The castle was colder inside than out.
Maya followed him across the great hall, her shoes whispering over a floor of black and white marble. A chandelier hung overhead like a frozen waterfall. Tall portraits lined the staircase, men and women in dark clothes who stared down from their gilt frames with ash-grey eyes, the same eyes, generation after generation, and she thought, absurdly: Mark will look like that when he's old.
Travis walked half a pace ahead. He did not touch her. He did not speak. Every few steps he turned his head, as though checking she was still there, and each time the same thin, soft smile crossed his face and vanished, like the reflection of a candle in a window.
"Where's Mark?" she asked, for the third time.
"Asleep." His voice was even. "The doctor gave him something for his fever. He had a bad night. He's going to be so happy to see you, Maya." A pause. "In the morning."
"I brought him something." She lifted the cotton rabbit, a little defiantly. "I'd like to put it on his pillow, if that's all right. I won't wake him."
"Of course."
He did not ask to see it. He did not even look at it. His eyes were fixed on the stairs ahead, and his hand, hanging at his side, was clenched so tightly that the knuckles were bone white.
They climbed to the third floor. A long corridor stretched out ahead, carpeted in dark red, lit by sconces shaped like flames. At its end, a pair of doors stood open on a room of cream and gold: a bed with four posts, a fireplace already lit, a vase of white lilies on the dresser.
Lilies.
A cold finger touched the back of Maya's neck. She did not know why.
"You'll be comfortable here," Travis said. "The bathroom is through there. There's food on the table. I'll have a maid bring clean clothes."
"I'd rather see Mark first."
"He's sleeping."
"Then I'll just look in on him through the door—"
"Maya." He took a step back, and his hand rose to the door handle, and she saw that his fingers were trembling. "Please. Just wait here. Just for a little while."
"Travis, what's—"
"I'm sorry."
The door closed.
A key turned in the lock.
Maya stood very still in the middle of the elegant room with the cotton rabbit in her hands and the sound of the key still ringing in her ears. She heard footsteps retreat three paces. She heard them stop.
She crossed the carpet and pressed her palm flat against the wood.
"Travis?"
Silence.
"Travis, open the door."
"I can't."
His voice came from very close, just on the other side of the panel, so low that if the corridor had not been so silent, she'd never have heard it. He was standing right there. She could feel it, the way you feel a person's presence in the dark.
"Why not?" Her pulse hammered. "What is this? You said Mark—"
"I'm sorry." A pause. A breath that was almost a sob. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
He said it again and again, quietly, like a man saying prayers, and the words seeped through the wood like water through stone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. After a while she stopped asking questions. She slid down the door until she sat on the floor, the rabbit in her lap, and listened to him apologize to her through the keyhole, and did not understand a single word of it.
…
Night fell.
The windows of the cream-and-gold room looked out onto the courtyard, but when she tried them, they did not open. The glass was old, thick, and set deep in an iron frame. Beyond it she could see the dark mass of the pines, the moon sliding in and out of cloud, a line of tiny lights far down the road where the highway ran.
She texted Chloe, I'm fine, he's being strange but Mark's okay, and watched the message turn red. Not delivered. No signal. She tried the phone twice more, holding it at the glass, then at the fireplace, then in the bathroom.
No service.
She sat on the edge of the bed for a very long time.
She counted the stars again, one and two, and heard how thin the numbers had become.
Around midnight the sound of an engine rose in the courtyard.
She went to the window. Headlights swung across the cobbles. A long black car with silvered windows rolled to a stop at the foot of the steps, and a figure got out of the back seat very slowly, leaning on a stick.
A silver wolf's head caught the moonlight.
Maya's breath stopped.
That's him. That's the old man.
She stumbled backward from the glass and nearly fell over the hearthrug. Her mind skittered in all directions at once. Why is he here? He wants Mark. He wants Mark back. He's come to take him, and Travis—
Travis locked me in.
She flew to the door and pressed her ear against the wood.
Footsteps in the hall, many of them. A heavy, uneven tread. The tap of a cane. Voices rising up the great staircase, one smooth and old and gentle; the other, deep and strained. They came along the corridor, slowly, and halted not ten feet from where she stood.
"...an agreeable house. I confess I'd forgotten how agreeable." The old man's voice, soft and genial, as if he were making polite conversation at a party. "It has been a long time since I last stood under this roof."
"Say what you came to say."
"Always so direct, my boy. It was the first thing she loved in you."
A long silence.
"Don't," said Travis, and she barely recognized his voice. "Don't you say her name."
"Elena."
Maya's skin prickled from scalp to heels.
Elena.
The syllables were soft and lovely and meant nothing at all, and then they meant everything. Mark's mother. The woman Mark had never once spoken of. The woman whose drawing-space on the "My Dream Family" page had been left blank. She pressed her ear harder to the wood.
"She is dead," Travis said. His voice cracked on the last word. "I buried her. I buried what was left."
