Twisted - Esme Devlin Page 0,97

He told me he was dying, and in the next breath introduced me to his successor, a small man with rounded shoulders who was likely thirty years my senior. They wed me to him that evening.”

When she pauses to take another sip of her tea, I tell her I’m sorry.

She shrugs. “Don’t be. Fiona was born a year later, and I had her to keep me happy. She was small and sickly—but she was a she. I had everything I ever wanted, remember? Bread on the table. Berries for dessert. Fresh milk. New clothes. Fiona had the most beautiful dollhouse. I never questioned where any of it came from, not until it all came crashing down around us.”

“What happened?”

“Too many boys. Too many men,” she says. “They called them the ‘Excess.’ Kept them in huge pits and worked them from sunrise to sunset. You know your history, yes?”

“More than most,” I tell her.

Celeste nods. “Then you’d know that when nomadic tribes unite under one common purpose, there is nothing urban dwellers can do to stop them. It happens again and again, peppered throughout history. Empires rise, become bloated and negligent and corrupted, then fall. And nobody ever sees it coming. The Excess were half-starved and thought too weak to revolt, but that only made them more hungry for it. All it took was one man, one great man willing to go farther than any good man could anticipate, and the world shifted again.”

“Baron told me a man isn’t his intelligence or his strength or his size, only how far he is willing to go.”

She smiles. “And where do you think he learned that? His father never had a name. He was known only as King. A fanatic—but a clever one who I doubt truly believed his own preaching, and believe me, they are the most dangerous types. He was as charming as he was dangerous, and people flocked to him—my daughter included. Just as history always repeats, teenagers will always rebel. He wanted to reset the natural order. Why should the best men, the men willing to go as far as they had to—be locked away and left to rot? We’d make the country great again. We’d repopulate. We’d enslave the weak, not the strong. We’d rebuild. We’d restart. My daughter shared that vision… right up until she found herself living it.”

All the little scattered pieces in my head click together as she tells me the story. “Baron wants to do the same thing.”

And he wants to do it with my baby.

Celeste shakes her head. “No. Though I imagine that’s precisely what he’d want you to think. He only allows people to see what he wants them to see. There is what he wants you to see, and underneath that, there is what he wants the people who think they’ve outsmarted him to see. Underneath that, layers down, is the reality.”

Now I’m the one shaking my head. “You’ve lost me.”

Celeste smiles. “On the surface, there is the monster. The man who makes money out of misery. The man who takes pleasure in killing. The madness. The riddles he speaks. Everyone on this island with any sense fears him, and he likes it that way.”

“And underneath all that?”

“There is the man who is acting. Putting on a show. The man who wants to take over the world and leave it worse than he found it. The man who wants to become his father. The man you think you just worked out.”

I shake my head again. “And underneath all that?”

“Get dressed, and I will show you.” She stands and walks over to a tall dresser in the corner. When she returns, there is a blade in her hand longer than my forearm. “You’re going to hold this to my side for the entirety of the journey. Understand?”

29

Sapphire

The lights of the long corridors flicker as we move through them, the candles on the shrines at intervals and Celeste’s soft whispers the only guide. She speaks without moving her lips, and without the cane she normally carries tapping against the unpolished hardwood, the place is eerily quiet.

She promised me warm clothes, but Celeste is the one who is currently wearing them. Two coats draped over her shoulders and mittens on her hands. As for me, I’m wearing underwear for the first time in months.

Only underwear.

“There is a camera just around this corner. Hold the blade to my neck as we pass it, conceal it quickly after.”

I nod using only my eyes—eyes hidden behind brown