Gabe sent Lizzie and Hanny into the parlor and escorted me into his study. He still wore his travel clothes and smelt of Thompson cigars and coffee. If I had been more considerate and less anxious, I might have paused to ask him if he wanted to change, but I was not. As soon as the doors to his study were closed I began speaking, "What is it you must say to me? No one will speak frankly to me and I am so afraid—"

He held up a hand. "Why don't you take a seat and I'll see about a pot of tea."

I wanted neither of those things. "Gabe, I am tired of being lied to—"

"We shall go about this my way, Merritt, or we shall not go about it at all." He sighed and crossed the room to stand before me. He cupped my shoulders in his hands and gently applied pressure until I collapsed, quite clumsily, into my usual armchair. When that was accomplished, he went back to the door and rang the small bell meant to summon Mrs. Zanderfield.

I watched with great impatience as he laid out the checkerboard between us and chose his color. I found that my hands were shaking, unable to cease trembling even long enough to stack the red chips. At one point he reached across the table and placed his hand on my wrist. "Merritt, you need not be afraid. You're safe with me. I swear it."

I did not respond, merely settled into my chair and let him finish with the board. Mrs. Zanderfield brought tea and a tray of treats. Gabe poured both of us a cup but neither of us touched the pastries. For a long time, the only sound in the room was the clink of his spoon against the china bowl of his teacup. When I thought I could no longer constrain myself I said, "Gabe, you must speak. I cannot go on like this."

He smiled wryly at me and lowered his cup. "Perhaps we should begin the game then."

"Perhaps we should begin this conversation. You must speak frankly to me. No one else will."

"What is it you wish me to say?"

I sighed. "I don't know. Everyone is lying to me and saying such confusing things."

"Like what?"

"So many things. Just yesterday Desmott was accusing you of—"

"Why should you place more trust in Leviathan Desmott than in us?"

I pointed a finger at him, he had unintentionally just proved my point. "When have you heard him called by that name? I was only ever introduced to him as Levi. Why does the name Leviathan fall from everyone's lips when it should not? Why was he so appalled that I would know it? And why did I know it?"

Gabe smiled. "You always were too clever for your own good."

"And that as well," I said. "Everyone speaks so cryptically as if they know more of me than I do."

He just smiled at that, a tight-lipped grin that was sad and, just the smallest bit, worried.

I pushed forward. "I no longer know who I can trust, which way to turn. To whom I should speak and to whom I should not. The world, my world, has always had rules but just the other day a man asked to call me by my first name and I let him because it felt solid and nothing has felt solid in so very long—"

He cut me off. "Merritt, you must take a breath lest you pass out."

Of course, he was right. I was breathing so heavily, my lungs expanding so much, that I could feel the tightening of my corset against my ribcage with every breath. The constriction made me panic and my breathing hitched more. But I wanted to speak, to be heard. I had not felt this way in years—not since I had sat before a judge and let him call me a murderer.

I had wanted to speak then too, wanted to keep myself talking so that my mouth was always full. So that my brain could not digest, could not spit out, what it actually wanted to say. And now I let the words fall from my lips. I allowed myself to accept what I'd bee fighting since that day in the train station with my mother and sister, when I'd seen shadows that I shouldn't have.

Tears filled my eyes. "Gabe, what is wrong with me?"

His expression softened from worry to compassion. "Oh, my dear sister, nothing is wrong with you."

"But there is. Everyone must see it. Yesterday, when Desmott was here..." I trailed off.

"What did Leviathan say to you?"

I shook my head. "It wasn't exactly what he said...he—he can see them too. He saw the shadows, the ones that only I see."

He nodded. "And does he know that you see them?"

I nodded.

"And what of Abaddon, does he know as well?"

"No. I have not told him."

"Why not?"

"It never felt right. I did not really tell Desmott...he caught me looking at them." I swallowed, "I fear he will tell Lucius...but then, they are friends. Perhaps Lucius is only interested in me because he believes me capable of the same skill as Desmott. But Desmott feels pain. I know because—"

"Because of what?"

Shame encircled me like the embrace of a familiar friend. "Because I took his pain from him. Yesterday, when he fell, I accidentally took his pain." Silence filled the study. I waited to be reprimanded for having been so stupidly careless, but those words did not come.

Gabe leaned forward, his voice growing soft as he said, "Merritt, what I am about to tell you must be said gently, for it is the sort of information that will inevitably change you. All I ask is that you listen to me, answer my questions and that you do not interrupt unnecessarily. I was assured that, when the time came to be honest, you would be able to recall the truth. The time for that is now. Do you understand?"

I blinked at him. "I beg your pardon?"

His smile was easy, but serious. "You are already interrupting me. I just needed a nod." He carefully slid my cup of tea towards me across the untouched checkerboard. "It is cool enough. Drink this, it will help you settle."

