He hesitated, his eyes darting to the letters on the table. He knew. Of course he knew. He shuffled to the chair and sank into it, his gaze fixed on the tabletop, unable to meet her eyes. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
"I was looking for the accounts ledger for the fabrics from Lyon," she said, the lie smooth and practiced. "I found these instead."
She slid the bundle of debt notices across the table. He flinched as if they were hot coals.
"This is business," he mumbled, his voice low. "It is not your concern."
"Not my concern?" she repeated, her voice still quiet, but with an edge that made him look up. "They mention Clara. They say her 'service' is not enough to cover the debt. What service, Father? What debt?"
He sagged in his chair, the fight draining out of him. "It was a loan. For the shop. After the blight last year ruined the silk harvest. The prices… they skyrocketed. I had to buy, or we would have lost everything."
"You borrowed money from Lady Valestra?" she asked, though she already knew the answer. It was a foolish, desperate move. To be in debt to a merchant was one thing. To be in debt to a vampire, one known for her cruelty, was a death sentence.
"She was the only one who would lend to me," he whispered, his eyes pleading with her. "I thought I could pay it back. I thought I had more time."
"Time ran out, didn't it?" Isadora said, her voice turning colder. "It ran out the day Lady Valestra came here. You let her take Clara. You stood there and let her take your daughter, and you said nothing. You let me believe it was my fault."
The accusation hung in the air between them, sharp and glittering with unshed tears.
He finally met her gaze, and his eyes were filled with a desperate, paternal agony. "What was I supposed to do, Izzy? Tell her no? She would have taken you both! She would have bled this family dry and left us in the gutter! Clara confessed to protect you. I supported the lie to protect you. Everything I have done has been to protect you!"
"Protect me?" The word was a bitter laugh. "You call this protection? Lying to me while my sister is taken to a monster's dungeon? Leaving Bram alone and terrified while you drown yourself in a tavern? That is not protection. That is cowardice."
He flinched, the word striking him like a slap. "You don't understand."
"Then make me understand," she challenged, her voice rising now, fueled by a week of fear and grief. She slid the two remaining letters across the table. The one from Seraphyne, and the worn, folded one from the secret compartment. "Make me understand these."
He stared at them, his face paling even further. He recognized the elegant script of Seraphyne Virellion, a vampiress he had likely never met but whose reputation preceded her. But it was the other letter, the tattered one, that made his hand tremble as he reached for it.
He picked it up as if it were a venomous snake, his thumb stroking the faded writing on the front. For Elias. From Viregate.
"Where did you get this?" he whispered, his voice a raw nerve.
"From the same place you hid your debts," she said flatly. "Who is Prisoner 817? And why are they writing to you from the same prison where Seraphyne says Clara is being held?"
He looked cornered, a fox trapped with the hounds closing in. He shook his head, a frantic, jerky motion. "It's nothing. An old debt, an old acquaintance. It has nothing to do with Clara. Nothing to do with any of this."
The lie was so blatant, so desperate, it was almost pathetic. Her patience, already worn thin, finally snapped.
"Stop lying to me!" she cried, slamming her palm down on the table. The teacups rattled, and he jumped. "I am not a child anymore, Father. I am the one who stood before a monster and did not flinch. I am the one who went to Mirewood Hall and faced the Duke and his terrifying sister. I am the one who dragged you out of a gutter last night! Do not insult me with lies."
She was on her feet now, leaning over the table, her eyes boring into his.
"Clara is in a vampire prison. You are in debt to a vampiress. Her collector is called the Bone-Reaper. I have a letter from Lady Seraphyne that speaks of torturing my sister. And you have a secret letter from that same prison. Connect the pieces for me, Father. Or I will."
He stared at her, his mouth opening and closing silently. He looked old. Older than she had ever seen him. The precise, proud man she knew was gone, replaced by this broken, haunted shell. The fight was gone, replaced by a vast, empty despair.
"You know nothing," he finally managed to say, his voice cracking. "You know nothing of the promises I had to make. Promises that concerned your mother."
The words fell into the poisoned air of the kitchen, and the world tilted. Promises that concerned your mother.
It was as if he had reached across the table and struck her. The argument, the debt, even the terror for Clara—it all receded, replaced by a sudden, roaring silence in her head. A silence that was seven years deep.
Her mother. Elenora Wren. A ghost of perfume and lullabies, a faded portrait on the mantelpiece, a story of a woman who went to a noble's party and simply... vanished. Declared dead. A tragedy that had hollowed out their family and left her father a man made of grief and quiet routine.
But it wasn't a tragedy. It was a promise. A secret. A lie.
"What?" Isadora breathed, the single word a wisp of sound. Her anger, so sharp and righteous moments before, dissolved into a cold, creeping dread. "What promises?"
Elias seemed to shrink before her eyes, the momentary flash of defiance gone, leaving only the wreckage. He shook his head, looking down at his trembling hands on the table. "It doesn't matter. It was long ago."
"It matters," she insisted, her voice dropping to a fierce, desperate whisper. "You just made it matter. What does our mother have to do with any of this?"
"Leave it be, Isadora," he pleaded, his voice ragged. "For your own sake. Some doors are better left sealed. Some truths are sharper than any blade."
Her mind raced, connecting dots she hadn't even known existed. Her mother, who had once taken a temporary position sewing at a noble estate just before she disappeared. An estate whose name he never mentioned. Her father's quiet but absolute refusal to ever take work from House Virellion, even when their coin was good. The way he would go pale when the Duke's carriage passed in the street.
"It was them, wasn't it?" she whispered, the realization a shard of ice in her gut. "It was House Virellion. Mother worked for them."
He wouldn't look at her. His silence was her answer. It was a confession more damning than any words. The floor seemed to fall away from beneath her feet. Her mother hadn't just vanished from a party. She had vanished from the world of the Duke of Ravenshade. The same man Isadora had danced with. The same man who now held a cryptic claim on her.
The web wasn't just around her, Clara, and her father. It was older. Deeper. Its anchor was buried in her mother's unmarked grave.
"What did you promise him?" she demanded, her voice shaking with a new kind of fury, one born of a grief she now realized she had never truly understood. "What did you promise the Duke?"
"I promised nothing!" he finally snapped, his head jerking up. His eyes were wild with a terror that dwarfed his shame. "I promised to stay away. To keep my family out of their affairs. To be invisible. A promise I kept for seven years, until you..."
He trailed off, but he didn't have to finish. Until you wore a dead woman's gown and danced your way back into their world.
The cruelty of it, the bitter irony, was a physical blow. She had thought she was rebelling against her small life, but she had only been walking back into a cage her father had spent years trying to keep her from.
He pushed himself away from the table, his movements clumsy, ancient. "I will not speak of this again. The subject is closed."
"It is not closed!"
"It is!" he roared, his voice cracking with a final, desperate authority. He pointed a trembling finger at her. "You will drop this, Isadora. You will forget what you have found. You will do the work Lady Seraphyne has commissioned, you will be polite and respectful, and you will not ask any more questions. You will not provoke them. Do you understand me? Your life, and Bram's, depends on it."
He turned and shuffled out of the kitchen, not back to the sitting room, but toward his own small, dark bedroom, closing the door behind him with a soft, final click.
Leaving her alone in the ruins.