Page 33 of Venom & Vanity

The cold edge in his voice has my stomach dropping. “What do you mean?”

“The eastern lighthouse,” Bash says, and the dismissal in his voice has sharpened into something more serious. “That's Thorn Vale territory. They hold that part of the island. There is no version of that woman living near the eastern lighthouse without Thorn Vale knowing.”

I open my mouth and then close it.

Beside me Cinder goes still in a different way than she has been still before. A thinking still. Her eyes are doing something, moving between the lighthouse path and some internal calculation I can’t see.

“Gus.” Her voice is quiet.

“What is it?” he asks immediately.

“What she said to me.” Cinder looks at me. “When she came to me. She said the glass was never meant to be a slipper. It was meant to be a mirror.” A pause. “I've been turning it over since she said it. I could not work out what she meant.”

I stare at her.

Something’s moving in my chest. A slow, cold recognition.

“What did she say to you?” Cinder asks me.

“The light matters,” I say.

The silence that follows is a different quality to all the silence before it.

Cinder and I look at each other and I can see in her face that she has arrived at the same place I have, that we got there at exactly the same moment, that the thing assembling behind both our eyes is the same thing wearing different clothes.

“She said something different to each of us,” Cinder says slowly.

“Not the same message,” I say. “Something personal. Something specific to each of us.” I look at the dark shape of the lighthouse ahead. “She knew enough about both of us to know what to say. Not a general warning. Not a riddle meant for anyone who would listen.” A pause. “She chose her words for us individually.”

“Which means she’s been watching,” Cinder says. “Not just arrivals. Specifically us.”

“For how long?” Duke says.

Neither of us answers because neither of us knows and the not knowing is the part that should be frightening and instead is the opposite, because a woman who watches that carefully and waits that long and then delivers a message that precise isn’t careless and she’s not cruel and she’s not anyone's instrument.

She’s her own.

“She's not with Thorn Vale,” I say to Doc. I say it quietly and I say it with the particular certainty of a woman who has learned in the past weeks to trust the thing in her chest that recognizes truth when it lands. “She’s near them because this island is divided and she has to be somewhere. But she’s not theirs.” I hold his gaze. “I bet they have an heir of their own.”

Doc looks at me for a long moment.

“They're the next ones in the chain,” Gus says. Quiet, almost to himself. Doc nods once.

“Each group only knows the one after them,” Doc says. “Thorn Vale is next. They will know who comes after that.” He looks between Cinder and me. “The chain runs in one direction only. One link at a time.”

“So no one holds the whole picture,” I say.

“No one except her,” Cinder adds.

We both look at the path ahead.

“She came to both of you with different words,” Prince says carefully, and the assessment in his voice is working through something I can hear him building. “She knew enough about each of you to choose differently.” A pause. “That’s not someone who stumbled across you. That’s someone who has been building toward this for a very long time.”

“Then we don't walk in heavy,” I say. “We don't announce ourselves. We let her set the terms.” I look at Bash because he is the one most likely to push forward on his own instinct and I need him to hear this. “She came to me once. She will come again on her own terms or not at all. We do not chase her. We let her come when she is ready. If there is another heir inside that lighthouse, like I suspect there is, she won’t be far.”

He holds my gaze for a long moment.

“Fine,” he grits out.