I lifted the cup to my lips and said, "Go on then," before taking a sip.

He closed his eyes and exhaled, the breath leaving him slowly. "Where should I begin?"

"Perhaps from the beginning."

He opened his eyes. "I was not asking you." His tone was teasing, but there was tightness in his jaw that told me otherwise.

I set the cup of tea down on the table and eased further into the cushions of the armchair. It smelt of mint leaves, dust and old cigars. The smell was that of my father, and perhaps every lawyer before or after him.

There was nothing my father liked more than a smoke after a long day at the office. He would close himself off in his study, only allowing family to access, and let himself relax. My mother would hem his shirts and listen as he retold the occurrences of that day. When he was in that room, he was entirely himself. He did not need to have the answers or the perfect thing to say—and that made him all the better. I wanted to feel that sense of rightness now, the same way I had as a girl.

"What do you remember of the house fire, Merritt?"

I tensed at the question, caught off guard in my own daydreams. "I'm sorry?"

He merely smiled and repeated, "The house fire, what do you recall about it?"

My hands shook and I slowly pulled them off the table in an effort to give myself something to do. I folded them in my lap and forced my eyes to his. "I don't—"

He stopped me from continuing. "I would ask that you not lie to me just now as I will most certainly know if you do."

"I know nothing of it."

He stirred his tea once more. The only sound between us that of the spoon hitting china and my own hastening breath. "You woke up and there was smoke, isn't that right?"

I pursed my lips. "You are leading the witness."

He smiled. "I am merely repeating what you yourself have said to be true. It is not leading the witness if the witness has already established it. You may have been a lawyer's daughter, Merritt Holbrook, but I was the lawyer's apprentice. Now—Answer the question."

"Yes. I woke up to smoke in the house."

He nodded, letting my words hang in the air for some time before he said, "That is a lie."

I shook my head. "Gabe—"

"All I ask is that you trust me with the truth. I have played along with you for three years, Merritt. I defended you in court when I was certain of the fallacies you were speaking. I knew you were lying and still I stood by you. Surely you can place your trust in me, if you can place it anywhere at all. Do I not deserve the truth?"

I was breathless. "It is the truth."

"No, it is what you have told yourself to be true. You can lie to yourself all you please, but you cannot, and will not, continue to lie to me. Not now. We must be on equal terms you and I."

"Gabriel."

He tapped the table between us with her finger and said, "When you woke up, there was smoke in the house. Yes or no?"

"No."

He nodded slowly and deeply, letting my admission linger before he said. "What really happened that night?"

I closed my eyes. "Please do not do this."

"What really happened the night your family died?"

I felt compelled to answer him, felt the word perched on my tongue, waiting as they had been for three years. "Father and mother were asleep. We were all asleep."

"Another lie." He leaned towards me, his gaze so intense I felt my very soul tremor. "You must tell me the truth. In order for this to work you must push past this."

"I woke up and the house was full of smoke. I grabbed Lora by the arm and I pulled her towards the entrance of the house. I—I only let her go when I thought I might die myself. I only stopped when I was certain that she was dead and that I could not save her."

Gabe sighed and leaned back into his seat, his entire body seeming to cave in as he said, "Your parents were concerned for your health. There had been an accident, you'd cut yourself on a barbed wire fence while playing hide and go seek outside. Some of the other children from the neighborhood saw you do it. When they did not see you flinch—"

"They said I was demon possessed," I whispered. "They screamed and ran away from me. Only Lora stayed."

"Those children told the vicar and he went to your parents. He requested to see you for himself, they refused."

I was trembling, my breath coming quickly now. I could not do this, could not talk about this. "I would like to have a lie-down." I stood up, almost knocking over the table in the process. The tea rocked in our cups, cascading over onto the saucers and the lace tablecloth beneath. "We—We shouldn't talk about this."

Gabe seemed unphased by me. He just looked up at me and spoke evenly, directly. "Sit back down."

I pressed a hand to my chest, sure I would collapse at the violent way my heart pounded. "I do not want to talk about this anymore."

"You will. Sit down."

I walked to the door and tried the handle. It did not budge. I turned back to him. "You have become my jailor now?"

"The door requires a key, one which both Lizzie and I have—you will find that neither of us will unlock the door until this is finished. That may take as much, or as little, time as you desire. I am only trying to help you, Merritt."

"I do not want your help. I want to be let out of this room."

"Come and sit back down."

"No."

"Sit down."

"I do not want to sit."

"Why must you act as a child?" He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Very well then, we shall speak like this. Did you meet with the vicar, Merritt?"

I shook my head.

"And why was that?"

"I do not wish to continue this conversation."

"It was because they believed he would take you away. Your mother was terrified that you would be taken away and locked up. Or that perhaps they would try some horrid exorcism. Another child in your area had been killed during one such event. They were afraid for you. You parents thought you were only sick, that you had a skin condition. But they did not know all of it, did they? They did not know about your ability to take other peoples pain."

