THE WEIGHT OF TRUTH

SERAPHINA

The car is too clean. That's the first thing I notice, sitting stiff in the back seat with a man on either side of me like bookends.

 No mud on the floor mats. No smell of sulfur or fungus-mash. Just leather and something sharp and cold, like metal, like money.

I've never been in a car before. I hate that some small, stupid part of me is curious about it anyway.

"You can stop staring at the window," the man on my left says. He hasn't told me his name. None of them have. "Nothing out there you haven't already seen."

"I've never seen it from up here," I say. "Forgive me for looking."

He doesn't answer that. Good. I didn't want an answer, I wanted him to know I'm not afraid to talk, even now, even with my wrists still stinging from where they grabbed me.

We climb. That's the only word for it the road spirals up and up, out of the fog, out of the Enclave, past the Under-Tunnels where I've never once been allowed to go, until the acid rain turns to ordinary rain and then to nothing at all, and the crater opens up below us like a wound with the scab pulled off.

I have lived my whole life at the bottom of this city. I did not know, until tonight, how far up the top actually is.

The car stops outside a tower of black glass and pale stone, tall enough that I have to crane my neck against the window to see where it ends. 

There isn't an end I can find. It just keeps going, up into cloud.

"Out," says the man on my right, and his hand closes around my arm before I've even reached for the door myself.

"I can walk," I snap, yanking my arm free. He lets me. I think he's amused. I hate that too.

The inside of the tower is worse than the outside, somehow. Marble floors so polished I can see my own reflection staring back up at me, muddy and out of place, like a stain someone forgot to clean. 

Guards everywhere standing in doorways, standing at the base of staircases, standing like furniture nobody bothers to look at anymore.

Nobody looks at me either, not really. They look past me. Through me. The way you look at a package you're waiting to be told what to do with.

I am walked through hallway after hallway, all of them cold, all of them silver-white and black, until we reach a room with floor-to-ceiling windows and no furniture except one long table and one high-backed chair, and standing at the window with his back to the room, hands loose at his sides, is Dante Romano.

He doesn't turn around right away. He lets me stand there, flanked by his men, staring at the back of his black coat, and something about the deliberateness of it makes my skin crawl.

"Leave us," he says finally, and his voice is low, even, the kind of voice that has never once had to raise itself to be obeyed.

The men leave. Every single one of them, without argument, without hesitation, and the door closes behind them with a soft, final click, and then it is just the two of us, and the ghost of my father kneeling in the mud, and ten years of waiting for this exact moment.

He turns around.

Up close, he is worse. Not uglier I wish he were uglier, it would make this easier but worse in the way a held breath is worse than a shout. 

His eyes are the blue of something you'd find at the bottom of very cold water, and around his shoulders the chain.

 I saw in the street is even thicker here, even darker, layered so many times over that I can't count where one contract ends and the next begins.

"Seraphina Luca," he says, like he's reading it off a page. "Your father's debt has been sitting unpaid on my ledger for ten years. I'm told you're the last of your line."

"I'm told you're the one who put it there," I say.

Something flickers across his face. So brief I almost miss it. Not guilt. I don't think this man knows how to feel guilt. Something closer to surprise, like he expected silence and got a blade instead.

"You have a mouth on you," he says.

"I have a memory," I say. "I watched you take it. My father's soul. I was thirteen, and I was behind the rain barrel, and I watched you take it out of his chest like you were collecting a parcel."

The room goes very still. Even the guards' absence seems louder.

"Then you already know," he says, quiet now, "that arguing with me about the debt is a waste of both our time."

"I'm not arguing about the debt," I say. My voice shakes, just slightly, and I hate that it does, but I keep going anyway.

 "I don't care about the debt. I want to know if it was worth it. Whatever you burned my father's soul for—was it worth it?"

For one long moment he doesn't answer. He just looks at me, and I make myself hold still under it, chin up, even though every instinct in my body is screaming to look away.

"No," he says finally. "It wasn't."

It is not the answer I expected. It knocks something loose in my chest that I don't have time to examine, because he's already turning away, already done with me, gesturing toward a door at the far end of the room.

"You'll stay here until I decide what you're worth," he says. "Don't test the guards. They won't hurt you. They also won't let you leave."

"And if I try anyway?"

He looks back at me, and for just a second, something almost like amusement moves behind those cold blue eyes.

"Then I suppose we'll find out what kind of girl argues with the devil about whether it was worth it," he says, and walks out, and the door shuts.

  I am alone in a cage made of glass and marble, ten stories above the only life I've ever known, standing three feet from the man who ended it.

I stand there for a long time after he leaves. My legs feel weak, like they might give out at any moment. I press my hand against the cold glass of the window and stare down at the city below.

The Enclave is so far away. I can barely see it through the fog and smoke. 

My home, my street, my life, all of it is down there, and I'm up here, trapped in a tower with the man who destroyed everything.

I think about what he said. No. It wasn't worth it.

I wanted him to lie. I wanted him to be the monster I've been imagining for ten years. I wanted him to say it was worth it, that my father's life meant nothing, that I meant nothing.

Instead, he gave me the truth. And the truth is so much harder to hate.

I slide down the wall until I'm sitting on the cold marble floor. I pull my knees up to my chest and rest my forehead on them.

"I'm going to get out of here," I whisper. "I don't know how yet, but I'm going to get out. And when I do, I'm going to make him pay."

But even as I say it, I don't know if I believe it anymore.

DANTE

She has my father's eyes. Not literally—my father's eyes were black as pitch, and hers are brown, ordinary brown, nothing remarkable about them at all except for the way they refuse to look away from me. But there's something in the set of them…

 The way she holds a stare like it costs her nothing, that reminds me of every Romano who ever sat across a table from an enemy and didn't blink first.

