Chapter 119 Breakfast

Chapter 119 Victor

POV: Niko

He found his father in the fourth floor office at ten.

He had not been on the fourth floor since he was twelve years old. He had told Carly that and meant it and had spent the walk up the stairs confirming it was still true. The fourth floor felt different from the rest of the house. Quieter in a way that was not peaceful. The particular quiet of a place where decisions had been made and the walls had absorbed the weight of them.

He knocked once.

"Come in." Victor's voice. The same register it had always been. The same specific quality of someone who already knew who was on the other side of the door and had decided in advance how to receive them.

Niko opened the door.

The office was exactly as he remembered it and also nothing like he remembered it. The desk was the same, the dark wood one that faced the window with the view of the full grounds. The bookshelves were the same, floor to ceiling on three walls, organized by a system he had never fully decoded. The specific smell of old paper and whatever his father had always used for the furniture.

Victor was standing at the window, not sitting at the desk. His hands were clasped behind his back. He was looking at the grounds.

He did not turn when Niko came in.

Niko closed the door behind him.

He stood in the middle of the room and waited.

This was an old game. He had played it countless times in this room. The waiting. The silence that was not neutral, that was Victor's specific method of establishing the terms before a single word had been said. He had spent decades learning to sit inside it without letting it do what it was designed to do.

He sat inside it now.

Victor turned.

He looked at Niko the way he always looked at him. The systematic evaluation that started at the face and moved outward. Not hostile. Just counting.

"You look well." Victor said.

"I am well." Niko said.

"Sit down." Victor said.

"I'll stand." Niko said.

A pause. Victor registered this and filed it and moved past it. "As you like."

He crossed to the desk and sat behind it. He folded his hands on the surface in front of him and looked at Niko with the patient certainty of someone who had learned that patience was its own kind of power and had been exercising it for four hundred years.

"I'm glad you came." Victor said. "For Freida's sake."

"For Freida's sake." Niko said. "Yes."

"And for your own." Victor said. Not a question.

Niko said nothing.

Victor looked at his hands. "You've been at the school for four years. You've been in this town for four years. You chose not to come home for four years." He looked up. "I'm curious what changed."

"Several things." Niko said.

"The girl." Victor said.

"Among other things." Niko said.

Victor studied him. "A McPherson witch." He said it the way he said most things, without inflection, letting the fact do whatever work it was going to do on its own. "An interesting choice."

"It wasn't a choice." Niko said. "It wasn't strategic or calculated. I didn't select her for any reason except that she is who she is."

Victor looked at him for a moment. "You sound certain."

"I am certain." Niko said. "Of very few things. That one I'm certain of."

Something moved through Victor's expression that was not quite what Niko expected. Not dismissal. Something more complicated. He identified it after a moment as recognition and was not sure what to do with that.

Victor looked at the window. "Your mother will try to use her." He said it plainly. "I want you to know that I'm telling you this not as a warning against your mother specifically but as information you should have."

Niko went very still. "Explain that."

"Isabel has been interested in the covenant for some time." Victor said. "More specifically in what reestablishing the Monroeson contribution would require. She has ideas about how that might be accomplished that I do not fully share." He looked back at Niko. "The McPherson girl's presence here is convenient for those ideas."

"What ideas." Niko said.

Victor folded his hands. "That is a conversation for another time."

"No." Niko said. "It's a conversation for right now. What is she planning."

Victor looked at him with the expression Niko had spent a childhood trying to read and had never fully managed. Not cold exactly. Something more like sealed. A face from which nothing escaped that had not been permitted to escape.

"She believes." Victor said carefully. "That the covenant can be reestablished through a binding of the two bloodlines. Not political. Not a formal agreement." He paused. "Personal."

Niko stared at him.

The room was very quiet.

"She wants to use Carly." Niko said. His voice came out flat and very controlled. "She has been planning to use Carly."

"She has been considering the possibility." Victor said. "Whether she intends to act on it, and how, I cannot say with certainty."

"You could have told me this before I came." Niko said. "You could have told me before I brought her here."

"I could have." Victor said. "I'm telling you now."

"That's not the same thing." Niko said.

"No." Victor said. "It isn't." He looked at his desk briefly. "I am aware of that."

Niko looked at him.

He had come up here with a plan. He had planned to have the conversation about the covenant directly, about the four year absence and what it had cost Carly without either of them knowing, about what he intended to do to fix it. He had planned it carefully on the drive and had known it was going to be difficult and had prepared for difficult.

