the world, then it was no longer just the problem of France.

“What about Laila?” asked Hypnos.

The paper slipped
from his hands.

“What
about
Laila?” he asked, not looking up from his desk.

He hadn’t seen her since that night in his study. He pushed away the memory.

If everything went to plan, they would find her precious book. She would leave Paris, and he would be free of his guilt.

“Are you no longer working together?”

“We are.”

Enrique had become, albeit grudgingly and with much attitude, a conduit
between the two of them. Laila might not speak to Séverin anymore, but he still had what she wanted: access to artifacts and the intelligence collected by the Order. And she still had what he wanted: insight into the objects that held precious secrets. S
é
verin would pack a box full of this or that collector’s or curator’s personal effects and have it sent to her, and a progress report on finding
the Fallen House. Laila would return the box with notes about the person attached, along with anything she’d picked up from the Palais. It was a method that suited both of them.

“Have you asked her to join us at the Winter Conclave?”

S
é
verin nodded.

“And has she responded?”

He sighed. “No.”

That was another problem. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted, what would make her join.

“Ah, lover
spats,” sighed Hypnos.

“Laila is not my lover.”

“Your loss,
mon cher
.” Hypnos shrugged and looked up at the clock above the office doorway. “Your birthday party is in full swing downstairs. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Mm.”

“Are you going to make an appearance?”

“This late in the evening, I doubt it will be remembered,” he said.

Hypnos rolled his eyes, bowed, and swept out of the office.
S
é
verin forced down a yawn. He wanted to stay in his study, but there was nothing left to do. Happy birthday, indeed. Last year, Tristan had the bright idea of baking a living
entremet
pie and filling it with four and twenty blackbirds as an homage to the nursery rhyme that S
é
verin had found funny when he was eight. Zofia built the cage-pie with a Forging mechanism to open when S
é
verin blew out
the candles. Enrique found a first edition nursery rhyme book containing “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Laila had made the jam. But once the candles had been blown and the cage sprang open, none of the birds wanted to leave as they vastly preferred Laila’s pie. And then Tristan had wanted to keep them. And Enrique was furious because there were bird droppings all over the library books. The pie was
inedible after that, but Laila baked him a cupcake and left it on his desk the next day with a small candle.

S
é
verin almost laughed, but it died halfway past his lips.

There would never be another birthday like that.

Right before S
é
verin left his office, he grabbed an ouroboros mask from his desk. The brass snake mask formed an intricate figure-eight pattern that hid his eyes, so he could watch
the revelries from the top of the bannister. L’Eden was in the grips of a masquerade ball. Acrobats spun down from the rafters, grinning masks plastered eerily onto their faces. Everyone had come out for the event.
Zofia wore a mask with a pointed beak, her cloudlike hair fluffed around her like ruffled feathers. Enrique stood beside her, a grinning monkey mask on his face, complete with a tail.
Hypnos had eschewed a mask in favor of a sweeping, phoenix train Forged into the semblance of twisting flames.

At the doors, a line of twelve women wearing peacock feathers poured into the lobby. They were utterly dazzling.

But they were not her.

Behind him, he heard his factotum call out: “Please welcome the stars of the Palais des R
ê
ves, who are performing a
very
special dance in honor of
Monsieur Montagnet-Alarie’s birthday!”

The crowd cheered. S
é
verin turned on his heel. His suite was just off to the western alcove, disguised behind a Tezcat door of a long, oval mirror encircled by an ouroboros. The snake was Forged so that it continually slithered, continually chasing after its own tail. It was only by catching it by the throat as if one were to throttle it that the snake would
still. It was also how one could access his suites.

S
é
verin’s room was rather spartan, which he preferred. There was a large bed with an ebony headboard. A sheer, golden canopy Forged so that anyone who touched it between the hours of two in the morning and four in the morning—prime murder hours, he was told—would be snarled in the threads.

