Page 53 of Cinder
“Thank you,” Cin whispered in their wake. Beneath his transformed bosom, his heart ached from joy. He could feel Perdition’s little body still warm against his chest. She cooed softly, but when he tried to let her join the others, she barely managed to stand from within her sling, so he tucked her back against his chest and pulled his cloak over her.
Cin steeled himself and walked around to the back door.
The kitchen was dark. So dark, and cold, in fact, that at first it seemed as though no one had touched it since the night before. As Cin crept across the chilled stone, though, he passed by the hearth. A tiny whirl of ash streamed up from its edges. Cin stopped to press his fingers into the thin layer of soot and no pain sparked in his sides. Therehadbeen a fire here, one which must have consumed the remaining wood Cin had left the night prior, but no one had bothered to clean the remains after.
He turned, and his foot hit the solid side of the cook pot—left haphazardly on the ground. Cin grimaced. They had certainlytriedto cook something in it, though by the coarse grim layered on the bottom, it hadn’t gone well. No one had even bothered to soak it, either.
As he moved through the kitchen, it was like stepping into a haunted version of his life; into a house not quite his own, inhabited by a family he could recognize the shapes of, but not the faces. Grime on the counters, an apple core tossed to the floor, every surface cold and careless in the darkness. At this time of evening, the space would usually have been alive with Cin’s post-meal preparations, a crackling fire dancing off his busy hands as he cleaned and prepped for the coming day.
Instead, there was a ghostly version of his home, disrespected and distressed.
At least they had tried, he wanted to tell himself. He wanted to, but somehow—somehow he couldn’t. Not yet, not while his heart burned like a tiny fire had been born under it and his bones trembled from deep within. Right now, he was angry. Irrationally, uselessly angry.
Cin held his breath and moved into the house proper. Beneath the creak of the old wood, he could hear a whisper of his family’s voices, growing ever clearer. Ever harsher. Making his way down the hall, he caught the flicker of very low flamereflecting from within the second parlor, and the haunting murmurs turned fully to frustrated hisses.
“You were the one who dropped it last!” Floy said.
Manfred managed to grind out his words in a snarl even worse on the ears than his usual. “AndIput itout.”
Somehow Louise matched him in tone and emotion without losing an ounce of her usual conceit. “Not before it burned a hole in my floor.”
“I can—” Emma tried to insert, but every other voice snapped back a harshno, in varying levels of anger and dismay.
The flickers of the hearth’s tiny fire in the parlor sputtered to the sound of curses, then steadied. It had to be nearing embers now.
For one fleeting second, hope swelled in Cin’s heart. Maybe now, now they understood how much Cin was worth. Not in Louise’s back-handed way, but with genuine respect. Hewasholding their family together. They’d all known it to some degree, but now, perhaps, it had sunk in just how much effort and care and skill it took for Cin to do what he did for them. And if they could understand thatnow, then later, when he spent a little time each week at the castle…
But Cin stepped into the room and reality rushed back in.
“Cinder-Szule!” Louise’s dramatic gasp of both Cin’s given names might have been mistaken for joyous surprise in the moment it took her face to transform. “Where in God’s green earth have youbeen, child?”
Cin opened his mouth as Floy and Manfred both began to insert their own frustrations, but Louise wasn’t finished. She spoke over them all, storming toward Cin with her skirt lifted in one white-knuckled fist, the flickering embers in the hearth casting eerie shadows across her features.
“You were given a responsibility! One youclaimedyou could be trusted tohandle. Yet we return from the city to findthe house locked, the fires dying—your poor brother had to break into our own home! Because you chose to go dallying somewhere!”
“He broke the window frame,” Floy added, and Cin couldn’t tell if it was a taunt at him or at Manfred.
It felt like neither, like nothing. Cin was just so tired of it all. Deep inside him, he knew his bones were trembling, his heart surging in a panicked rhythm, but his mind was elsewhere, untethered and... not unbothered, but one step removed from the bothers of his own body, like a nerve had been snapped from between them.
“I didn’t intend to be gone so long,” he said, and somehow he sounded the right amount of distressed, despite the slow, steady drone of his own inner voice. “I went to the woods, to see about magic for my chest and— And I got it. But it just took longer than I thought.” A white lie, he realized, only after the words were out. But it was as close to the truth as his family was likely to understand.
“You left for magic?” Louise made a sound almost like a laugh. “Just thought, well, today seems a good day to run into the woods alone, without a word, and leave my siblings and parents to suffer!” She stamped her foot.
From the darkness of the chair in the far corner, something shifted—not something, but someone, rising from the shadows, still half a ghost himself as he cleared his throat in a dry, swallow sound. “You could have died out there, been tricked into enslavement, or worse, and we’d not have known. Szule, my dear, were you not raised better than that?”
The weakness of his father’s voice hit Cin first, not simply soft or uncertain, but tired and empty in a way Cin had not witnessed since his mother’s death. As though he’d given up: given up on Cin.
Cin’s throat twisted suddenly, a lump forming so thick and ugly he couldn’t swallow it down. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and he was, truly—not for leaving, perhaps, but forsomething. He felt sorry: for the lives his family lived, for the desolate state of their hearts, for his own existence within their pointless little world. He wished things were different. For all of them, no matter how much he’d hated them for so long.
But for himself especially.
Louise scowled, pulling at her own fingers. “Not sorry enough yet.”
With that, she raised her hand.
Cin felt the jolt before he registered the slap, and he stumbled, just slightly, just enough to feel like a fool for it. The sting spread across his cheek moments after, starting with a prickle and turning quickly to a burn. His jaw ached. He breathed in, trying to right himself, not simply physically, but mentally.
Louise held her hand like touching Cin had laid a curse on it. The whole room was watching him: Floy, their brow lifted, and Manfred, smug as he’d have been if he’d landed the slap himself, and Father, his gaze so vacant he seemed not be there at all. Emma looked away, her cheeks nearly as red as Cin’s must have been.