I did not expect that. I expected fear. I have collected enough debts over enough years to know exactly what fear looks like on a person being dragged into my tower—the shaking hands, the pleading, the offers of things they don't have to give.

 Seraphina Luca offered me none of that. She offered me a question I have spent ten years not asking myself.

Was it worth it.

I walk the hall back to my study with that question sitting in my chest like a coal that won't go out, and by the time I reach the door, Julian is already waiting for me, arms crossed, that particular look on his face that means he has something to say and isn't sure he's allowed to say it.

"You brought her here yourself," he says. "You could have sent anyone for that debt. You went yourself."

"I wanted to see her," I say.

"Why."

I don't have a good answer for that. I settle for the true one instead. "Because her father's soul is the one I burned to save this family, and in ten years I have never once looked the daughter in the eye. I wanted to know what that felt like."

Julian raises an eyebrow. "And how does it feel?"

I think of her chin lifted, her voice shaking and refusing to stop anyway. Was it worth it.

"Uncomfortable," I say, and Julian, wisely, does not push further.

I do not sleep that night. I rarely do—the Ferrum Blood makes sleep a luxury my body can't always afford anymore, another thing I have told no one, another chain I carry that nobody in this tower can see. Instead I stand at my window and look down at the glass room where I left her, watching her pace the length of it like a caged animal testing the bars, arms wrapped around herself against the cold she must be feeling and refusing to ask anyone to fix.

She doesn't cry. I watch for an hour and she does not cry once.

I think about my father, dead eleven years now, and the debt he left me that has cost this family everything since—cost it the Luca girl's father, cost it whatever softness I used to have before I learned that hesitation is how Romanos die.

 I think about the Concordat, about the countdown no one outside these walls knows has already started, about the thing dying at the center of all our contracts and the five families racing to be the one left standing when it does.

I think, unhelpfully, uselessly, about the exact shade of brown her eyes were when she asked me if it was worth it.

"You're doing it again," Vittoria says from the doorway. My sister has a talent for appearing exactly when I don't want company and refusing to leave until I have some.

"Doing what."

"Standing at the window at three in the morning, looking like the world personally wronged you." She comes to stand beside me, following my line of sight down to the glass room below. Her mouth curves, slow and knowing. "Ah. The debt girl."

"She's not a girl. She's twenty-three."

"Forgive me," Vittoria says, entirely unrepentant. "The woman you dragged out of the Enclave with your own hands, when you have forty people who could have done it for you."

"I wanted to see her," I say again, because it's the only true thing I have to offer.

"Why."

I look down at the glass room. She has stopped pacing. She's sitting now, knees drawn up, back against the wall, staring straight up at my window like she can feel me watching, like she knows exactly where I am even in the dark.

"I don't know yet," I say, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, that uncertainty doesn't feel like weakness. It feels like the first honest thing I've thought in years.

Vittoria studies my face a moment longer than I'd like, then pats my arm and walks away without another word, which is somehow worse than anything she could have said.

I stay at the window until the sky starts to grey. She never once looks away from it either.

Ten years, and I never asked myself if it was worth it.

She asked me in the first five minutes.

The next morning, I find myself standing outside her door. I don't know why I came here. I don't know what I hope to accomplish. All I know is that I can't stop thinking about her.

I knock.

"Come in," she says, and her voice is flat, guarded.

I open the door and walk in. She's sitting on the bed, her back against the headboard, her knees drawn up to her chest. She looks small like this. Vulnerable.

But there's still that fire in her eyes. That stubborn refusal to break.

"Can I sit?" I ask.

"It's your room," she says. "Do whatever you want."

I sit down on the chair across from her. She doesn't look at me. She stares at the window, at the city below.

"I've been thinking about what you said," I tell her.

"About?"

"About it not being worth it." I lean forward, my elbows on my knees. "You were right. It wasn't worth it. It's never been worth it. Every soul I've collected, every debt I've settled, none of it has made me feel less trapped."

"Then why do you keep doing it?"

"Because I don't know how to stop," I admit. "Because the Concordat is a machine, and I'm part of it. If I stop, I die. If I try to break free, everyone I love dies. There's no way out."

She looks at me, and her eyes are so full of hatred and confusion that it almost hurts to see it.

"Your father begged," she says. "He was on his knees in the mud, and he begged you to spare him. And you took his soul anyway."

"I know."

"Did you even look at his face?"

"No."

"Did you know his name?"

I pause. "Not until later."

She laughs, but there's no humor in it. "You didn't even know his name. You killed him, and you didn't even know his name."

"I know," I say again. "And I'll never be able to undo that. I'll never be able to give him back. But I can try to make sure no one else suffers the same fate."

"And how are you going to do that?"

I look at her, and I make a decision I didn't know I was going to make.

"I'm going to break the Concordat," I say. "I'm going to burn every contract, free every soul. And I'm going to need your help to do it."

She stares at me, and for a long moment, neither of us speaks.

"Help you?" she finally says, her voice incredulous. "You want me to help you?"

"Yes."

"After what you did to me?"

"Because of what I did to you," I say. "You can see the chains. You can see what I can't. You're the only person in the world who can help me break them."

She doesn't answer. She just looks at me, her expression unreadable.

"I'll think about it," she

says finally.

"That's all I'm asking."

I stand up and walk to the door. I pause with my hand on the handle.

"Seraphina," I say, without turning around.

"What?"

"I'm sorry. For everything."

I walk out before she can respond…….