Not a single thrill.
Not even a hint of anticipation.
No satisfaction at the schemes he could lay or the battles that would inevitably be won.
Nothing.
Nihil.
“Long live the king,” Rohan said darkly.
Eventually, he made it back to the first entry in the first ledger. Rohan stared at the page—at thename.
The founder of the Devil’s Mercy—a brilliant, Machiavellian man, a man with royal blood and the kind of reputation that had survived generations—had his own entry in the ledger. His own secret.Why?It made little sense that the man who’d founded this place would have required a levy fromhimself.
And yet… Rohan found that hedid not care. He closed the ledger and set it aside, and the next thing he knew, he was standing at the bookshelf, staring not at the ledgers but at the glass rose and the brush and the knife and the remains of a ballgown the color of smoke. He picked up the shredded fabric, still soft to the touch. Savannah had really done a number on the dress, destroyed it the way Rohan had once dared her to destroy another glass rose.
I see you, Savannah, Rohan had told her.The real you. The angry you.
And she’d told him that women like her didn’tgetto be angry. At the time, Rohan hadn’t even let on that he knew quite well what that was like. He’d grown up in the seat of power, playing game after game with men who all too often let their anger rule them, men who, outside of the Mercy, would have looked rightthroughRohan based on nothing more than the color of his skin.
Men who evenwithinthe halls of the Mercy had needed to learn the hard way not to.
I see you, Savannah. The real you. The angry you.Rohan picked up the glass rose and thought about Savannah’s hatred of flowers, of roses in particular, and he let the glass rose slip from his fingers. Rohan heard it shatter. He saw the shards, and still—
Nihil.
He returned his attention to the ledgers—to the staff ledger this time, and flipped it open to his own page. He stared at his secret, written in shaky, childish scrawl in dark purple ink. Rohan stared at the page until the words blurred, and then, as the sound of his mother’ssong—and her screams—rose in his mind, Rohan heard another voice, a woman’s voice, taunting him on the other end of a phone line.
You said to make you an offer. I thought you should know: We already have.
Rohan looked back again to the glass on the floor—so many shards—and the pieces clicked into place.
We already have.
Rohan picked up the first ledger with one hand and the cane with the other, his scepter, a match for an invisible crown that did notmatterto him the way it should have.
I want everything, Rohan had told Savannah once,and I always have. The Mercy was supposed tobehis everything. Rohan was supposed to rule, but instead, he found himself leaving the inner sanctum and making his way to the Proprietor’s study—hisstudy, now.
Alastair was there, waiting. Rohan dropped the ledger onto the desk.
Make me an offer, he’d told the Gilded Blade.
We already have.
Rohan really should have seen it. For as long as he could remember, freshcalla lilieshad decorated the atrium of the Devil’s Mercy—floating on water, year after year after year.
If you play any game long enough, he’d told Jameson Hawthorne,certain patterns will always repeat.
“It didn’t take you half as long as I expected,” Alastair said. “Have you tried the handle of the cane yet?”
Rohan tightened his grip over said handle, thatelaborately carvedhandle, the alchemical symbol for alchemy repeated again and again and again.
He found a fleur-de-lis on the underside.
Rohan pushed it, and the handle of the cane popped up, revealing a hollow compartment inside. As Rohan pulled a piece of aged paper from it, he thought of the warning he’d given so often as Factotum:
Where angels fear to tread, have your fun instead. But be warned: The house always wins.