Cora forced herself to her feet, face stony as though the smell of smoke wasn’t choking her, the flames weren’t still kissing the back of her throat. She didn’t have the emotional space to know what to do with Luciana’s apology, what forgiveness looked like, if it was even possible, but she suspected that Luciana knew that it was too little, too late.

55

55

Cora hadn’t known what to expect those couple of days with Nikola after the Senate hearing, nor had she cared. She’d offered herself up as a sacrifice, so who was she to care about what he would do with her? He wanted a tool to find his “dear Beloved” and nothing more; she knew the deal. Her horror at the Senate hearing had been so overwhelming, Nikola was welcome to do his worst.

But he hadn’t. He’d been curious, respectful, but mostly he’d been absent. She didn’t particularly crave physical comfort from him, but it didn’t repulse her, either. She endured him even as he kept an eye on the world, the twenty-four-hour news networks, the beast with ten thousand heads.

She pushed the door to the hangar open, a largely empty space striped by decades of graffiti and decay. The windows had been blacked out decades prior, and the few that had been broken by time or vandalism provided the only source of light during the day, which was waning quickly. There was no electric light emanating from inside, which meant that Nikola’s surveillance system was off. Why wouldn’t it be? He didn’t need it anymore.

“THERE YOU ARE, LITTLE COUSIN.” The voice in her ear felt like an invasion, the aural equivalent of a clammy finger sliding up the back of her neck. It was even more echoed, more layered than it had been the first time she heard it. “ARE YOU HERE TO JOIN US?”

The same fear gripped her that grips young children at the thought of a monster in the basement. But there was a real monster in the darkness here, one that could not be reasoned with. Kaveh’s Nikola was gone now, replaced with the same cruel id that she had first encountered in the woods all those months ago, Enola. His movements were erratic, jerky, sometimes so fast that gravity should not have allowed for them, like sped-up film. But it was his eyes that were the most damning tell that he had gone back to the medication, cataract and unfocused.

“Let me see him,” she said.

“SHALL YOU JOIN US, LITTLE COUSIN?”

“No,” she snapped. “No, you can’t have me.”

He approached her, not in the fluid way amygdalines normally moved but alternately too slow and too fast, like he skipped through time, appearing in front of her, eliciting a startled yelp. “THEN I AM DISINCLINED TO LET YOU SEE HIM.”