Page 72 of The Beautiful Ones

“What are you?”

Adrian looked almost sad.

“The consequence you believed would never come.”

He stepped forward.

The flagstones split beneath his boot.

A crack raced across the rotunda, branching through the floor and up the low stone walls. The earth groaned. Iron shrieked. Wet soil and white lime erupted through the broken pavement as the center of the glasshouse heaved upward.

Thick blue roots emerged from the ground.

They were the width of a man’s wrist and luminous beneath their dark skin. They coiled around splintered pine boards, lifting the ruins of a buried box through soil that should have concealed it forever.

The grave opened at Father’s feet.

Nathaniel Vale lay within it.

Time had not touched him.

His naval coat remained dark blue, its brass buttons bright, its gold braid unstained by earth or lime. His face was pale and still, the expression emptied of pain. Over his heart, where his coat had been torn by the fatal wound, blue gardenias grew from the cloth.

I remembered that coat bent beside me at the pianoforte. I remembered his finger resting upon the music, never upon my mouth. Take your time, little bird. A song does not become less beautiful because the singer must breathe.

My knees weakened.

Elin held me upright.

Father crawled backward through mud and broken glass.

“No,” he whispered. “The lime—”

“Preserves some debts poorly,” Nicholas observed.

Adrian stood at the edge of the grave. For the first time since entering our house, his composure gave way to something that resembled grief.

“Nathaniel waited while you drank his port,” he said. “He waited while your wife wore jewels purchased with human lives. He waited while you taught your children to call blood money an inheritance.”

Father shook his head as though denial might close the earth.

“He waited for you, Étienne.”

Octavia stepped from the shadows. She did not look at Father. She looked at me.

“Watch closely, little bird,” she said, her voice sounding inside my mind. “Watch what becomes of men who build their kingdoms upon the bones of the innocent.”

The blue roots surrounding Nathaniel’s body began to move.

They slid over the fractured floor toward Father’s legs.

I found my voice.

“Father!”

My scream shattered what remained of the glass.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN