The darkness reads the caution in her face.
“Come, Adeline,” he says, “I am no fae thing, here to trap you with food and drink.”
“And yet, everything seems to have a price.”
He exhales, eyes flashing a paler shade of green.
“Suit yourself,” he says, taking up his glass and drinking deeply.
After a long moment, Addie gives in, and lifts the crystal to her lips, taking her first sip of Champagne. It is unlike anything she’s ever tasted; a thousand fragile bubbles race across her tongue, sweet and sharp, and she would melt with pleasure, if it were any other table, any other man, any other night.
Instead of savoring each sip, she immediately empties her glass, and by the time she sets it on the table, her head is fizzing slightly, and the servant is already at her elbow, pouring her a second drink.
The darkness sips his own, and watches, saying nothing as she eats. The silence in the room grows heavy, but she does not break it.
Instead she focuses first on the soup, and then on fish, and then on a round of pastry-crusted beef. It is more than she has eaten in months, in years, and she feels full in a way that goes beyond her stomach. And as she slows, she studies the man, who is not a man, across the table, the way the shadows bend in the room at his back.
This is the longest they have ever spent together.
Before, there were only those mere moments in the woods, the minutes in a shoddy room, half an hour along the Seine. But now, for the first time, he does not loom behind her like a shadow, does not linger like a phantom at the edges of her sight. Now, he sits across from her, on full display, and though she knows the static details of his face, having drawn them a hundred times, still she cannot help but study him in motion.
And he lets her.
There is no shyness in his manner.
He seems, if anything, to relish her attention.
As his knife slices across the plate, as he lifts a bite of meat to his lips, his black brows lift, his mouth tugs at the corner. Less a man than a collection of features, drawn by a careful hand.
In time, that will change. He will inflate, expand to fill the gaps between the lines of her drawing, wrest the image from her grip until she cannot fathom that it was ever hers.
But for now, the only aspect that is his—entirely his—are those eyes.
She imagined them a hundred times, and yes, they were always green, but in her dreams they were a single shade: the steady green of summer leaves.
His are different.
Startling, inconstant, the slightest change in humor, in temper, reflected there, and only there.
It will take Addie years to learn the language of those eyes. To know that amusement renders them the shade of summer ivy, while annoyance lightens them to sour apple, and pleasure, pleasure darkens them to the almost-black of the woods at night, only the edges still discernible as green.
Tonight, they are the slippery color of weeds caught in the current of a stream.
By the end of dinner, they will be another shade entirely.
There is something languid in his posture. He sits there, one elbow on the tablecloth, his attention drifting, head tipped ever so slightly as if listening to a far-off sound, while his elegant fingers trace the line of his chin as if amused by his own form, and before she knows it, she has broken the silence again.
“What is your name?”
His eyes slide from a corner of the room back to her. “Why must I have one?”
“All things have names,” she says. “Names have purpose. Names have power.” She tips her glass his way. “You know that, or else you wouldn’t have stolen mine.”
A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, wolfish, amused. “If it is true,” he says, “that names have power, then why would I hand you mine?”
“Because I must call you something, to your face and in my head. And right now I have only curses.”
The darkness does not seem to care. “Call me whatever you like, it makes no difference. What did you call the stranger in your journals? The man after whom you fashioned me?”
“You fashioned yourself to mock me, and I would rather you take any other form.”
“You see violence in every gesture,” he muses, running a thumb over his glass. “I fashioned myself to suit you. To put you at ease.”
Anger rises in her chest. “You have ruined the one thing I still had.”
“How sad, that you had only dreams.”
She resists the urge to fling the crystal at him, knowing it will do no good. Instead, she looks to the servant by the wall, holds out the glass for him to fill it. But the servant doesn’t move—none of them do. They are bound to his will, not hers. And so she rises, and takes the bottle up herself.
“What was his name, your stranger?”
She returns to her seat, refills her glass, focuses on the thousand shining bubbles that rise through the center. “He had no name,” she says.
But it is a lie, of course, and the darkness looks at her as if he knows it.
The truth is, she’d tried on a dozen names over the years—Michel, and Jean, Nicolas, Henri, Vincent—and none of them had fit. And then, one night, there it was, tripping off her tongue, when she was curled in bed, wrapped in the image of him beside her, long fingers trailing through her hair. The name had passed her lips, simple as breath, natural as air.
Luc.
In her mind it stood for Lucien, but now, sitting across from this shadow, this charade, the irony is like a too-hot drink, an ember burning in her chest.
Luc.
As in Lucifer.
The words echo through her, carried like a breeze.
Am I the devil, or the darkness?
And she does not know, will never know, but the name is already ruined. Let him have it.
“Luc,” she murmurs.
The shadow smiles, a dazzling, cruel imitation of joy, and lifts his drink as if to toast.
“Then Luc it is.”
Addie drains her glass again, clinging to the lightheadedness it brings. The effects won’t last, of course, she can feel her senses fighting back with every empty glass, but she presses on, determined to best them, at least for a while.
“I hate you,” she says.
“Oh, Adeline,” he says, setting down his glass. “Without me, where would you be?” As he speaks, he turns the crystal stem between his fingers, and in its faceted reflection, she sees another life—her own, and not her own—a version where Adeline didn’t run to the woods as the sun went down and the wedding party gathered, didn’t summon the darkness to set her free.
In the glass, she sees herself—her old self, the one she might have been, Roger’s children at her side and a new baby on her hip and her familiar face gone sallow with fatigue. Addie sees herself beside him in the bed, the space cold between their bodies, sees herself bent over the hearth the way her mother always was, the same frown lines, too, fingers aching too much to stitch the tears in clothes, far too much to hold her old drawing pencils; sees herself wither on the vine of life, and walk the short steps so familiar to every person in Villon, the narrow road from cradle to grave—the little church waiting, still and gray as a tombstone.
Addie sees it, and she is grateful he doesn’t ask if she would go back, trade this for that, because for all the grief and the madness, the loss, the hunger, and the pain, she still recoils from the image in the glass.
The meal is done, and the servants of the house stand in the shadows, waiting for their master’s next instruction. And though their heads are bowed, and their faces are blank, she cannot help but think of them as hostages.
“I wish you would send them away.”