He could have murdered Ethan, I thought. It was possible that it was already far too late to save him.
Carwyn’s eyes opened. They looked darker than Ethan’s even though they must have been the same color, as if the black of his pupils was spreading to swallow Ethan’s eyes up in darkness. “If you cause a disturbance, people will come in. What will you say when they start asking questions? If I’m not Ethan, who else could I be? Who is Carwyn?”
I stared at him mutely, my lips pressed together.
Carwyn smiled gently. “A long-lost twin?” he asked. “Maybe an eeeeeevil twin?”
My silence was the stony, absolute silence of a grave. My silence should have spelled out his own name to him, carved on a tombstone.
“Surely not a doppelganger,” said Carwyn, dropping his voice with solemn horror. “How could that be? Certainly the esteemed Strykers, the first family of the Light, would never create a filthy, unholy creature like a doppelganger! And even if they did, what hideous traitor would ever, ever remove the monster’s collar?”
I could not help myself. I started to shout. “How dare you—”
The door burst open, a stranger on the threshold who must have been Stryker security. He stopped short at the sight of me and someone he thought was Ethan, and I could read his uncertainty: nobody should have been threatening one of the Stryker heirs, but it was the heir’s girlfriend, and he might have been misinterpreting the situation.
Carwyn pulled himself out of my slackened grip and strolled toward the security agent.
“She’s a little rough with me sometimes,” he explained in a confidential tone, patting the man on his arm. “You know how it is. You want to tangle with a wildcat, you get clawed. Worth it, of course. We’re very much in love.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, as I stood with my hands empty, robbed of my prey.
“Coming, my love panther?”
I walked over to take his arm.
“Absolutely. We still need to continue our conversation.”
“Certainly,” Carwyn returned promptly. “I have promised my dear Uncle Mark and my even dearer cousin Jim that we’ll have dinner together tonight, but of course we’re all so close, there’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of them. Family’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
He looked at me, and the security guard looked at me too.
“You must come for dinner as well,” said Carwyn hospitably to his security detail as we stepped out into the hall. “The more the merrier. Don’t you agree, my strawberry of delight?”
I spoke through my teeth. “I’m afraid I have to go home to Penelope. I have to be there for her and Marie right now.”
“Oh, because one of your adopted family has disappeared into the Dark city, possibly never to return? Of course. How insensitive of me. Please forgive me. I will think of you fondly during every course at dinner, and twice during the cheese course.”
We walked through the halls and went down in the gold-plated elevator of Stryker Tower, me, the mocking copy of my darling, and the man who was preventing me from killing him. Carwyn kept up a cheerful monologue, mainly about what he was going to have for dinner.
We went out into the street. It was still morning, the sky a fine bright blue over tower tops winking in the sunshine.
“I’ll leave you here, tulip,” said Carwyn.
He bent down, Ethan’s face gilded by sunlight with darkness behind it, and his lips brushed my cheek as his hair brushed my forehead. I held on to his shirt and hoped it looked as if I was clinging.
“Is he alive?” I whispered. “Just tell me that.”
Carwyn’s kiss was gone as soon as it had landed, the place on my skin he had left it cold even before he leaned back. “If you behave yourself . . .” he whispered against my cheek.
He studied me in silence, as if he was considering something, then turned and walked away.
I stood looking after him. If anyone saw me watching, they would assume my motive was love, and, after all, they would be right.
The doppelganger and his guard proceeded down Sixth Avenue, past a pizza shop and a tailor’s, cars whizzing by with their windows becoming squares of captured light and then turning back to darkness.
Carwyn was far enough away that someone else might not have been able to see him perfectly, not been quite sure what he was doing. But I was sure.
He looked back over his shoulder and nodded, just once, just slightly.
Ethan was alive. Ethan would stay alive, if I did what Carwyn wanted.
I got through dinner with Penelope and Marie and Dad with the forced cheer and frequent smiles of the desperate. I had someone else to think of now, besides Jarvis. Ethan was just as surely gone.