are you?”
His voice was low and warm and threatened to undo the hardened facade I’d tried to maintain all morning. I pushed a tear from my eye, as if it was no more than a speck of dust. “Today is most decidedly not about me.”
He bounded up the stairs between us. “You look exhausted. Let me search the crypt.”
I kept climbing. “You don’t know how to get there.”
“Send a servant with me. We’ll be there in no time.” His fingers brushed the hollow of my back. “Annaleigh…”
I stepped onto the landing. “I need to do this, Cassius. I can’t stay here looking through the same rooms over and over while everyone else is out searching. I feel like I’m going mad. Let me do this.”
“We’ll find them,” he promised, squeezing my hand. “There must be a room we missed, or perhaps they’re playing a prank?”
I shook my head. “They wouldn’t do that. They know what we’d think.”
Cassius stopped at the portrait just across from my bedroom, studying it. It had been painted before the triplets were born, back when there were just six of us.
“Those are my older sisters.”
“Ava, Octavia, Elizabeth, and Eulalie.”
I paused. “How did you know their names?”
He froze, his blue eyes dark. For a moment, he looked worried, caught in something. “On the plaque.”
I squinted at the little bit of brass under the picture frame. I couldn’t make out their names in the dim light. “There were twelve of us originally. But one by one, we’ve been picked off. The villagers think there’s a curse on our house. So you see, Rosalie and Ligeia would never pretend to go missing. It would be too cruel.”
“So much loss,” he said, his eyes focused on the painting.
I turned away from my sisters’ gazes. “Oh.”
“What is it?”
I studied the door handle. “I’m certain I left my door shut.”
But it was now several inches ajar. I pushed it wide open, hoping to find Ligeia and Rosalie inside. When I spotted a dark form near my bureau, a startled cry burst from my throat.
Ivor looked up in surprise, his face cloudy but panicked.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded, and felt Cassius at my back, peering in.
Ivor slowly shut the drawer. One of my silk stockings caught in the latch. “Looking for the twins.”
“In Annaleigh’s dresser?” Cassius’s voice was dark with warning. “And they’re triplets.”
He shrugged. “Thought with everyone busy, I might search for clues.”
“Clues?”
“About the shoes.”
“My sisters are missing and you’re worried about our shoes?” I flew at him, grabbing his arm and pushing him toward the door with all the strength I could muster. It was like trying to move a mountain. “This is my private room. Get out of here!”
Ivor ducked out of my grasp. “I was just trying to help.”
“Help yourself, more like it.”
“The lady has asked you to leave her room,” Cassius reminded him, stretching out his frame.
Ivor glanced back and forth between us, one eyebrow raised. “And just what exactly are you doing in the lady’s room?”
Cassius’s eyes narrowed. He stared him down, silent and unmoving, until Ivor shuffled off. “There’s a trinket in your pocket I’m certain belongs to Miss Thaumas,” he called after him. “Leave it.”
Without looking back, Ivor dropped one of my hair ribbons to the ground, trampling it as he left. Cassius followed after him to make sure he didn’t wander into any of the other rooms.
As I picked up the ribbon, a memory stirred deep within me.
Hair.
I’d pulled a twig from Lenore’s hair this morning. A berry twig. I knew where those bushes were. They grew in a thicket in the forest not far from Highmoor. Lenore must have been there. And the triplets never did anything by themselves….
“I think I know where they might be,” I said as Cassius returned.
“Where?”
I raced down the stairwell, throwing a scarf around my neck. “Follow me.”
I took the quickest route through the gardens, but we were still half frozen by the time we entered the forest’s edge. Along the way, I kept an eye out for any signs my sisters had come this direction, but the howling winds obscured any traces they might have left. I tried to ignore the growing fears in the pit of my stomach as they twisted my hopes with grim pragmatism.
It was too cold.
They’d been gone too long.
There was no way we’d find them alive.
No!
I pictured Rosalie and Ligeia huddled in the thicket, cold and disoriented, but we’d cover them in our cloaks and bring them