"You buried a coffin, my dear boy. A coffin that I filled with a stranger's bones and a burnt car." The old man sighed, a tender, rueful sound. "I did try to make it convincing. I thought it kinder, you see, that you should grieve, and be done with it. She would have wanted her child to have a father who wasn't hunting me through every cellar in the state."
Silence.
It went on so long that Maya began to hear her own blood in her ears. When Travis spoke again, it was barely a breath.
"What are you saying?"
"I am saying that my daughter breathes."
A sound came out of Travis that Maya would never forget: a low, wrecked, animal noise, as if something had been torn from him with a pair of pincers. She heard a thud against the wall, a man steadying himself, and the old man's calm voice flowing over him like warm oil.
"She has not woken since the night I brought her home. Three years. The doctors call it a persistent vegetative state. Her heart is failing; it failed first, you understand, which is the cause of all the rest. She has a very rare tissue type. I have combed every list in this country. I have bribed every registry. I have waited, and prayed, and I have watched her slip away a little each month." A soft pause. "And then, one day, a file landed on my desk."
My daughter.
The old man's daughter.
Elena is the old man's daughter. And Mark's mother. And she's alive.
Maya's fingernails dug into the wood.
"A young woman," the old man said, "with a heart so perfect a match that when I read the numbers, I wept."
The silence in the corridor turned to ice.
Maya's hand crept to her own chest.
Remarkable, really.
Excellent condition.
Why does he look at me like that?
"No," Travis said.
"Yes."
"No. No. You can't. She's—she's—"
"She is the only one." The gentleness did not shift by a hair. "Hand her to me, Travis, and I will give you your wife back. Alive. Whole. Not wholly herself, perhaps, not at first. But alive. Alive, and in your arms, and the mother of your son. It is a very small price. One young woman, orphaned, without family, without anyone in the world who will weep for her."
"She has a friend."
"Friends are replaceable."
Travis said nothing.
Maya had stopped breathing. Her whole body had gone cold and distant, as if she were watching herself from the ceiling. She heard the old man's cane shift on the carpet. She heard a long, ragged inhale.
And then she heard Travis, hoarse as dust, ask a single question.
"Is that the only way?"
"The only one."
"There is no... there's no other donor? No other match? A thousand people on the lists. A transplant clinic in Zurich. I'll pay anything."
"I have paid everything. For three years."
A pause. And in that pause, Maya heard a man weigh her life against a dead woman's resurrection. She heard it as clearly as a clock ticking. She heard what he was going to say before he said it.
"At dawn," said Travis.
…
The sun came up grey, and the key turned in the lock.
Maya was standing in the middle of the room with her back to the wall, holding the cotton rabbit against her chest like a shield. She'd heard them leave. She'd heard Travis return alone and stand outside the door for hours, silent. Now the door swung open and he was framed in the opening, in yesterday's black suit, unshaven, his eyes dark pits.
She had expected a monster. She'd spent the whole night preparing for one.
What she saw instead was a man who looked as if somebody had cut out his insides and propped the shell up for show.
"Maya."
"Don't." Her voice was shaking. "Don't come near me."
"I have to take you downstairs."
"I heard you. I heard everything." The words tumbled out in a hot rush. "You said yes. You said at dawn. You're going to give me to him. You're going to let him—"
"I know."
"Then don't!" She flew at him, caught his lapels in both fists, shook him with all her small strength. "Please! Please, Travis, don't! I don't want to die! I'll do anything! I'll go away, I'll disappear, I'll never come near you or Mark or this house again, I'll leave the country, you'll never hear my name—"
He did not defend himself. He did not even lift his hands. He stood and let her pull at him, and when she slumped, sobbing, against his chest, a hot tear fell on her hair, and then another.
"I love you," he whispered.
Maya went rigid.
"I don't know how. It doesn't make sense. I've known you a month. I looked at you across a classroom and something broke, and I've done everything wrong ever since." His voice was ruined. "I tried to keep you away from this. I tried to ask you to stay with me. I would've kept you in a house with my name on every wall. I would've given you everything. But she's..."
"Elena," Maya said, bitterly.
"She's the mother of my son." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "She's the mother of my son, Maya, and she's breathing, she's alive, and I've spent three years believing that I killed her, that I wasn't there, that I should have been—and he's holding her up in front of me like a hook, and I cannot..." The words dissolved. "I have no other way. I have no other way. I'm so sorry. I have only this."
"There's always another way!"
"There isn't." He opened his arms as though to hold her, and let them fall. "I looked. For hours. I looked."
Behind him, in the shadowed corridor, two men in dark coats had appeared. She had not seen them arrive. They were not Travis's guards; she'd learned that face in the old man's hall. One of them nodded to her, almost politely.
"Please," said Travis, and his voice broke entirely. "Go with them. It's... it will be quick."
She looked at his ruined face. She looked at the lilies on the dresser, white, ghost-white in the grey light.
She laid the cotton rabbit on the bed.
"Give it to Mark," she said. "Tell him I counted."
Then the two men took her arms, and she did not fight, because there was nothing in her left to fight with, and she walked out of the room.
Behind her, down the long red corridor, she heard a man begin to weep.
