A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Count

I sent for her at noon, and she came in pale, with a bandage under her sleeve.

She had slept the morning away, and Ysmay had stood guard on the cellar stairs and told me so with her arms folded.

I did not ask her to sit, and she sat anyway.

"Say it," Lenore said. "Whatever you've been holding since the yard."

I stood by the cold hearth with my hands behind me.

I had planned this for ten years.

I had planned it in the dark, and in a hundred cheap inns, and across forty thousand crowns of other people's debt.

Now that she was in front of me, I found that the words came out flat.

"You were eight and I was eight," I said. "My mother had died in your father's service, and your father kept me for the debt."

"I know."

"The first week, you took my shoes."

"I know, Dav."

"You told me a thin pale man lived in the well beneath the cellar. You said he came up for boys who cried."

She said nothing.

"You scratched at the door every night, and you wet your hands in the washbucket and left prints on the stone outside it, and you whispered through the keyhole that he had my name." My voice did not shake, which surprised me. "By nine I had stopped crying out loud, because crying was what he ate. I lay on that floor with my eyes open until it got light. That was six years."

The room was very quiet.

"I did that," Lenore said.

"I know you did."

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