Chapter 184 The Window
THIRD PERSON POV
Leo knew the count before they finished questioning the second girl.
He had been tracking it since the moment the guards realized Brianna was gone,how fast they moved, how many of them came, which corridors they sealed first and which ones they didn’t bother with. Everything was information if you looked at it correctly. His father had told him that once, on a walk around the pack boundary when Leo was eleven, and he had stored it in the part of himself which turned out to be permanently useful.
The guards questioned everyone individually, taking them out of the main room one at a time and bringing them back. Leo watched each face when they returned. None of them had said anything.
He had not told them to say nothing, he had simply made it clear, in the first conversation he’d had with Daphne after sending Brianna out, that he believed help was coming and that the best thing they could do while they waited was make themselves as predictable and manageable as possible to the people guarding them.
Predictable and manageable meant not giving anyone a reason to look too closely.
“Do you think she made it?” Daphne asked.
They were in the corner of the room that caught the most light during the hour when the lights were on. Leo had established them there early.
“Yes,” he said.
“You sound very sure.”
“I gave her a good route and she’s smart. She’ll have made it home by now.” He paused. “And my father’s people will be moving carefully, which means we have time. Not unlimited time, but more than we need.”
Daphne looked at him with an expression she had developed over the past weeks — assessing and direct, the expression of someone who had been through enough to know when they were in the presence of someone worth paying attention to. She had been here longer than most of the others.
“You’re going to tell me who you are eventually,” she said with conviction. Like it has already been decided.
“I’ve told you who I am.”
“You’ve told me your name. That’s not the same thing.” She kept her voice low, which was a habit both of them had developed without discussion. “The master took you to dinner again last night.”
“Yes.”
“What does he want with you?”
Leo considered how much to say. He had been turning the dinners over since the first one.
It was not information the Golden Blade was after. He had not asked Leo a single question about the pack’s defenses or Elijah’s patterns or anything strategic. What he asked about was Adriana. Where she had gone after leaving her father’s pack. Whether she seemed happy. What kind of mother she was. Whether Leo thought she missed her life before.
Leo had answered none of these questions directly. He had developed a facility, over several evenings, for speaking at length while conveying almost nothing, which was a skill he had observed in his father across a hundred meetings and had apparently inherited the capacity for.
“He’s trying to make me like him,” Leo said. “He thinks if he can get me on his side, it helps his case.”
“His case for what?”
The door opened before Leo could answer.
The two guards who came for him were the evening ones, which confirmed the schedule he had been building. Evening dinner with Landon, back by the time the lights went out. He had this mapped to within twenty minutes now.
“I’ll be back,” he told Daphne.
She nodded and did not look worried, which was the right response.
The corridors were the same as they had been every evening, and Leo walked through them with the same attention he paid every single time. Third left, second right, the door with the iron handle rather than the brass one, the corridor that smelled different from the others because something had been stored there once that had left its scent in the stone.
He knew the way out. He had known it for eight days. He was waiting for the right configuration of circumstances before he used it, because going early and going wrong would cost him the window and cost the other children the protection he was currently able to provide simply by being the one Landon had taken an interest in.
Leo was the reason they hadn’t been moved.
He understood that without being told. Landon wanted him comfortable enough to be useful, and keeping the other children in place was part of what comfortable looked like for Leo. The moment Leo left, the other children became a liability rather than a resource.
So he stayed and he had dinner and he answered none of the real questions.
Landon was already at the table when he arrived.
The food was always better here than in the room, which Leo continued to note and continued to decline, eating only enough to sustain function and no more, as a precaution.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Landon said.
“I’m usually quiet,” Leo replied.
“You’re usually asking me things.” A slight smile. “Tonight you came in without a question ready. That’s different.”
Leo looked at him across the table. He was a man who had clearly been constructing something for a very long time and had arrived at the point where the construction was nearly complete and the waiting was making him careless. That was what the dinner invitations were. Impatience dressed as generosity.
“I do have a question,” Leo said. “I’ve been thinking about how to ask it.”
Landon waited.
“The other children,” Leo said. “When this is finished — whatever you mean by finished — what happens to them?”
Landon looked at him with a slightly thoughtful expression. He knew he was being tested and it looked like he was choosing whether to be honest.
“They go home,” he said. “They were never the point. They were a way to get attention and a way to have something worth trading. As soon as I have what I want, they’re irrelevant.”
“And what you want is my mother.”
“What I want,” Landon said, like a man who has rehearsed his version of the truth many times, “is what was taken from me. Your father took a great deal from me. Your mother was part of it.”
Leo thought about Adriana. About the woman who had come into his life when he was small and silent and broken and had simply stayed. She had sat with him and fed him and learned to read what he was trying to say before he had the words to say it. Who had fought for his right to inherit what was his father’s. Who had stood in a gathering in front of the whole pack and held her power back rather than give anyone a reason to doubt her.
“My mother,” Leo said carefully, “makes her own choices. She has always made her own choices. That’s one of the things about her.”
Landon smiled in the way people smiled when they had decided they knew something you didn’t.
Leo filed that away alongside everything else and asked his next question, the one he had actually been planning, and let Landon talk, and listened to everything including what was between the words.
He had two days, maybe three. Then the window he was building would be ready.
He just needed two more days.