Chapter 116 The House

Chapter 116 The House

POV: Carly

The entrance hall was exactly what she should have expected and somehow still wasn't prepared for.

High ceilings. Stone floors covered by rugs that were old enough to have stories and valuable enough that she was immediately aware of her boots on them. A staircase that split at a landing halfway up and went in both directions, dark wood banister, the kind of craftsmanship that did not exist in modern buildings. Portraits on the walls that she could not look at directly yet because looking at them directly would require stopping and she was not ready to stop moving.

It smelled like old wood and something floral she could not identify and underneath both of those, very faintly, the specific cold that she had come to associate with vampires who were not Niko. The kind that came from many of them occupying the same space over a very long time.

It was beautiful.

It was also exactly what he had said.

Cold in the way that houses were when everyone in them was performing a version of themselves for everyone else.

She could feel that in the walls.

"Your room is on the second floor." Deacon said, already on the stairs with her bag. "South side. Niko's usual room is next to it. Isabel had them prepared together, which I'm choosing to take as a positive sign for all parties."

Niko said nothing about that.

Carly followed Deacon up the staircase and kept her eyes moving.

The landing was wide enough to be a room in its own right. More portraits. She caught one in her peripheral vision that stopped her mid-step.

She looked at it properly.

A family portrait. Formal, the kind that was clearly commissioned and carefully arranged. She placed the figures quickly. Victor on the left, younger than he probably appeared now, the specific architectural quality of his face that she could see echoed in all of his children. Isabel beside him, the strawberry blonde hair she had already seen, one hand at her side and one at her hip and the expression of someone who was very aware of how they appeared in a painting.

The children arranged in front of them.

She found Niko immediately. He was on the far right, slightly apart from the others, his posture the only one in the portrait that was not fully oriented toward the painter. His face was angled just barely to the left, eyes toward something outside the frame. He looked exactly like himself except younger and she understood without being told that this was probably the last portrait he had sat for in this house.

She stood on the landing and looked at it.

He stopped beside her.

She could feel him looking at the portrait and then at her looking at the portrait.

"How old were you." She said.

He looked at the painting. "Eighty, approximately." He said. "In human appearance, perhaps sixteen."

She looked at the sixteen-year-old version of him in the portrait. The angle of the jaw. The curls. The posture that was already practicing the controlled distance that had taken her months to get past.

"You were already you." She said.

He looked at her.

"Even then." She said. "Already the same."

He said nothing for a moment.

Then quietly. "My mother commissioned it three years before I left. She had been trying to get us all in one place for long enough to sit for it for decades." He looked at the painting. "It took another fifteen years after that to actually get everyone available at the same time. I think she was afraid if she waited any longer it would never happen."

Carly looked at the other figures. She found Freida easily, the eldest bearing, the specific quality of someone who had been prepared since childhood to carry responsibility. Reba, younger in the portrait, the unmistakable energy of her even captured in oil. The boys.

"Which one is Harrison." She said.

He pointed.

The youngest in the portrait. A boy who looked no more than ten or eleven, standing slightly in front of Victor, his hand just barely touching his father's arm in a way that felt significant.

"He's like Deacon." Niko said. "Charming. Makes friends easily." He paused. "He was the one I worried about most when I left."

Carly looked at Harrison's painted face.

"Is he here this week." She said.

"He is." Niko said. "He's at university in Edinburgh now but he came back for the wedding."

She nodded.

She looked at the portrait one more time. At the family arranged with the specific deliberateness of a photograph taken before a fracture, everyone in their places, the fracture not yet visible.

She looked at Niko's painted face and his painted posture and his eyes aimed just barely toward something outside the frame.

He had always been looking at the exit.

She looked at him now and found him looking at her.

"Come on." He said quietly.

She followed him up the rest of the stairs.

Her room was on the south side, as Deacon had said, and the window overlooked the rose garden that was dormant for the season, the canes cut back and the beds mulched over, the geometric arrangement of it still visible through the grey of the morning.

It was a proper guest room in the way that only very old houses had proper guest rooms. Not decorated to a theme. Just furnished with things that had accumulated over decades of actual use and stayed because they belonged. A writing desk. A wardrobe with actual depth. A fireplace that had been recently cleaned and laid with wood ready to light.

She put her bag on the bed and stood in the middle of the room and looked at the window.

Niko appeared in the doorway.

"The fireplace works." He said. "If you need it. The south wing holds the cold more than the others."

"It's fine." She said.

He looked at the room with the expression of someone recalibrating something. She thought he was probably seeing the room as it had been when he was last here and overlaying the present version of it on that memory.

She let him have that for a moment.

"My room is through there." He said, nodding at the door in the wall she had taken for a wardrobe.

She looked at it. "Adjoining rooms."