"It was not necessary. I was not even sure what I was doing. I was in St. Agatha's before I even—"

"But Clara Harris was not the first person you took pain from, was she?"

"No one would have understood. Gabe," I crossed the room and sat once again on the edge of my seat, "Gabe, please, you must understand that I could not tell them because no one would believe me."

"But one person did, isn't that right?"

"She thought it was a game."

"One that you willingly played even though you knew it was wrong."

"I did not willingly play. I told her no, I asked her to stop. She did not listen. What was I to do?"

"You should have let her suffer. You should have let her hurt, let her learn her lesson. It was not your place to try to help—"

"How was I to know it would escalate as it did?"

"You should have realized it the moment she stole that matchbox." He sighed and pressed his knuckles to his lips before he said, "But this conversation is not about blame. I did not bring this up to place blame on your shoulders, Merritt."

"Then why are you doing this? Why are you forcing me to?"

"Face the truth?" He smiled sadly at me, almost apologetically. "Because in order for you to recognize yourself you must first weed out what isn't true to you. I know that you want to shield—"

"They are dead because of me. What else is there to say?" My nails were digging so hard into the flesh of my arm that it drew blood. Gabe saw before I did and reached across the table, pulling my hand away.

"Your family is dead because of Lora Holbrook. You have stood between her and guilt for far too long, Merritt. The time has come to step back. Can't you see what this is doing to you? What it already has done to you?"

I felt rattled. My heart was beating so fast I worried it might fly from my chest. Whatever it was that Gabe wished to say to me, I now felt that I no longer wanted to hear it. I did not care what words he might share or his reasoning for doing any of this. I had held so tightly to my imagined past that I was no longer willing to hear the truth. I would not consider that there were any other possibilities outside of what I had stood before a judge and said.

I fought past tears as I begged. "Please, stop speaking."

He shook his head. "This is your moment. I have allowed you to have your say and still you stand by the lies. Merritt, you know that I do not hold you at fault. Why do you insist on blaming yourself for an accident that was clearly caused by another girl's folly."

I thought I might be sick. "She was my sister."

"She was a foolish child—not unlike yourself at this moment."

His words wounded me, but I could not find it in myself to argue the point.

"Three years ago, on February fifth, your twin sister woke you up to ask you to play a game with her. The same game you had been playing for weeks without anyone noticing. Tell me what that game was—"

"Gabe—"

"Now, Merritt. I will not ask again."

"She took father's matches. She took the matches from his cigar box and she burnt herself." I covered my face with my fingers. "She burnt herself and then she made me take it away. She liked the empty feeling of having the pain removed and—"

"And you, of course, liked being able to feel something."

"I told her to stop—but she kept doing it."

He reached forward and pulled my hands from my face. His thumb ran a soft trail over the burnt skin there. "Is this why you have suffered with Lucius, because burning your own hands reminds you of her?"

I pulled my hand from his grasp. "How do you always know exactly what is happening? How is it that you speak so certainly of something you know nothing about?"

A small smile tugged at Gabe's lips, "I was created to know what to say and when to say it."

"Please speak plainly. I cannot withstand another riddle."

He laughed, the sound musical, and shook his head. "Oh, Merritt. Darling, you are a riddle in and of yourself."

"I just want to feel something."

"That is impossible. You chose this. You chose to do this even when everyone advised against it...but then I am getting ahead of myself. Let us return to the subject at hand: Lora lit a match that night, did she not?"

In all of the times I had stood on trial, no one had ever asked me about how the fire had been started; it was only ever assumed that I had been the instigator. No one had cared about whether or not I had access to matches—in the beginning, I had wanted them to prove I was lying. I was willing to concede to the truth if only someone would truly try to find it. But no one ever looked past the fact that I could not feel pain—eventually, after days and weeks of being berated and told I was an unfeeling monster, I could not look past it either.

"I kept telling her no. Eventually she stopped asking. Instead, she would hurt herself and demand I take the pain away. But it was only temporary. I am not a healer, only a sedative...that night she lit the match while I was asleep."

Gabe leaned back in his chair and studied me. "And when you woke up her mattress was on fire."

Tears sprang to my eyes but I fought them off. "The room was full of smoke. I found her collapsed on the floor, I do not know what happened...but she was not alive when I found her."

"But you still tried to pull her from the house."

It was hard to speak the words. "She is my sister."

"And you loved her. But why did you chose to take the blame?"

Suddenly the pearl buttons on my dress were quite intriguing. "The blame was cast on me, I merely failed to shrug it off."

"Putting the blame on her would have been easy, even natural. Merritt, I would have fought for that verdict if you would have only admitted to it."

My gaze darted up and caught his eyes. "If you knew then why did you not stop me?"

