Sever (31 page)

There’s no trace of Linden left in this room. I can see the empty spaces where things might have been once.

Rowan crawls under the sheets, and he’s gone in seconds. Vaughn tucks the covers to his chin, as though my brother is a child in his care rather than a subject exhausted from horrifying treatments.

“He has your fire,” Vaughn says. “I’m impressed that he was able to stand on his feet for as long as he did. Anyone else would be positively incoherent for at least two days following the sedation required for a retinal procedure. But time and again, the both of you exceed my expectations.”

I watch Rowan turn onto his left side. It’s how he’s always slept, turned away from me when we shared a bed.

“You’re looking tired,” Vaughn tells me. “I could bring you to your room, but I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk first. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

After the thriving Hawaiian cityscape and my parents’ notes and my brother, I cannot imagine what’s left to see. But finding out is bound to be more tolerable than facing the wives’ floor alone, so I agree to follow him.

I can’t help but be curious about what’s behind all of
the closed doors along this hallway, and wonder what was going on under my feet and over my head while I was trapped on the wives’ floor every day. This level could almost belong to a different house.

We get into the elevator, and I’m not surprised a few moments later when the doors open to reveal the basement. But its chemical smell and flickering lights don’t frighten me this time. I’ll never trust Vaughn, but I can feel that things have changed. The world is not what I thought it was, and my brother is asleep upstairs, and somehow I know that I won’t be harmed by this place this time.

There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again. Girls who used to braid my hair, wrap arms and legs around me in sleep, and ask me what the party lights were like in my rare evenings of freedom. They’re here and not here.

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Unlike two of my sister wives, I still have a pulse. I feel like a traitor.

As we walk, Vaughn says, “The hallucinations that caused you to harm yourself were very interesting. Your brother did experience some nightmares—I’d asked him to keep a journal—but he was, for lack of a
better word, sane. I can’t say the same thing for you.”

He restrained me to a bed and filled me with drugs and took endless notes. The only company I had was my ailing domestic, who appeared to be even worse off than I was. But he wants to talk about sane.

“I’d like to try something different this time,” he says. “I’d like to let you have more freedom. It occurs to me that I’ve treated you like a caged animal. I’d like for you to travel with your brother and me while you receive your treatments. I think you’d enjoy yourself.”

I don’t know how to answer. I’m scared to admit to myself that I might be willing to do as he asks. I do want to see what more is out there. I am starting to believe in the methods he’s using to find this cure.

“You don’t have to answer me now,” Vaughn says. “Before we get to that, there is the matter of my son and grandson.”

We’ve stopped before a closed door, and my heart starts pounding. My palms fill with sweat. Whatever is behind that door, I know it’s going to be a bargaining chip.

I find my voice to say, “I can’t force them to come back here; Linden has to decide for himself.”

“So modest,” Vaughn says, rapping his knuckle against the tip of my nose. “Still refusing to see the power you have over my son. And, perhaps more important, over your former sister wife.”

“Cecily?” I say.

“Something tells me that she plays the biggest hand in keeping Linden and Bowen away from home. It’s such a surprise because she used to be the obedient one.”

I never would have described Cecily as obedient. But I suppose that’s what she was to Vaughn. He earned her trust by being the parent she’d never had, and when she finally saw that she was being used, she ran as far and as fast as she could. Nothing will bring her back now.

“She’ll listen to you,” Vaughn says. “She’ll follow you anywhere.”

“She wouldn’t follow me back here,” I say.

“Let’s just hope that she does,” Vaughn says, and he opens the door.

At first I don’t register what it is I’m seeing. I’m too afraid to let my eyes focus. But then I see a room like the one that kept me imprisoned the last time I was here, complete with a fake window that would show a fake horizon if it were turned on. Instead the screen is turned off. What’s the point when there’s no one to look at it?

There are several machines surrounding a bed, all of them with wires leading to a still body that breathes rhythmically. Colored fluids jolt back and forth through IV tubes. His skin is gray. His skin is gray, and my brain won’t register what this is. Won’t accept that this is happening, that the boy on that bed is the very same to give me my first kiss, and to show me the atlas with a river that has my name.

Gabriel. I rush to his side.

But there’s nothing that my presence here will do. He doesn’t feel it when I sweep my hand along the length of his face. He doesn’t even know that I’m here.

“What have you done to him?” I say.

“He’s seen my most valuable research. I couldn’t very well let him run loose.”

“How long has he been here?” My fingers make a fist around the bedsheet.

“Oh, goodness,” Vaughn says, like it’s a chore bothering to try to remember. “However long you were here. You wouldn’t have known he was with you on the drive back home; you slept like the dead the whole way. He’s fine, though, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s an induced coma, easy enough to undo.”

“So undo it,” I say through gritted teeth.

“I’m certain that once he awakens, we can all be one big happy family again,” Vaughn says. “Once my son is home, of course.”

“Rowan,” I whisper. It used to be that a whisper would have him sitting bolt upright. The slightest noise would send him into high alert. But Vaughn’s treatments have changed him. I crawl onto the mattress beside him and shake his shoulder. “Rowan.”

