Chapter 118 Day Two
Chapter 118 Morning
POV: Carly
She woke up before seven.
The room was dark still, the south-facing window showing the specific grey of a pre-dawn sky that was not yet committed to becoming morning. She lay there for a moment and listened to the house.
It was quiet.
Not the quiet of a school dormitory, which was always inhabited quiet, full of the small sounds of other people sleeping and moving and existing. This was older quiet. The kind that came from thick stone walls and high ceilings and a building that had been absorbing sound for four hundred years and had gotten very good at it.
She sat up.
She dressed in jeans and a grey sweater and found her way to the window. The rose garden below was still and grey in the early light, the geometric beds visible, the bare canes casting thin shadows across the mulched ground. Beyond the garden the grounds extended further than she had been able to see arriving yesterday, a lawn rolling toward a treeline that marked the edge of the estate.
She was not going to stay in this room waiting for the day to arrive.
She found her way out of the south wing without waking anyone.
The house in the early morning had a different quality from the house at dinner. Less performed. She moved through the ground floor corridors slowly, not rushing, letting herself actually look at the things she had been too aware of people watching her to look at properly last night.
The portraits were everywhere.
Not just on the landing. In the corridors, the sitting rooms, the library she found off the east passage. Generations of Monroesons rendered in oil and charcoal and pencil, the dates beneath them spanning centuries. She walked the length of the portrait corridor slowly, reading the dates, tracking the faces.
She found the oldest ones at the far end.
The paint had that specific quality of age that no restoration fully removed, the color slightly warmer than the pigments would have originally been, the faces emerging from backgrounds that had darkened over time. She stood in front of the earliest one and looked at the man in it.
Not Victor. Older. The founding generation, or close to it.
The face had Niko's jaw. The same architectural quality, the same set of the shoulders. Different eyes but the same expression. That specific quality of looking at the painter and thinking about something else.
She had not expected that to hit her as hard as it did.
She heard a sound from somewhere to her left.
She followed it.
Through a door she had taken for a cupboard that opened onto a side passage, and then through another door that opened onto the grounds through a smaller entrance than the main. The sound was clearer outside. Metal on metal, rhythmic, coming from across the lawn.
She followed it across the wet grass.
A low stone building sat at the east edge of the garden, separate from the main house, the kind of structure that had been built for a specific purpose and had that purpose visible in its shape. Large windows on the north face. A chimney. The door was slightly ajar.
She pushed it open.
A studio.
Canvases everywhere. Not displayed — stacked, leaned, accumulated. Brushes in jars. Paint tubes organized on shelves with the specific system of someone who cared about process. A large work table in the center with the remnants of several projects still visible on its surface.
And Niko, at the far end, his back to her, working on something she could not yet see, the sound of a palette knife against the edge of a canvas the metal-on-metal she had been following.
He heard her.
He turned.
He was in a paint-stained shirt she had never seen before and his curls were pushed back with something and his eyes had the specific quality of someone who had been awake for a while.
She looked at the room around him.
"This is yours." She said.
"It was." He said. "I left most of it here when I went."
She stepped inside properly and let the door close behind her. She crossed to the nearest stack of canvases and looked at the top one. An abstract thing in blues and greys that was nothing like his sketchbook work and was completely recognizable as his at the same time. The same control and the same moments where the control had deliberately let go.
She looked at the one beside it.
She looked at him.
"How long have you been out here." She said.
He looked at the canvas in front of him. "Since four."
"Did you sleep." She said.
"Some." He said. "Enough."
She came to stand beside him and looked at what he was working on.
It was the rose garden. The view from her window, she realized. The dormant beds and the bare canes and the grey morning light. He had been painting what she had been looking at from the other side of the glass.
She stood beside him and looked at it for a long moment.
"It's beautiful." She said.
"It's not finished." He said.
"It's beautiful anyway." She said.
He looked at it.
She looked at him.
"How are you." She said. "Actually."
He set the palette knife down. He turned toward her and leaned against the work table and crossed his arms and looked at the floor for a moment before looking at her.
"Better than I expected." He said. "Which I keep being surprised by."
"Dinner wasn't as bad as you thought it was going to be." She said.
"Dinner was." He paused. "Dinner was fine. Which is not the same as easy but is better than what I had braced for." He looked at her steadily. "You had something to do with that."
She shook her head.
"You did." He said. "Don't dismiss it. You walked into a room full of people who have known each other for centuries and you handled every one of them within the first hour." He held her gaze. "Victor."
She pressed her lips together. "That was nothing."
"It was not nothing." He said. "Nobody speaks to Victor like that. Not in this house."
She looked at the rose garden painting.
"I just answered his question." She said.
