“Do I have your forgiveness?”

Zofia considered this. “You have … more time.”

“I’ll take whatever you will give me,” he said, and smiled.

22

ENRIQUE

Enrique set off down the hallway, his ears—or rather his one ear and what was left of the other—burning.

“Enrique!” called Hypnos behind him.

Enrique whipped around, snarling. “Am I not allowed a single moment to myself?”

Hypnos looked stunned. His outstretched hand snapped back to his chest. Beside him, Laila rested a hand on his shoulder, a parental gesture that said “let him go,” which only made Enrique more furious as he stomped off.

Initially, it had felt so good to stomp out of the room—as if he was doing something productive, as if he really could just unfasten himself from all the chaos around him. But it was a false relief that faded almost immediately into cold and sticky shame.

What the hell was he doing?

He couldn’t walk away, and he didn’t want to. Every hour they lost put Laila’s life in danger. Still, he needed a moment to himself if he was going to function.

Enrique slammed the door of the music room behind him. He rarely came in here. It was, more or less, Hypnos’s domain. It was here that the patriarch of House Nyx released his beautiful, singing voice and perhaps something of that beauty clung to the walls because, finally, Enrique could breathe easier. Now what? he thought. Unbidden, his mother’s voice called him.

“One way or another, you’ll have to face the tsinela,” she’d say.

Enrique shuddered. A tsinela was technically nothing more than a sandal, but in the hands of a Filipino mother, it gained an aura of inevitable horror.

Cirila Mercado-Lopez looked like a doll of a woman. Small-boned and spare, with bird-black eyes and fine, dark hair swept into a neat black bun, Enrique’s mother hardly looked like the kind of woman who could drive her three, tall sons into deadly stampedes trying to get out of the house.

But her anger was legendary.

It could be because one of them—usually Enrique or Francisco—had found the desserts earlier and gotten a head start before dinner. Or a prank on the neighborhood had been traced back to them—generally Enrique or Juan. Or one of the brothers—almost always Enrique—tried to skip church on the pretense of illness, only to be found swimming in the ocean. Sometimes, they’d get away with it. Other times, the house would be silent and then … thud. The moment the brothers heard the sound of their mother’s wooden tsinelas sliding off her feet and hitting the floor, the three of them would prepare to bolt.

“Buwisit! Go ahead and run!” Their mother would laugh. She’d pick up her sandal and smack the stair bannister lightly. “The tsinela will be here when you come back.”

Enrique almost missed his mother’s punishments. He would’ve much rather faced a wooden sandal than Séverin.

Part of him felt furious that Séverin would throw off the course of their plans by even asking for forgiveness, and the other part felt relieved that he wanted it in the first place. The moment he’d returned to them at Carnevale, Enrique felt dislocated. Every stilted interaction reminded him of how they used to be. But then he remembered the months of cold silence. He recalled, all over again, that weightless rush he’d experienced in the Sleeping Palace.

Séverin had known his dreams and used them against him. Séverin had let him imagine that he was unwanted, his scholarly work unneeded. For all that he’d once promised to lift him up, he had kept him small. Intentionally malleable.

It made Enrique nauseous all over again.

And yet … he knew Séverin had been off. That sheen of desperation still clung to him. Enrique knew he wasn’t perfect. He too had moments of deliberate unkindness.

Once, an old, white curator had come to visit the galleries of L’Eden and see the works Enrique had acquired for the hotel. In the past, the man had been a rather harsh critic of museums, but when Enrique and Séverin met with him, he was a shriveled thing, his clothes hanging off him, his glasses askew. He got historical dates wrong, mispronounced the names of kings. Enrique had savored correcting him as pompously as possible until the old man was reduced to stammers and tears. Later, Laila had admonished him. The curator had a neurological condition that had impaired his memory. He had come to L’Eden not to write an article of critique, but to try and familiarize himself with the activities he’d once loved in the company of another renowned historian.

Ashamed, Enrique had slunk into Séverin’s office. “I was intolerably cruel.”

Séverin, who had been in the middle of reviewing some papers or another, barely looked up. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Do you have a tsinela?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” said Enrique. “I was mean and thoughtless and awful—”

“And not yourself,” finished Séverin. “So you had a dark moment. It happens. Do you know what makes a star appear so bright?”

“That sounds more like a question for Zofia.”

“The darkness around them,” said Séverin, closing the book before him and giving Enrique his full attention. “Growth and remorse are rather like stars: the surrounding dark makes them vivid enough to notice. Invite the old curator once more and apologize. Tell yourself that next time you’ll do better.”

Enrique frowned. “I know you did not devise such wisdom on your own.”

“Quite right, I stole it from Laila. Now please leave my office.”

In the music room, Enrique almost laughed.

He stood there, thinking about the darkness between stars. He had no doubt that Séverin had fought through darkness. Who was Enrique to deny anyone the chance for light? And would he also deny that light to himself?

Just because the threat of the Fallen House was gone, that didn’t mean there wasn’t still plenty left of the world that demanded changing. He’d seen that much even inside the matriarch’s safe house.

Yesterday, when he had been researching in the library, he had stumbled on a slim, pale volume hiding amongst the matriarch’s belongings: The White Man and the Man of Color. Enrique knew the title well. It had been written nearly twenty years ago by the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso. His university classmates had argued loudly about its merits, but he’d never bothered to open it until now. Curious, he flipped to a bookmarked page.

“Only we whites have achieved the most perfect symmetry in the forms of the body…”

Something cold wound its way up his ribs. The words rooted him to the spot. Enrique put the book down when Lombroso blamed criminal tendencies on the residual “blackness” of white communities.

Now, Séverin’s words flitted through his head.

If you could change the course of history and lift up those who had been downtrodden in its path … wouldn’t you?

That had always been Enrique’s dream.

He wanted to be like his heroes, to light a path to revolution, to carve out a space for himself in a world where people told him he was not wanted. He yearned to do grand things—brandish a sword (though preferably not a heavy one) and sweep someone off their feet, to utter deadly one-liners and swish a cape behind him. More than anything … Enrique wanted to believe in something better. And he wanted to believe that he could be part of bringing that vision to life. That he could stand at the front instead of in the shadows.