The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,65

watches, saying nothing as she eats. The silence in the room grows heavy, but she does not break it.

Instead she focuses first on the soup, and then on fish, and then on a round of pastry-crusted beef. It is more than she has eaten in months, in years, and she feels full in a way that goes beyond her stomach. And as she slows, she studies the man, who is not a man, across the table, the way the shadows bend in the room at his back.

This is the longest they have ever spent together.

Before, there were only those mere moments in the woods, the minutes in a shoddy room, half an hour along the Seine. But now, for the first time, he does not loom behind her like a shadow, does not linger like a phantom at the edges of her sight. Now, he sits across from her, on full display, and though she knows the static details of his face, having drawn them a hundred times, still she cannot help but study him in motion.

And he lets her.

There is no shyness in his manner.

He seems, if anything, to relish her attention.

As his knife slices across the plate, as he lifts a bite of meat to his lips, his black brows lift, his mouth tugs at the corner. Less a man than a collection of features, drawn by a careful hand.

In time, that will change. He will inflate, expand to fill the gaps between the lines of her drawing, wrest the image from her grip until she cannot fathom that it was ever hers.

But for now, the only aspect that is his—entirely his—are those eyes.

She imagined them a hundred times, and yes, they were always green, but in her dreams they were a single shade: the steady green of summer leaves.

His are different.

Startling, inconstant, the slightest change in humor, in temper, reflected there, and only there.

It will take Addie years to learn the language of those eyes. To know that amusement renders them the shade of summer ivy, while annoyance lightens them to sour apple, and pleasure, pleasure darkens them to the almost-black of the woods at night, only the edges still discernible as green.

Tonight, they are the slippery color of weeds caught in the current of a stream.

By the end of dinner, they will be another shade entirely.

There is something languid in his posture. He sits there, one elbow on the tablecloth, his attention drifting, head tipped ever so slightly as if listening to a far-off sound, while his elegant fingers trace the line of his chin as if amused by his own form, and before she knows it, she has broken the silence again.

“What is your name?”

His eyes slide from a corner of the room back to her. “Why must I have one?”

“All things have names,” she says. “Names have purpose. Names have power.” She tips her glass his way. “You know that, or else you wouldn’t have stolen mine.”

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, wolfish, amused. “If it is true,” he says, “that names have power, then why would I hand you mine?”

“Because I must call you something, to your face and in my head. And right now I have only curses.”

The darkness does not seem to care. “Call me whatever you like, it makes no difference. What did you call the stranger in your journals? The man after whom you fashioned me?”

“You fashioned yourself to mock me, and I would rather you take any other form.”

“You see violence in every gesture,” he muses, running a thumb over his glass. “I fashioned myself to suit you. To put you at ease.”

Anger rises in her chest. “You have ruined the one thing I still had.”

“How sad, that you had only dreams.”

She resists the urge to fling the crystal at him, knowing it will do no good. Instead, she looks to the servant by the wall, holds out the glass for him to fill it. But the servant doesn’t move—none of them do. They are bound to his will, not hers. And so she rises, and takes the bottle up herself.

“What was his name, your stranger?”

She returns to her seat, refills her glass, focuses on the thousand shining bubbles that rise through the center. “He had no name,” she says.

But it is a lie, of course, and the darkness looks at her as if he knows it.

The truth is, she’d tried on a dozen names over the years—Michel, and Jean, Nicolas, Henri, Vincent—and none of