Chapter 2
I did not leave for Blackthorne immediately.
That disappointed Wesley.
Good.
He wanted urgency.
Urgency makes people obey the person who created the clock.
I took Hazel upstairs.
Her suitcase stayed exactly where it was.
Untouched.
Evidence in our world did not always mean police or courts.
Sometimes it meant knowing which lie came first.
Hazel sat on my bed with her coat around her shoulders.
“Who packed your things?”
“Adrienne.”
“All of them?”
She nodded.
“Did she tell you where you were going?”
Hazel looked down.
“Big house.”
“Which house?”
“Bell house.”
Blackthorne.
“What did she say about me?”
Her mouth trembled.
“You gave me away because I cry too much.”
Something inside me went cold.
“Anything else?”
“She said new family likes quiet girls.”
I closed my eyes.
There it was.
Not only removal.
Conditioning.
Make the child believe abandonment came first.
Then whatever happened afterward would feel like rescue.
I kissed her forehead.
“You could cry every day for the next hundred years and I would still be your mother.”
Hazel considered the number seriously.
“Hundred is big.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Three-year-old logic.
Better than ours.
Downstairs, Wesley finally agreed to speak.
He sat across from me without his jacket.
Adrienne beside him.
Neither had recovered their arrogance.
“What does ‘promised’ mean?”
Wesley looked toward the windows.
“Your father made an agreement.”
Of course.
Dead men.
Always convenient.
“What agreement?”
“If the Bellandi succession ever became unstable, the youngest direct heir would be raised at Blackthorne until the family settled.”
I stared at him.
“Hazel is not an heir to anything yet.”
“She is your child.”
“That is not the same.”
Wesley disagreed.
There.
The ideology beneath everything.
My daughter existed, therefore people had already assigned institutional meaning to her.
“Who decided succession was unstable?”
Silence.
I smiled.
“Not me.”
Wesley answered:
“The Old Table.”
I had abolished the Old Table seven years earlier.
At least I thought I had.
May you like
Then he said:
“They never abolished themselves.”
