Chapter 265: The Libra.
"Venna."
I called into the dark and got nothing back.
The dark was absolute—no edges, no shapes, only the soft black that pressed against my eyes and made the air feel thicker. Abuela had told me she was already inside the libra, sitting in there waiting, expecting me. The old woman had said it the way she said everything, like the information had been true for a long time and I was simply the last to arrive.
"Venna."
She let out a breath, long and slow, the sound of someone who had been holding it the entire time I’d been calling. It brushed the air between us.
"I’m here."
"Where?"
I moved into the room with my hands out in front of me, fingers spread, feeling for edges, walking the way you walk when the dark is total and the furniture belongs to somebody else. The floor was old. It said so under my weight—soft creaks, the give of wood that had carried more years than people. My shin found the chair before my hands did. A hard, clean knock of bone against wood. I went from there, hands lifting through empty air until my fingers found her face—warm skin, the slight curve of a cheekbone, the faint damp of breath against my knuckles.
"Got you."
I felt behind me for the seat, the one directly opposite hers, and lowered myself into it. The chair accepted my weight with a quiet complaint.
"Seems like I pulled you out of something."
"You did." No complaint in it. Just fact. "What brings you this time, Abram?"
"You told me you can reach anything in the past." I put my hands on my knees. The denim was rough under my palms. "There’s a person I need you to help me find in mine."
"That’s fine." A pause. The dark between us felt denser for a second. "But you help me into my own today. Not next week. Today."
"Deal."
She sighed, and something in it said she’d expected me to negotiate.
"Give me your hands."
No preparation, then. No easing into it. If this had been sex there wouldn’t have been any romancing first, and I understood that about her already. Venna went straight at things.
My hands moved through the dark and found her thighs before they found her fingers—smooth fabric, the solid warmth of muscle underneath—and neither of us said anything about it. Then I had her hands and we locked our fingers together, tight, the way we’d done it the first time. Her grip was firm, almost hard. Mine matched it.
"Close your eyes."
I closed them. The dark didn’t change, but the act of closing them made the rest of the room feel farther away.
"Now think about the exact moment you want. Hold it. The libra will take you back to it."
I opened my eyes again, which changed nothing, because there was nothing to see either way. Only the same thick black.
"That’s the whole problem," I said. "I don’t remember ever seeing him. Not once, anywhere in my life. But I’m certain we’ve met."
She went quiet. The kind of quiet that listens harder.
"That’s a serious problem." Her voice had changed—lower, careful. "I can’t take you anywhere you don’t already hold. I don’t find things, Abram. I only walk you back into what’s already in your head."
"There has to be another way."
"There isn’t."
I held onto her fingers. The bones of them pressed against mine.
Think. Fast.
Because a man with no heartbeat was walking around inside my life with a promise in his mouth, and the awakening was still out there on its countdown, and for the first time since Eleanor had put the whole weight of it on me, the countdown wasn’t the thing at the front of my mind. Twenty-eight days was terrifying. But twenty-eight days was scheduled. My brother wasn’t scheduled. My brother was in the building.
You did something far worse than kill me.
I rubbed my thumb across her fingers without deciding to. The skin there was smooth, warm, real.
"What about the libra itself?"
"The libra knows everything." Her voice came back with a little lift in it, the first real interest. "It can show anything."
I waited for the part that came after.
"But it only reveals what it wants revealed," she said. "I can’t promise you where it takes you. It goes wherever the past connects to you. That could be anywhere. It could be nothing you were looking for."
"Then let’s use the libra."
"You’re sure?"
"Yes."
"Okay." A breath—slow, deliberate. "Close your eyes."
"They’re closed."
"And Abram." Her grip tightened until the joints of my fingers ached. "Open them if you want out. That’s the whole exit. Just open your eyes."
"Okay."
Then the movement started.
Something left me. Not violently. It shifted, the way weight shifts when a floor gives under one foot, and the dark stopped being dark. Light came back into a room that wasn’t the room I’d been sitting in—thin, grey light, the kind that filters through half-closed blinds on a day that has already decided to be overcast.
I knew this house. Riya Belmonte’s.
Her body was on the floor outside the room where I’d found her, exactly where I’d found her—one arm flung out, fingers curled as if she’d been reaching for something that never came. The whole place had that same particular quiet in it, the kind that sits heavy after violence has already finished its work.
A girl came up the stairs.
Mask over her face, blonde locks pulled back into a tight puff, moving fast. I knew her before I saw anything else, knew her from the way she took the steps—the specific rhythm of it, the light, quick placement of each foot.
Becky.
What is Becky doing in the Belmonte house.
She was in the hospital. She was supposed to be in the hospital that whole day.*
And how does any of this connect to me?
She reached the top, saw the body, and stopped dead. Her whole body locked. Whatever she had come for, this wasn’t it. Her shoulders jerked once. Then she turned and ran back down without touching anything, boots hammering the stairs in a sudden, panicked scramble.
The moment she cleared the stairs, a man came out of the bedroom.
Masked as well. Broad through the shoulders, the kind of build that fills a doorway without trying. He’d been in there the entire time, waiting her out, close enough to reach her if he’d wanted to. The mask sat flat against his face. No expression. Only the set of the body.
He walked straight through me, and I felt nothing, because I wasn’t there. Only a faint displacement of air, as if the space itself had registered the passage.
He took the stairs without hurrying. One step, then the next. Controlled. Certain.
How does this connect to me? Why did the libra bring me here?
Behind him, Riya coughed.
The sound was small, wet, final. The man stopped. One foot still on the stair, the other suspended. His whole body froze mid-motion.
"Abram will find out." Riya’s voice, thin, spending the last of itself on a sentence. The words hung in the grey light like something that should never have been spoken aloud.
Then nothing.
Find out what?
The man’s shoulders dropped. Something went out of him—some tension he’d been holding since he came out of that room—and I understood I was watching a man react to bad news. The line of his back softened. His head tilted a fraction, as if the name had landed somewhere he hadn’t expected it to reach.
He wasn’t Mute. He wasn’t built like Mute. He wasn’t built like anyone I could name.
And whoever he was, my name had just been the last thing said in his hearing, and he hadn’t seemed surprised to hear it.