"Because you have free will." His brow furrowed. "I could not tell you what you did not know yourself."

"I knew I was not a murderer."

"Physically, perhaps. But you believed yourself to be a murderer indirectly. You did not start the fire that ended the lives of your family members, but you blamed yourself for letting Lora have the matches in the first place. You blame yourself for enjoying her game. For craving it just as much as she did."

"She was a danger to herself and I did not stop her. I did not even have the courage to tell my mother what a monster I was."

He blinked at me, his eyes darting around my face, drinking me in. "Darling girl, you are far from a monster."

"How can you be so certain?"

"Because I know you, not this you—but the one from before."

I fell back into my chair and inhaled shakily. "Why must you speak in riddles?"

He smiled, but it did not quite meet his eyes. Gabe was holding something back from me. "I assure you," he said, "I am not speaking in riddles."

I sat up again, "Gabriel?"

His smile deepened, touched the corners of his eyes. "Yes, Merritt?"

"How is it you know all you do about me? How is it you knew of my heart even when I did not?"

A moment passed, just a breath. "Years ago you made a request...a choice that was widely scoffed at. Nevertheless, you spoke of your heart. You made a decision to give yourself up to save someone else. Do you remember what I am referring to?"

I could feel a slight pressure building behind my eyes. I marveled at the feeling of it, knowing that if I were capable of such things—this sensation would cause me great pain. I focused my scattered attention on Gabe, who was awaiting a response with all the patience of the loving brother he had always been to me. "You mean what I chose to do in court? By taking the blame and sparing Lora?"

He shook his head. "No. You did much more than that. Your very existence with Lora was only made possible because you had already sacrificed yourself."

I shook my head. "I'm not sure what you mean."

There was silence for a long time before Gabe said, "How do you feel when you say Leviathan's name?"

"I am not sure—"

He clicked his tongue at me, a soft reprimand. "I thought we had decided to drop all pretenses?"

"You have not dropped all pretenses with me."

"This is a delicate manner. Trust me, all will be revealed shortly. You must exercise some patience, little sister. Now, tell me, how does his name make you feel?"

Leviathan.I reached for my tea with trembling fingers, the cup clattering against the saucer as I brought it to my lips. Once there, I could not bring myself to drink. Leviathan. I suddenly felt quite bombarded with the magnitude of what had just taken place. Gabe knew everything. He knew about Lora and about the secrets I had held close to me for years. He knew things he should not know.

That pressure, behind my eyes, at the nape of my neck, that would have been pain, intensified, pressing against my skull, dulling my senses. "I don't understand what he has to do with my sister—"

"I want you to say his name."

Leviathan. "Why should I? What part does he play in all of this?" The hair on my arms stood on end as the strangest sensation came over me. It was as if I were not myself, as if I were watching all of this from afar. Something tugged at the back of my subconscious.

Why does Gabe know?

Why does Gabe know?

Why does Gabe know?

Leviathan.

His name was like music. Foreign and familiar. A balm.

I still held the teacup and saucer in my shaking hands. The blue and pink patterned china moved so rapidly that the rose etchings blurred. Acid burnt at my throat and my tongue felt oddly wet as if I might vomit. Gabe was talking to me but I could no longer hear his words. Sharp sounds fell upon my ears, a sound that made my neck tense and my muscles spasm.

He was not in the house. He should not know about the matches.

Leviathan.

"Say his name."

Every time my mind circled back to his name, that word, I felt more ill. It was a waltz, a crazed dance of erratic questions that never had decent answers. He was still speaking—his facial expression was concerned. I wondered if he knew how wretchedly unwell I felt. I could not even open my mouth for fear of losing my stomach all over the pretty Persian rug at my feet.

The world was both so loud and so quiet, a spinning wheel of anxiety-inducing horror that I could neither understand nor shield against. The dreams that had plagued me for nights without end all found solace in my frazzled brain.

You are in the grasp of the devil himself.

You should have told me.

I was standing still and yet in my mind I was running, flying down corridors, screaming and pleading—if only he had told me. If I had only known, I could have stopped it, stopped him. He should have told me. Why was I not trusted with his heart?

I stood up from the table too quickly and lost my balance as every bit of blood in my body went rushing to my head. I dropped the teacup and gripped the edge of the table for balance. My fingers scratched at the lacy tablecloth and found no respite in its silken touch. Lizzie's fine china fell to a million dazzling pieces and I fell with it. My knees no long had the strength to hold me up.

I collapsed to the floor, my burnt hands digging in amongst teacup shards. I neither saw nor felt it—nevertheless, I was hurt. My very soul quavered, settling on the edge of some great abyss.

And all of it because I suddenly knew who the boy in my nightmares was.

I closed my eyes.

Opened them.

Inhaled and breathed out one name. 

"Leviathan."