Chapter 207 The Patrician Lady and the Unfortunate Woman
POV: Valentina | Holding cell, Parliament building
The cell is clean. This is the first thing I notice about it and the thing that tells me the most about the institution that built it, which is that it cleans its holding cells for the same reason it conducts formal breakfasts before executions, because the appearance of civilization is more important to it than civilization itself.
Countess Isolde arrives two hours after they bring me in. She comes alone, which required authorization she clearly has because the guard at the door steps back without requiring explanation, and she comes with the specific quality of someone doing something they have made a decision to do and who is not looking for permission to have made that decision.
She is six hundred years old and she looks fifty, which is the specific vampire arithmetic of very old power wearing a human face, and she has the quality of someone who has been in institutions for a very long time and who has developed a complicated relationship with the things those institutions do.
"I must vote for execution," she says. She does not sit. She stands in the center of the small room and delivers it as plainly as it can be delivered, no performance, no softening. "Mordaunt has leverage on me. Correspondence from 1987 that I cannot have made public. If it were made public it would end my position and damage people I care about. I am not able to vote against him while he holds it."
I look at her. "I know," I say.
"I wanted to tell you directly," she says, "rather than let you discover it through the vote. You deserve to know why."
"The system protects him," I say. "It always has. Everything he has used against people, the leverage, the blackmail, the corruption, it has all been possible because the system was designed to protect people like him. Even the people who want to do the right thing end up working for him in the end."
She absorbs this without defense, which is the response of someone who knows it is accurate.
"I can make the death quick," she says. "Painless. I have the authority to specify the method and I will use it. It is the only thing I am able to do for you and I will do it."
I look at the cell wall. I look at the clean floor and the clean walls and the institution that built them.
"Callum is going to try to stop this," I say.
"I know," she says.
"He is going to do something desperate and probably very stupid in the next eighteen hours," I say.
"I assumed," she says.
"If there were a way to give him more time to be desperate and stupid," I say, "that would be more useful than a painless death."
Isolde looks at me for a long moment. She has the expression of someone doing a calculation that involves multiple variables, only some of which are stated.
"Two hours," she says. "I can delay the processing by two hours. The administrator is susceptible to the right kind of pressure. It is all I can do and I cannot be visible doing it."
"Two hours," I say. "That is something."
She turns to go. At the door she stops, and she does not turn back, and she speaks to the door rather than to me, which is the posture of someone who has not made their peace with something and who is not going to perform making their peace with something.
"You don't deserve this," she says.
"I know," I say.
She leaves. I sit in the clean cell and think about Callum and the two hours and what it means to trust someone to be desperate and stupid on your behalf in a way that might actually work, and I think about Lucia in the preservation chamber three months from being born, and I think about Dante who arrived two days ago and who is probably currently being forbidden to do something dangerous by Callum, which means he is almost certainly doing it anyway.
Outside the cell door I hear movement, a guard shifting position, and then something else, something quieter, the sound of a message being slipped under the door.
I read it. Isolde's handwriting, precise and small.
I'll delay execution two hours. Use them well.