Page 86 of The Deathless One
He hated that she knew what he was. Who he was. But also what had been done to him. So instead of responding, he just nodded.
“I see.” She sighed. “Then I suppose we should talk about our next step in this plan. We still need to find Callum.”
“It seems logical.” Although he still wasn’t sure why. “Who was he in the castle again?”
“The head of the royal guard and my mother’s lover for many years.” Stepping off the stone edge, she padded over to a shadowy corner where she had stowed her pants. “He practically raised me, so I think it’s rather important to know why he betrayed us.”
“Can’t we just kill him and be done with it?” This was a much morecomfortable conversation for him. Elric knew how to murder people. He knew how to take lives and make them suffer as they struggled to remain in this realm.
He had no interest in saving anyone. Certainly not someone who had harmed her.
“No, we shouldn’t just kill him. Because he couldn’t be the mastermind behind all of it. He was a brilliant soldier and a man with ambition, but he wouldn’t organize a coup against the women he loved. Not without a reason I cannot fathom. He was happy; I saw it with my own eyes. My mother kept him happy. Callum was a tool that was wielded in the wrong way, or he had some other reasoning I cannot fathom. He opened all the doors, but he did not cast the killing blow. I want to know who wanted the royal line dead.” She tugged her pants on a little too hard, the fabric creaking under the strain. “If I’m to take back my throne, then I want everyone who ever thought to murder me dead.”
“There’s the feral little thing I knew you were.” He sat down on the edge of the pool, reclining as he watched her pace back and forth. “Just how are we supposed to find him? The last time you asked someone where Callum was, they killed you.”
“None of this makes sense.” From one end of the room to the other, she marched. Jessamine skirted the pool, wove through the stone benches, then returned to him in a complicated pattern. Over and over. “Callum loves me. Or he did. I know that. He used to tell me that before he tucked me in at night, and he’d always pop a kiss on my forehead before disappearing into my mother’s room. He wouldn’t do this without reason.”
“What reason could that possibly be?”
“I don’t know!” she practically shouted. “That man in the Factory District knew who I was when he attacked me, I’m certain of it. And the fact that I can’t even ask about Callum without the threat of death makes me fear that I did not know this man at all. And if I didn’t know him, then neither did my mother.”
There was the spike of anxiety he’d expected. Elric hated to admit that he had been waiting for it. She’d handled this entire situation with scattershotguesses rather than a single bullet. But of course, she was still so very young. He had had centuries of time to become jaded and forget how to trust.
Jessamine hadn’t learned that yet. He certainly wouldn’t be the person to stand in the way of that very important lesson.
Sitting up, he turned all his attention to her. “You’re struggling to grasp what stands before you. And you are hesitating because you fear what you might find at the end of this path. Is that correct?”
Oh, her miserable expression hurt every inch of him. But voicing her fears was the only way she would ever be able to face them.
He thought perhaps she would argue. Or fight back against what she believed he wanted her to say. But she didn’t. This strong, bravehearted woman nodded her head.
“I’m afraid to find out he’s been the villain in all this,” she whispered, her voice very small. “I’m afraid to discover that the man I considered my father was the one who could so easily dispose of me.”
“What does it mean if he was the one behind all this?”
She shrugged, her face creasing with an ugly expression before she quietly replied, “That I’m unwanted. That even the man who raised me didn’t love me enough not to want to see me dead.”
“No,” Elric said. “It does not mean that. It means you put your trust in an ugly man who wore an impeccable mask. Nothing more. His hatred or fear or guilt has nothing to do with you. He carries that, Jessamine. Not you. Never you.”
He hoped there was some small part of her that recognized he was right.
She smiled, although the expression was thin. “I’ve been listening in on conversations while I’m wandering. There’s a group that seems to unofficially run the Factory District. They call themselves the Iron Knuckles. They’re run by a man called the Butcher, who apparently is a bit of a local legend.”
“Ominous name.”
She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling with the weight of her emotion. “I think Callum might be the Butcher.”
“A royal guard who leads a group of outlaws?”
“The Iron Knuckles are decidedly more than that. But someone mentioned that they saw the Butcher once, and he has silver hair at the temples, with black eyes that see straight into your soul. That is eerily similar to Callum. Too similar.” She winced. “The Iron Knuckles are a group of militant soldiers who wander the streets. People pay them protection money to keep their homes, and frankly, they seem evil.”
“Fits the charges against him.”
“I suppose it does. I want to get inside the Iron Knuckles’ home, and I want to force him to see me. Not his goons. Not his soldiers. I want the man who raised me to look into the dead eyes of the girl he used to love.” Those big eyes stared at him. “But I don’t know if I can do this on my own.”
“If you want me to walk with you, then I will. Every step of the way. But what is your plan, little one?”
“From everything I’ve heard, it seems the Iron Knuckles live in a section of the city that has been mostly blockaded because of the sickness that spread there. The rumor is that there never was anyone sick there. I heard someone claim they used to live in those buildings, and there wasn’t even a cough for weeks before the Knuckles moved everyone out.”