He had not prepared for this.

"Why are you telling me." He said. The same question he had asked Leona in a corridor outside a gymnasium weeks ago. The same instinct that someone giving him information had a reason for giving it that went beyond straightforward disclosure.

Victor looked at him steadily. "Because you are my son." He said. "And despite what you believe about me I am not indifferent to what happens to you."

Niko held his gaze.

He did not know what to do with that sentence. He had been carrying a specific picture of his father for four years, had refined it and confirmed it and used it to justify every decision he had made since leaving. The picture did not have room in it for sentences like that.

He was not going to dismantle the picture in a fourth floor office at ten in the morning.

But he filed the sentence.

"What should I do." He said. And hated asking it. And asked it anyway because she was somewhere in this house and the week was only beginning.

Victor looked at the window.

"Stay close to her." He said simply. "And trust what you know about your mother rather than what she presents."

He looked back at Niko.

"The rest is yours to figure out." He said.

Niko nodded.

He turned toward the door.

"Nicholas." Victor said.

He stopped. He did not turn around.

"She handled herself well last night." Victor said. "The girl."

Niko said nothing.

"She has backbone." Victor said. "I find that—" He stopped. "I find that notable."

Niko opened the door.

He walked out and pulled it closed behind him and stood in the fourth floor corridor and breathed through everything that had just happened and told himself to think clearly.

He needed to find Carly.

He needed to find her and tell her what Victor had just told him and he needed to do it before Isabel had the chance to do whatever she was planning.

He started down the stairs.

POV: Niko

He found her in the morning room with Freida.

He stopped in the doorway.

Both of them looked at him. Freida's expression did something complicated. Carly read his face immediately, the way she always did, and her eyes asked the question before she could.

He looked at Freida.

"Can I borrow her." He said.

Freida looked between them. She stood up without being asked, which told him she already knew something was wrong. She put her cup down. She crossed to the door.

She stopped beside him.

"He told you." She said. Very quietly.

He looked at her.

"I was going to." She said. "I was trying to find the right moment."

"You knew." He said. The words came out with more edge than he intended.

"I suspected." She said. "Since Christmas. I wasn't certain." Her eyes were direct and not apologetic. "I'm sorry I didn't say it sooner."

He exhaled.

He looked at the ceiling briefly.

"Okay." He said.

She touched his arm once, briefly, and walked out.

He came into the morning room and closed the door.

Carly was already on her feet. Her hands were in her lap and her expression was the specific version she wore when she was bracing for something and was doing it calmly.

He sat down across from her.

He told her what Victor had told him.

All of it. Plainly and in order. The binding of bloodlines. Isabel's plan. Victor's warning.

He watched her face move through it.

She did not interrupt.

When he finished she was quiet for a moment.

She looked at the window.

"She invited me here." Carly said. "You asked me and she facilitated it. The adjoining rooms." She was putting it together out loud. "She wanted me here."

"Yes." He said.

"She knew about the covenant before I did." She said. "She knew about all of it."

"Yes." He said.

She looked at him.

"Are you going to tell me what binding of bloodlines means specifically." She said.

"I don't know the specifics yet." He said. "I only know what Victor said. I don't know what form she intends it to take or how she was planning to present it."

Carly pressed her lips together.

She looked at the window again.

He watched her process it and did not rush her and did not try to manage what she was feeling. He had learned that from the courtyard. She needed to think through the shape of it before she could respond to it and pushing into that space only made things harder.

She turned back to him.

"Okay." She said.

He looked at her.

"We know." She said. "She doesn't know we know. That means we have something she doesn't have." She held his gaze. "So we keep that and we see what she does and we decide together what we're willing to do about the covenant on our own terms." She paused. "Is that agreeable to you."

He stared at her.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Yes." He said. "That is extremely agreeable to me."

She nodded once.

She stood up and smoothed her jeans and picked up her tea cup.

"Good." She said. "Then for now we go about the week normally. We let her think she still has the advantage and we enjoy Freida's wedding and we deal with whatever she presents when she presents it." She looked at him. "Together."

He stood up.

"Together." He agreed.

She held out her hand.

He took it.

They walked out of the morning room together and he thought that this specific girl who had walked into a room full of vampires and answered his father's question like she had been sitting at that table her whole life was the most remarkable person he had encountered in nearly two centuries.

He was not going to stop finding that remarkable.

Not ever.