Free Web NovelChapter 263: Chapter 263: Sable Agreed To Help
Not of Eve specifically. Of something in Eve. Something she was looking for without meaning to look.
"Morning," Sable said. Steady. Warm. The voice of a woman who had been performing ordinary for years and was very good at it.
"Morning," Eve said.
She moved into the shop.
Ran her fingers along a shelf without reading the spines. Just....present. Non threatening. A person in a bookshop on a Tuesday morning with nowhere particular to be.
"Looking for anything specific," Sable said.
"Not really," Eve said. "Just looking."
Sable nodded.
Went back to whatever she’d been doing behind the counter.
Eve moved through the shop slowly.
Felt the woman tracking her with her eyes. Which shows that she had overtime learnt to watch out for threat after hiding for years.
She stopped at a shelf near the window.
Pulled out a book without looking at the title.
Opened it.
"You have a good collection," she said.
"Thank you," Sable said.
"Feels like a personal one," Eve said. "Not curated for customers. Just....things you wanted to keep near you."
A pause.
"Something like that," Sable said.
Eve turned a page she wasn’t reading.
"I’m looking for someone," she said.
"Most people who come in here are looking for a book," Sable said. Carefully.
"I know," Eve said. "I’m looking for someone who was in a building years ago and walked away because she had a limit." She closed the book. Held it. "And I want to tell her that whatever it cost her it meant something."
The shop was very quiet.
Sable was still behind the counter.
Not moving.
Not running.
Eve turned around.
Looked at her directly.
Sable looked back.
Her composure was.....extraordinary. Years of practice. Years of being small and quiet.
But underneath it.
Underneath it something was happening that years of practice couldn’t fully contain.
"Who are you," Sable said. Quiet.
Eve set the book down.
"My name is Eve," she said. "My mother was Lilith Seraphim." She paused. "You saved my life. I was few days old and you warned her in time and she got me out before...." She stopped. Steadied. "Before the rest of it."
Sable’s hands were flat on the counter.
Pressing down.
"You’re alive," Sable said.
"Yes," Eve said.
"I didn’t know," Sable said. "After.....I didn’t know if she made it out in time. If you...." She stopped. Her jaw moved. "I never knew."
"She made it," Eve said. "She got me out." A pause. "She didn’t survive the night. But I did."
Sable closed her eyes.
One second.
Two. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
Opened them.
"Because of you," Eve said. "Because you had a limit and you found it and you acted on it." She held the woman’s gaze. "I’m standing here because of that."
The shop was completely still.
Sable looked at her for a long moment.
Then she came around the counter.
Slowly. Like someone moving through something thick.
She stopped in front of Eve.
Looked at her face. Really looked. The archivist eyes doing what they’d always done.....seeing, filing, remembering.
"You look like her," she said. Barely audible.
"Everyone keeps telling me that," Eve said.
Something broke in Sable’s face.
Not dramatically. Not loudly.
Just...quietly, completely, the specific break of something that had been held for forty years and was finally, finally allowed to stop holding.
She put her hand over her mouth.
Breathed.
***
After a while, they decided to sit down, they sat at the small table by the window.
Three chairs. The steaming teapot. The morning light coming through the glass and laying itself across the books and the table and the two women sitting across from each other.
Sable poured tea with steady hands.
The composure was back. Most of it. The kind that came from decades of practice and didn’t fully leave even when everything else did.
"I knew for three weeks," she said. "Before that night. I’d seen the documentation. I knew what was planned....not the specifics, not the exact timing. But the intent." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "I told myself it wasn’t my place. That I was an archivist. That I recorded things. I didn’t intervene." She paused. "I told myself that every day for three weeks."
Eve listened.
"The night it happened I was in the building," Sable said. "Late. Working. I heard them planning the timing and I...." She stopped. "I thought about the documentation I’d seen. About what I knew was going to happen." A pause. "And I thought about the woman I’d met once at a Conclave function. Briefly. She’d laughed too loud at something someone said and then apologized for it and then laughed again anyway."
Eve’s throat tightened but she kept her face still.
"I went to the east corridor," Sable said. "I knew she was there. I knocked on the door and when she opened it, i told her she need to leave right now and take the child and that she shouldn’nt come back." She paused. "She looked at me for about two seconds. Then she said thank you and closed the door and I never saw her again."
"I left Malachai’s service eight months later," Sable said. "I couldn’t...." She stopped. "After what happened to them I couldn’t sit in that office and file his documents and pretend I didn’t know what I knew." She paused. "I left and I came here and I built this." She looked around the shop. At the books. The towers. The chaos of a life made carefully in a small space. "I told myself it was enough."
"Was it," Eve said.
Sable looked at her.
"No," she said. Simply. "It wasn’t." A pause. "But it was what I had."
Eve held her gaze.
"I need your testimony," she said. "Everything you saw. Everything you archived. The original vote record....we think it’s in a vault in the Court sub level. We have someone going in to retrieve it." She paused. "But the document alone isn’t enough. We need someone who was there. Who watched it happen. Who can stand up in front of the Conclave and say what they know."
Sable was quiet.
"He’s been looking for me," she said. "twenty years."
"I know," Eve said.
"If I come forward...."
"You’ll be protected," Eve said. "Completely. You have my word and you have the word of three Blackwood alphas and a Morvaine witch who has been keeping promises she made to my mother for years." She paused. "You won’t be alone. You were alone last time. You won’t be this time."
Sable looked at the table.
At her tea.
At her hands.
She thought about all the years she had spent sitting in the shape of a bookshop in a village nobody noticed.
"He almost won," she said. Quietly.
"Yes," Eve said.
"He took everything from you before you were born."
"Yes," Eve said.
"And you’re still here."
"Yes," Eve said. "Because you knocked on a door and warned my mother before i perished with them."
Sable looked at her.
Eve held her gaze and waited.
Let the silence speak her mind.
Let the woman across from her feel the full weight of what years had been building toward and decide for herself what to do with it.
No pressure.
No strategy.
Just the truth sitting on a table between them in the morning light.
Sable breathed in.
Out.
"Alright," she said.
"I will testify for you...i will testify against him"
Eve felt something release in her chest that she hadn’t known was held.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don’t thank me," Sable said. "I should have done this years ago." She picked up her tea. "I’m just finishing what I started."
***
Damian was still in the car when Eve came out.
He looked at her face through the windscreen. freewebnøvel.coɱ
Read it immediately.
"She said yes," Eve said.
Damian nodded.
Looked at the bookshop.
Vessa was very still in the back seat.
Eve turned to look at her.
Vessa was looking at the shop window.
At Sable.
Her eyes were doing the thing they did when something landed that was too large for an immediate reaction.
"Twenty two years," Vessa said quietly.
"Yes," Eve said.
"She’s been here the whole time."
"Yes."
Vessa nodded once.
Looked at her hands.
"Your mother would have found her in a week," she said. "If she’d had the chance." A pause. "She was like that. She found people."
Eve looked at the pendant through her jacket.
Felt the weight of it.
"She found you," Eve said.
Vessa looked at her.
"Yes," she said. "She did."
Damian started the car, and they drove back home.
