Page 92 of Where Light Cannot Follow

"Undoubtedly."

While he's pouring gin and uncapping the Campari, I add, "I have terms, though. If we're to negotiate. Very specific terms."

He stirs the drinks slowly, the spoon clinking against crystal. He presses an orange peel onto the rim with the precision of a man who has performed this ritual ten thousand times.

"I would expect nothing less, Mr. Dante."

He offers me the glass and waves a hand toward the leather chair opposite his desk.

I take the drink. I take the seat.

And I begin.

PART VI

"No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused."

—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

33

VIRGIL

I don't return to the estate.

I can't.

My tears won't dry, and I cannot allow him to see me this undone. This exposed. If he knows I can still feel this deeply, he will fashion it into a blade and wield it against me for centuries.

"Virgil."

I startle. I hadn't noticed her standing at the edge of the path.

Constance's smirk is already forming, that familiar, sharpened thing she wears like armor, but it falters as she takes me in. Whatever she came to say dies on her lips.

I must look as wrecked as I feel.

"He waits for you," she says finally. Her voice lacks its usual edge.

"I know."

"Do you intend to evade him?"

A ragged breath escapes me. I don't bother to hide my tears. What would be the point?

"There is no evading him. You know this as well as I do. I am his creature, and when he wants me, he will pull the strings. I only seek a few moments to collect myself before I must perform again."

She stares at me. I wait for the barb, the twist of the knife. It's what we do, she and I—this endless dance of her resentment and my guilt.

But something shifts in her expression. Something I can't quite name.

Perhaps she's seeing me clearly for the first time. Not the guide who failed her, but simply a fellow prisoner. Someone else who made choices and must live with their weight.

I think of Dante, how he'd looked at me when I blamed myself for her fate. Everyone chooses, he'd said. You can't carry all of it.

I'd dismissed him then. But standing here, watching Constance watch me, I wonder if he was right. I stepped into her pain willingly. I've carried it for centuries, let it calcify into certainty that I destroy so much of what I touch. But she made choices too. We both did.

Maybe guilt is its own kind of arrogance.