He winces, and it takes a few seconds for the sleep to leave his eyes, and then concern takes over. He sees that I’m rattled. “What is it?”

“I have to go,” I say.

He sits up. “Go? Go where?”

“I have to find my ex-husband.” Ex-husband. The word sounds too strange and simple to tell the whole story.

“Are you worried about something happening to you?” he says. “I’ll go with you.”

Right now that would be the only thing to comfort me. But I shake my head. “You can’t. House—” I hesitate. What do I call the man who’s at the root of all this? Housemaster Vaughn? Dr. Ashby? But in the end it sounds strange to say it any other way than how I was taught. “Housemaster Vaughn says that you need to stay here and rest so he can monitor your progress.”

“That’s crazy. I feel fine,” he says. “I’ll talk to him—”

“No,” I say. “Just do as he asks. Please.”

I can’t raise my eyes to meet his. I can’t let him see that there are things I want to say to him, if only I trusted the privacy of these walls. I can’t let him see that I’m being manipulated. I can’t do anything to jeopardize Gabriel’s safety.

But Rowan already knows something is up.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and stares me down until I raise my eyes. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asks.

Yes. A million times yes.

“I’ll be all right. Housemaster Vaughn is sending his driver with me. He wants to supervise you and make sure you’re all right.” What I don’t tell him is that Vaughn
wants to allow me as much time as possible to convince his son and daughter-in-law to return to his clutches, and that I have to do as he says or Gabriel won’t ever open his eyes again. “I’d feel better if you stayed here and rested. Besides, as you’ve pointed out, Housemaster Vaughn is doing so much for the both of us. We should trust him, right?”

Rowan falls back against the pillow. “I don’t trust anyone,” he says. “Except for you.”

It hurts to breathe. “Trust me, then,” I say.

“Always,” he says.

He knows something is wrong.

I can tell, or maybe I’m just wishing.

“R
HINE
!”
Cecily bursts through two of Madame’s guards and throws her arms around me, and we go spinning from the force. “Jared told us what happened. How could you run away and leave us? We were so worried!”

She’s perfumed like one of Madame’s girls, but without all the stench and decay. She’s wearing a sequined dress that’s too big for her, and blue eye shadow that drowns her eyes in their sockets. Costume beads are dripping from her neck.

All I can think as she’s hugging me and telling me she missed me is that I don’t want to force her back to the mansion. I don’t want her to have to face the man who murdered our sister wife and quite possibly caused Cecily’s brutal miscarriage. I’m working up the courage to assure her that I’ll go with her back to the mansion, that I’ll keep her safe. I’m trying to find the words, but all I’m finding is guilt. If anything happens to Gabriel, it will be
my fault. If anything happens to her, it will be my fault.

When we break apart, she blinks and her eyes disappear and reemerge in all that blue. “You’re wearing your green skirt,” she says. “You went back there, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I blurt, just to be done with it. “He wants to meet us at Reed’s, so we can collect Bowen and Elle.” We’re standing at a distance from Madame, who is watching us between a curtain of guards but not approaching. She’s far enough away that she won’t hear us, and Vaughn’s limo is idling out of sight while the driver waits for me. We’re alone, away from the possibility of being overheard or recorded, and it may be the only chance that I get to tell Cecily the truth about Gabriel and what I saw in Hawaii, the frightening, amazing reality that there’s more life out there than we were taught to believe.

I want to. I’m so desperate to tell someone, even if it’s my little sister wife, who is as powerless as I am. But I know that I can’t. She knew my secrets once before, and the consequences were devastating. This secret is too precious. I can’t.

“Housemaster Vaughn caught up with me after I found my brother,” I say. “My brother is back at the mansion now. It’s a long story, and I’d like to tell you about it, but—”

“You’ve come to convince me and Linden to go back home, haven’t you? It’s okay. I thought about it, and Linden and I talked it through, and we can’t go on like this—running away and leaving Bowen behind. The best thing for us to do is go home.” She hugs me again.
She’s abuzz with energy; I can’t remember the last time she seemed this happy. “I’m so glad you came back,” she says, and now she’s pulling me toward Madame’s carnival and calling out for Linden.

Madame grabs her by the back of the dress as we pass by. “Keep it down, child!” she growls in what I think is her Russian accent. “You want to wake up my girls?” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard her call someone “child” before. Usually it’s “stupid girl” or “worthless.”

“And take off that dress,” she says. “You’re too scrawny. You’re dragging it in the dirt.”

Cecily fusses with the skirt, indignant but still in high spirits. I’d expected it to take more convincing to get her to return to the mansion, but it seems that Linden talked her into it before I returned. Stubborn as she is, she’ll always be devoted to him.

We find Linden at the merry-go-round, and I begin to suspect that Cecily’s willingness to return to the mansion has a lot to do with her wanting to take him as far from memories of Rose as she can. Or maybe she’s willing to pretend his father isn’t what she knows him to be, because then at least Linden can still have a father at all.

He sees my reflection in the metal at the heart of the structure. “Jared told us you found your brother,” he says. “I’m glad.”

“Thanks,” I say, my voice as hollow as his. We always seem to be feeling the same way. “Your father sent the car for us. He’s hoping you’ll come home.”