DENIAL
1902—New York
Ruby could barely see from the tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t sorry to see the back of Viola Vaccarelli. She wasn’t.
She barely noticed that Theo was moving in her arms until he was already pulling himself upright, rubbing at the place on his chest that was still damp with blood.
“Theo?” His name came out in a rushing gasp as she threw her arms around him.
But he shook her off. “I’m fine,” he told her, his voice still weak. “That was rather harsh, though, don’t you think?” He cocked one brow in her direction, and her heart flipped to see the familiar, endearing look.
“What was?” she asked, already knowing exactly what he was talking about.
He only stared at her.
“She’s one of them, Theo. What did you want me to do?”
“You could have thanked her,” he said gently.
He was right, of course. But she’s one of them.
“She lied to us,” she said instead. She brushed his hair back from his face. “Are you truly all right?”
Taking a deep breath, as though testing out his lungs, he nodded. “I think I am, actually. Are you?” he said, his voice softening.
“I’m fine,” she told him. “I’m not the one who was shot.”
“That isn’t what I mean. You liked her,” he pressed.
“Don’t,” he said gently. “You lie to the whole world, but you’ve never needed to lie to me.”
Ruby felt the burn of tears threatening again, but she shook her head, trying to will them away. “It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “She is one of them, and you know how I feel about magic. You know what it did to my family.”
Theo didn’t speak for a moment, but then he took her chin and turned her toward him. “Ruby . . .”
“Don’t, Theo.” She shook her head again, not wanting to think about any of it.
“No,” he said, cupping her face. “You are my dearest friend, and because I love you as well as I’ve ever loved anyone, I’m going to tell you something that I should have told you months ago—before you started this quest of yours: Your father made his own choices, love.”
She started to argue, but he stopped her with a single look. They’d been friends since they were both babes in leading strings. No one understood her as he did because no one had ever felt as safe as he had. But now he didn’t look safe. Now he looked like the truth staring at her and forcing her to accept it.
“Yes, the Order might have driven your father deeper into an already unhealthy obsession, but he knew what he was doing when he started, and it had nothing to do with the good of your family or the good of the city. Magic didn’t drive him to his breaking point. Perhaps it helped, but he did that on his own.”
She was shaking her head and wishing that she could block his words, but in her heart—in that place where she had always understood unspoken things—she’d known this all along. She had been so young when her father had lost his mind and tried to attack a friend over some supposed magical object. He’d nearly murdered someone over a trinket, and it had been so much easier for her—for all of them—to blame the magic itself, that thing outside and apart from him. It had been so much more satisfying to hate and fight against that than to accept that her father had been the cause of her family’s misfortunes.
Perhaps he’d dabbled in alchemy and other occult studies because of the Order. But Ruby knew the truth. Her father had always been the sort of man who wanted to be bigger and more important than he was. His membership in the Order wasn’t separate from that. When she was a girl, his boasting and posturing had made it seem as though he were some paragon of manliness . . . like he was untouchable.
But she wasn’t a girl any longer.
“She’s never going to forgive me,” Ruby whispered, remembering every awful word she’d spoken to Viola.
“Do you want her to?” Theo asked gently.
“I don’t know,” Ruby said, knowing the words were a lie even as she spoke them. But she was still so angry and felt so betrayed that she would never, ever admit it.