"My mother's doing." He said. "I'm sorry if it's—"

"It's fine." She said again. And meant it. "I'm glad."

He looked at her.

She looked at the rose garden.

"When do I meet them." She said. "The rest of the family."

"Dinner tonight." He said. "The whole house comes to dinner the first night. It's." He stopped. "A tradition."

She heard everything that was underneath that pause.

"Okay." She said. She turned from the window and looked at him in the doorway. "Then I have a few hours."

He nodded.

"Good." She said. "Because I want to know everything you can tell me before I walk into that dinner. About each of them. What they care about. What they're likely to say. How to handle Victor if he says something in that specific quiet way you described."

He looked at her steadily.

"I know you want to protect me from all of it." She said before he could say anything. "I know that's your instinct and I understand where it comes from. But I don't need protection. I need information." She held his gaze. "So sit down and talk to me."

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the writing desk.

She pulled the desk chair out and sat across from him.

He looked at his hands.

Then he started talking.

POV: Niko

He talked for two hours.

Not everything. There were things that were going to take longer than two hours to say and things he was not yet ready to say and things that needed to wait for different conversations in different places. But everything she needed for tonight. Everything that would help her navigate a dinner table full of people who had known each other for centuries and who were all, in their different ways, forming an opinion of the girl he had brought home.

Home.

He had not called it that. He had been specifically careful not to call it that. But it was the word that had almost come out twice and he had redirected both times because calling it home implied a relationship with this house that he had spent four years untangling himself from and was not ready to reclaim.

She had listened to all of it with the focused attention she brought to things she was taking seriously. She had asked questions. Not the softening kind, not questions designed to make him feel better about what he was describing. The real kind. The ones that said she was building an accurate picture rather than a comfortable one.

He had answered all of them.

By the end of it something felt lighter in his chest than it had before. Not resolved, not finished, but shared in a way it had not been before, and sharing it had done something to the weight of it.

She had thanked him.

He had told her not to thank him and she had given him the look she gave him when he said something she disagreed with but was choosing not to argue about.

Now he was in his own room, the one adjacent to hers, unpacking the single bag he had brought with the specific economy of someone who had learned not to accumulate things in spaces they were not certain they were staying in.

His room was exactly as he had left it.

That was the thing about this house. Nothing moved. Nothing was replaced or rearranged. Every object he had left behind was in the place he had left it, either because his mother had ordered it kept that way or because nobody had had a reason to enter the room.

He looked at the desk.

The same books. The same pencil case, closed. The same sketchbook, the one that was full and that he had left here deliberately because leaving it had felt like leaving the version of himself that had made it.

He picked it up.

He opened it to the middle.

He looked at what he had been drawing at sixteen, at eighty, at the version of himself that had been here before the version that existed now.

The drawings were different from his current work. More controlled. More careful. Less willing to let the pencil do what it wanted. He could see the hand behind them calculating every line.

He closed it.

He put it back on the desk.

He looked at the window.

The view from his room was east-facing, which meant he was looking at the main grounds and, just visible through the treeline, the edge of Black River Falls in the distance. The town he had been living adjacent to for four years without coming back to this point.

He heard Carly in the next room. The specific sounds of someone settling into an unfamiliar space. A drawer opening. The wardrobe. The window.

He felt the specific weight of knowing she was there lift something in him that he had not identified as heavy until just now.

He turned from the window.

He sat on the bed.

He thought about the dinner tonight. About Victor's face when he walked in with Carly beside him. About his mother's face, which was the one he was less certain of and therefore more concerned about. About Deacon and Reba, who were known quantities. About Freida, who he had not seen in two years and who he genuinely wanted to see regardless of everything else.

About Harrison, who had been a boy when Niko left and was now something else, someone shaped by the years of Niko's absence in ways he had not been there to observe.

He pressed his lips together.

He was here.

He had chosen to be here.

He was not going to spend the week in his head about it.

He stood up.

He went to knock on the adjoining door.

She opened it almost immediately. She had changed into something slightly more put together than the drive clothes, her hair loose, and she looked at him with the steady expression he had been thinking about since the library on Sunday morning.

"Dinner's at seven." He said.

"I know." She said. "You told me."

"I wanted to check you were okay." He said.

She looked at him. "Are you okay?"

He considered that honestly. "I don't know yet." He said. "Ask me again after dinner."

She stepped forward and put her arms around him, her face against his chest, her hands at his back, the specific warmth of her that he had been missing for four days and had been careful not to show exactly how much.

He put his arms around her.

They stood in the doorway between their two rooms in the Monroeson estate at eleven in the morning with the whole week ahead of them.

"Ask me again after dinner." She said, quietly, against his chest.

He pressed his lips to the top of her head.

"After dinner." He agreed.