"You answered it like you'd been sitting at that table your whole life." He said. "It unsettled him. I could see it." Something shifted in his expression. "I liked seeing it."
She almost smiled.
He pushed off the work table and picked up a fresh brush.
She sat on the edge of a stool near the window and watched him work and the studio filled with the specific quiet of two people who were comfortable enough to not fill silence with words.
Outside the Black River Falls morning was arriving slowly through the north windows.
She sat there until the light was properly up and then a little longer after that.
POV: Freida
She found them at nine, coming back across the lawn from the studio together.
She had been looking for Carly specifically. She had woken early herself, as she always did in this house — something about the quality of the quiet here made sleeping past six difficult, a fact she had never fully made peace with — and had gone down to the kitchen and made tea and looked out the window at the grounds.
She had seen the light on in the studio.
She had known it was Niko before she looked properly.
She had also seen, twenty minutes later, a figure cross the lawn toward it, and known from the walk and the grey sweater that it was Carly.
She had not gone out.
She had sat with her tea and watched the light in the studio window and felt something sitting in her chest that she was taking her time identifying.
It was relief.
She had been waiting to see Niko like this for so long that she had stopped actively waiting and had moved into something closer to resignation. Not because she didn't love him. Because she had watched him for decades build the wall with such commitment and such skill that she had started to believe it was permanent. That whatever had made him build it had left a damage that couldn't be reached from the outside.
Then a girl she had never heard of had apparently been getting past it all semester.
She had liked Carly at dinner immediately and specifically. Not because Niko cared about her, though that was significant on its own. Because of the quality of her attention. The way she listened when someone spoke to her, not waiting for her turn to respond but actually taking in what was being said and deciding what she thought about it before responding. The way she had handled Victor.
Nobody handled Victor like that.
She watched them come across the lawn now, Niko with his hands in his pockets and his paint-stained shirt visible under his jacket, Carly with her arms around herself against the cold, their shoulders occasionally touching as they walked.
She stepped out onto the terrace.
Niko looked up.
"Freida." He said. Not surprised exactly. Just noting her.
"You smell like linseed oil." She said. "You've been in the studio."
"I have." He said.
She looked at Carly. "I was hoping to steal you this morning if you're not busy."
Carly looked at Niko.
He gave a small nod. Go.
"Of course." Carly said.
Freida turned and went back inside and heard Carly's footsteps follow her across the terrace.
She led them to the morning room, the small sun-facing room off the west passage that she had always preferred to the grand formal spaces the rest of the family occupied. It had two armchairs and a window seat and a bookshelf that had been accumulating reading material since before she was born and the specific quality of a room that nobody had tried to make impressive because nobody important enough to impress was expected to use it.
She had always loved it for exactly that reason.
She sat in one armchair. Carly took the other.
She poured tea from the pot she had brought with her.
Carly took the cup.
They looked at each other.
"I'm going to ask you something directly." Freida said. "And I want you to answer directly because I don't have patience for the performance version and I suspect you don't either."
Carly's expression was open. "Okay."
"What does he mean to you." Freida said. "Really."
Carly held the cup in both hands and looked at the window for a moment.
"Everything I didn't expect." She said. "And I'm still figuring out how to hold that."
Freida looked at her.
"He's the first person." Carly said more carefully. "Who made me feel like the real version of me was enough. Not the performed version, not the one who runs everything and has it managed. The actual one." She paused. "I'd spent a long time not knowing those were different things."
Freida sat with that.
She recognized it.
"He doesn't give that easily." She said.
"I know." Carly said. "I know exactly how much it cost him."
Freida looked at her.
She picked up her own cup.
"He was different before he left." She said. "In ways that were hard to watch. Whatever this place did to him, and I won't pretend it didn't do things, it left him with a version of himself that was very good at being a Monroeson and very bad at being Niko." She paused. "I don't know which version you met."
"Both." Carly said. "And everything in between."
Freida almost smiled.
"Good." She said. "He needs someone who knows the difference."
She drank her tea.
Outside the morning had arrived properly, the light coming through the west window pale and clean, the grounds visible through the glass, Niko's shape crossing back toward the main house in the distance.
"The wedding is Friday." Freida said. "Three days."
"I know." Carly said.
"Isabel has a plan for the week." Freida said. "She always has a plan for everything. Some of it will be for Lucien's family, who arrive tomorrow. Some of it will be for other reasons." She looked at Carly directly. "I want you to have a good week here. I'm going to try to make sure that happens."
Carly looked at her.
"Thank you." She said.
Freida gave a small nod.
She was already thinking about the dagger.
She looked out the window.
She was not going to think about the dagger right now.
She was going to drink her tea and be in this room with this girl who made her brother look like himself and let the week arrive one day at a time.
The dagger could wait.