S
é
verin rubbed the back of his neck, dropped the snake
mask on the floor, kicked off his shoes, and yanked his shirt out of his pants. When he breathed deep, he wondered whether he was beginning to lose his mind. Impossibly, he thought he could smell Laila. Sugar in the air. A faint aroma of rosewater. She was haunting him. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. What was wrong with him? He trudged forward a couple steps, ready to collapse
into his bed when he stopped short.

His bed was already occupied.

“Hello,
Majnun
.”

Perched on the edge of his bed and wearing a gown that looked cut from the night sky was Laila. She shifted under his stare, and faint stars zoomed across the ends of her dress. Blearily, S
é
verin wondered whether it was really her. Or whether she was some phantasm scraped together from all his longing. But then
the corner of her mouth lifted in a knowing smile, and he was jolted back to this moment.

They hadn’t spoken in weeks, and yet the
way
to talk to her—the push-pull of jokes—floated back to him, as easy as breathing. She no longer looked wide-eyed and bruised, the way she had when they had last spoken in the study. If anything, she looked like an icon. Terrible and beautiful. Untouchable.

And
here he was. Disheveled and tired and not willing to show it.

“And what brings the celebrity of the Palais des R
ê
ves back to my bed?” he asked.

She laughed, and even though he was clothed he might as well have been standing naked.

“A proposition,” she said lightly.

He raised his eyebrow. “One that has to do with my bed?”

“As if you’d know what to do with me in your bed,” she said, glancing
at her nails.

He most certainly did know—

“My proposition has to do with the Winter Conclave in Russia.”

“You’ll come with us?”

“On my own terms.”

“What do you want?”

Laila tipped forward. The light clung to her skin. “I want special access. I don’t want to hide in a cake. Or pose as a maid.”

And just like that, he understood.

“You want me to make you my mistress.”

“Yes,” she said. “Hypnos
declined, which left you as the only logical option. With the f
ê
te in three weeks’ time, I can hardly expend the effort into ingratiating myself with someone else.”

He tried not to think about how she had gone to another man first. He tried, and he failed.

She reached for his hand, and he noticed that she wore jewelry now. Heavy, uncut rocks on her index fingers and thin, beaten strands of gold
around her wrists. She had never worn jewelry in the hotel. They had always gotten in the way of her baking.

When she touched him, he stiffened.

“What do you say,
Majnun
? It will only be in name, I assure you,” she said. Her voice was low, suffused with an almost professional quality of seduction that knocked the wind from his lungs even as every corner of his mind fought to withstand her. “You
need me. You know it. If I am not there, then all your plans to find
The Divine Lyrics
disappear.”

Now her fingers traced the line of his neck, the underside of his jaw. He couldn’t breathe.

“Fine,” he bit out.

“Promise?” she whispered. “I need to hear you say it.”

He swallowed. “I promise I will declare you my mistress and take you to the winter f
ê
te,” he said.

“Promise that whatever you
discover you will share with me?” she pressed.

She had undone his first button. Her hands were on his chest.

“Fine, yes, I promise,” he said hoarsely.

Laila leaned in, her face inches away from his, damson-dark lips parting softly.

“Good,” she said.

Something was burning his skin. He hissed, looking down at his wrist to see that her stack of bangles had not been bangles at all, but coils
of iron wire, Forged from the same material as an oath tattoo and now seared into his skin by his own promise. The burning lasted for less than a blink before the metal disappeared beneath his skin.

“I have learned not to trust what you say,” said Laila. “So I took my own precaution.”

“How—”

“I learned from the best,” she said, patting his cheek.

He caught her wrist in his hand.

“You should
be more careful with the promises you extract,” he said, his voice low. “Do you know what contract you have just entered?”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

“Do you?” he asked. “Because you have just agreed to spend every night in my bed for the next three weeks. I will hold you to that.”

“I know that,
Majnun
,” she said, softer this time. “Just like I know how that
will hold no temptation for you. You might even have to kiss me on occasion, simply to prove that I am to you who you say I am. But that means nothing. Remember?”

She slid down from the bed and made her way to the door.

“Happy birthday,
Majnun
,” she said, as the door closed. “Sleep well.”

He did not sleep at all that night.