The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,131

damp, but she is patient, coaxing the flame from the lamp until it catches on the kindling.

Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse.

She cannot make a thing, but she can use it.

She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it.

She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.

She does not know if it’s some kind of mercy, or simply a crack in the mortar of her curse, one of the few fissures she’s found in the walls of this new life. Perhaps Luc hasn’t noticed. Or perhaps he has put them there on purpose, to draw her out, to make her hope.

Addie draws a smoldering twig from the fireplace and brings it idly to the threadbare rug. It is dry enough that it should catch, and burn, but it does not. It gutters, and cools too quickly, just outside the safety of its hearth.

She sits on the floor, humming softly as she feeds stick after stick into the blaze until it burns the chill off the place like a breath scattering dust.

She feels him like a draft.

He does not knock.

He never knocks.

One moment she is alone, and the next, she is not.

“Adeline.”

She hates the way it makes her feel to hear him say her name, hates the way she leans into the word like a body seeking shelter from a storm.

“Luc.”

She turns, expecting to see him as he was in Paris, dressed in the fine salon fashion, but instead he is exactly as he was the night they met, wind-blown and shadow-edged, in a simple dark tunic, the laces open at the collar. The firelight dances across his face, shades the edges of his jaw and cheek and brow like charcoal.

His eyes slide over the meager bounty on the sill before returning to her. “Back where you started…”

Addie rises to her feet, so he can’t look down on her.

“Fifty years,” he says. “How quickly they go by.”

They have not gone quickly at all, not for her, and he knows it. He is looking for bare skin, soft places to slide the knife, but she will not give him such an easy target. “No time at all,” she echoes coolly. “To think one life would ever be enough.”

Luc flashes only the edge of a smile.

“What a picture you make, tending that fire. You could almost be Estele.”

It is the first time she has heard that name on his lips, and there is something in the way he says it, almost wistful. Luc crosses to the window, and looks out at the line of trees. “How many nights she stood here, and whispered out into the woods.”

He glances over his shoulder, a coy grin playing over his lips. “For all her talk of freedom, she was so lonely in the end.”

Addie shakes her head. “No.”

“You should have been here with her,” he says. “Should have eased her pain when she was ill. Should have laid her down to rest. You owed her that.”

Addie draws back as if struck.

“You were so selfish, Adeline. And because of you, she died alone.”

We all die alone. That is what Estele would say—at least, she thinks. She hopes. Once, she would have been certain, but the confidence has faded with the memory of the woman’s voice.

Across the room, the darkness moves. One moment he is at the window, the next, he is behind her, his voice threading through her hair.

“She was so ready to die,” Luc says. “So desperate for that spot in the shade. She stood at that window and begged, and begged. I could have given it to her.”

A memory, old fingers tight around her wrist.

Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

Addie turns on him. “She would never have prayed to you.”

A flickering smile. “No.” A sneer. “But think of how sad she’d be to know you did.”

Addie’s temper flares. Her hand flies out before she thinks to stop it, and even then, she half expects to find no purchase, only air and smoke. But Luc is caught off guard, and so her palm strikes skin, or something like it. His head turns a fraction with the force of the blow. There is no blood on those perfect lips, of course, no heat on that cool skin, but she has at least wiped the smile from his face.

Or so she thinks.

Until he begins to laugh.

The sound is eerie, unreal, and when he turns his face back toward her, she stills. There is nothing human in