On the eighth word the wall opens before me, and I look back at Desmier’s shocked face.
“You’ve been here before.”
ChapterForty-One
Desmier
Iwalk into the sunroom with a glass of water and take note of how Anastasia looks sitting on the chair.
She’s slumped against the side and looks like she’s had the life drained out of her.
We’ve been in here for about an hour now with the doors open. We both need the fresh air. She still looks ghostly pale, and my head is still spinning.
We’ve been trying to figure things out and decipher where she was in her dream. She’s told me her dream multiple times. Each time she’s recounted it, I’ve tried to pick up on everything she’s saying.
All I can think when I see her is that she’s been here in this house before, and somehow, her past is entwined with the first people I considered family.
I can’t wrap my head around it. Nothing makes sense to me, and I thought it was best not to tell her what I learned from Xiou because I don’t want to freak her out any more than she is.
Right now, I have Leif on his way over, Zakh going through the Butyrskayas’ records to see where Anastasia could have been in her nightmares, and everyone else either watching Viktor or looking for Uther.
While they’re doing that, I’m here, pushing aside my inner turmoil in order to take care of Anastasia.
I can’t begin to imagine what must be going through her head.
She looks at me when I approach. I hand her the water. Her hands shake when she takes the glass from me.
I sit in the chair opposite and watch her take a few sips, then put the glass down on the table.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I just… don’t know.”
I understand the feeling. I don’t know anything either. And I don’t know if I should be making her stretch her brain to find out something we might not find.
The only things we’ve processed so far are what we already know—the crest and the secret door with the code.
As I watched her open the door, everything shifted for me and made me realize there’s more to this than where my suspicions had taken me so far.
Her recognition of the crest was one thing that was suspicious as fuck, but watching her first identify the secret door then enter the correct code was something else entirely.
Something that’s got to be linked to the dark secrets she’s not supposed to remember.
Pavel Butyrskaya himself showed my mother and I the passages and taught us the code. We only received it because of what we meant to him.
Only family knew that code. Not even the other members of staff. It was one thing we were never supposed to utter to anyone else.
So how would Uther know it to teach to his daughter?
Anastasia looks at me and brings her hands together.
“I think maybe you should go upstairs and sleep for a while.” I lean forward and take her hands.
She shakes her head. “No. I at least want to see if anyone finds something. And I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.”
“Anastasia, we’ve gone over everything. I don’t think you can do anything else.”
“I’m just hoping something might turn up, or it might come to me. Like the door. The moment I looked at it, I just knew someone had told me it was a secret door and how to open it.” Her voice shakes nearly as much as her hands. “Desmier, I know how weird this looks, and I can’t figure it out but’s that’s no surprise since I’m so fucked up. I’ve been living in a house for two months and don’t remember being here before, but I can open a secret door.”