Chapter 75 Unname What's Been Named

Chapter 75 Unname What's Been Named
The estate had the brittle quiet of a place that had survived the night by will alone. Boards still creaked from the storm’s pressure. Candle stubs guttered in dishes along the hall. In the courtyard, Felix and Roxy were sweeping ash from the flagstones while Anari chalked over scuffed sigils, her lines crisp despite the tremor in her hand.
Lorraine stood under the gallery, nursing a mug that had long since gone cold. Her body ached in strange places. The silver-thin hum of Jadis’s power threaded through her ribs like a second breath—steadier now, but heavy. Roman was a dark shape across the stones, sleeves rolled, speaking low with Trevor about damaged gates and what could be salvaged. Every few sentences he looked up, as if checking she was still there.
The front bell clanged—once, a frantic, off-beat smash of metal on metal.
Everyone stilled.
Colette reached the door first, her mouth already loaded with a barb. She flung it open and froze halfway through an exhale. “Oh, hell.”
Betsy staggered over the threshold.
Her hair was wild, rain-soaked though the sky was clear, mascara sluiced into bruised crescents under her eyes. A shirt that had once been white clung to her, spattered with mud and something darker at the shoulder. She climbed the two steps into the courtyard like each one might give way, eyes skating over Roman and catching on Lorraine as if that was the point her orbit couldn’t avoid.
“Don’t kick me out,” she said, and the bravado in her voice arrived cracked. “Not yet.”
Roman’s face hardened. “You have thirty seconds to explain why you’re here.”
Betsy laughed, ugly and too loud, then bit the sound off. “Because I like breathing,” she snapped. “And because I finally realized he’d rather feed me to his new friends than keep me on a leash.”
Shanta slipped in behind Colette, bracelets chiming once. Despoina came to stand at Lorraine’s shoulder, palm warm against her spine.
Lorraine set the cold mug down. “Betsy, look at me.”
“I am.” Betsy dragged the back of her hand under her nose like a kid who hadn’t learned a better way. “You want the truth? I came to watch you choke on it. But I also came because I’m not dying for him.”
Roman didn’t move. “For who.”
“Dwade,” she spat, like the name had become a bad taste. “He’s not a man anymore. Not in a way that makes sense.”
Roxy shifted, plant-lean, the broom in her grip becoming a weapon by angle alone. “Say what you came to say.”
Betsy’s eyes flicked to the high arch of the gallery, to the roofline where Felix’s mirrors caught stray light and threw it back. She licked her lips. “His pact. The place he made it. You want it?” Her gaze slid to Lorraine again, deliberate as a slap. “Break it, and maybe you win. Maybe you lose your precious Roman with it. Who knows what he’s tied into that storm.”
Roman’s jaw flexed. Lorraine felt her pulse stutter. “What place?” she asked.
Betsy swallowed. Her bravado thinned and something girl-young showed through. “House in the bayou,” she said. “Old. Looks abandoned from the water. There’s a bridge—one of those long, swaying nightmares with planks that like to give when you step wrong. He goes there when he wants to…talk.” Her mouth twisted. “He took me once. Said I should see what real power looked like. I told Lorraine about the bayou before, but she already knew of it, seen it in her dreams. I'm ready to tell you exactly where it is.”
Despoina’s fingers pressed harder into Lorraine’s back. “How many times has he returned?”
“Too many.” Betsy’s shrug was a flinch. “I thought he owned the storm.” She shivered. “Now I think it owns him.”
“And a pact unmade?” Anari asked, neat and teacherly even with grit on her cheek. “You don’t break one of those with a wrench.”
Betsy reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded scrap, the edges soaked and stiff. She held it like it might bite, then thrust it at Lorraine. “He draws this when he calls it—on the floor. In ash. Always with three channels for…whatever it is that comes. I watched. I remember.” Her gaze clung to Lorraine’s face with old meanness sputtering like a dying pilot light. “Don’t get sentimental. I’m telling you because I hate him more than I hate you today.”
Lorraine unfolded the paper. A sigil bloomed across it: three concentric rings cut by a triskel of knife-slender arcs, each tipped with a tiny hook, like something designed to catch skin. At the edges, Betsy had sketched crude marks—stones? Posts?—arranged in a triangle around the main sigil.
Despoina sucked a breath. Shanta’s jaw tightened.
“You know it?” Roman asked, eyes on Despoina.
“I know the pattern it apes,” Despoina said, voice low. “Old bayou working—twist of a Breton binding crossed with something we used to keep storms outside. He’s inverted it. Not to keep them out. To invite them in and make them hungry for him first.” She tapped the three marks Betsy had drawn. “Anchors. Physical. That’s why it holds. Break the anchors, unwrite the curves, and you starve the thing. But not with common fire. Clean burn. Iron and salt.”
“Blood,” Shanta added, eyes far away. “The right blood at the right curve. To unname what he named.”
Betsy laughed again, less ugly, more exhausted. “You’re welcome.”
Roman stepped closer, the courtyard light cutting angles into his face. “Where exactly.”
“I’ll take you,” Betsy said fast, and the offer landed clumsy between them. She ran a shaking hand through her wet hair. “I mean— I’ll show you. I don’t need to go inside. I’m not stupid.” Her gaze slid to Lorraine. “But somebody’ll have to.”
“You’ve done enough,” Colette said, tone sugar-glass. “A tour will be plenty.”
Betsy’s mouth opened. Shut. The venom drained and left her shivering. “It’s not… Look, he’ll know I said it. He always—” She cut herself off like she’d almost told a secret it would be safer not to remember. “So make it count. Hit him where it hurts.”
“Why now?” Roman asked, and the question wasn’t strategic; it was something like grief. “You could’ve run the first time you saw his shadow bow.”
Betsy stared at the sigil in Lorraine’s hands as if it were a mirror that refused to flatter. When she spoke, the words came smaller. “Because I thought hurting you would fix the part of me that hates her.” She nodded toward Lorraine, chin jerking like it weighed more than it should. “It didn’t. It just made another hole.”
Silence cobbled itself across the stones. The broom bristles rasped once under Roxy’s foot and stopped.
The air dropped ten degrees.
Every candle in the gallery guttered in perfect unison.
The light in the courtyard pinched thin and bent, as if someone had run a thumb across it. A draft with no source slid cold through Lorraine’s hair.
Roman’s head snapped up. “Inside,” he said, quiet and lethal. “Now.”
Too late.