And what do you know, it was probably the loose, relaxed, post-gasm float that made him actually answer her instead of hanging up, which was what he should have done.

“How many people did you lose in the raids?” he whispered.

“Seven cousins,” she intoned with sadness. “It’s just my father and me left, and the two of us were very lucky.”

“I lost my immediate family. My mother and sister were at home with me. My dad was at work. They found our house address on his falsified human driver’s license after they killed him. That was how they got us.” He took another drag. “So that’s why I don’t smile.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too.” Which was something else he wouldn’t have said under other circumstances. “I couldn’t save them. My mother and sister, that is.”

“Oh, God…”

He shrugged. “I lost too much blood. The lessers broke the door in and I came down the stairs when I heard the noise. They attacked me, thought I was dead, so they left me. To this night, I don’t know why I lived. They used machetes. I stayed conscious long enough to hear my mother scream for my sister to run—and then both of them died … horrible deaths.” When she made a choking sound, he shook his head. “TMI. Sorry.”

“I’m really … it doesn’t feel like enough, but it’s all I can say. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“How did you survive? What … did someone come save you?”

“I woke up in a pool of my own blood just before dawn. I was so weak … I barely managed to shut the front door before the sun burned me to shreds. I crawled … through the house, you know, and found their … yeah. It was bizarre, the sight of them both laying on the linoleum, red blood everywhere, skin white—they had reached for each other, my mom had one hand—” He had to stop and clear his throat. “My mom was holding her hand out for my sister and my sister was trying to get to her. Both of their sets of eyes were open … I don’t know. After seeing that? Something in me woke up. That’s all I can say—and that’s when it started. That’s when I decided that sometime, somehow, I was going to find a way into the war with the Lessening Society. It’s the only way I can walk the earth without wanting to blow my own brains out.” He laughed harshly. “Well, I also decided that I hate aristocrats—although that didn’t come for two more nights after that.”

“Why…” She hesitated. “Why do you hate the glymera?”

Chapter Thirty-one

As Paradise waited for something to come back to her over the phone, her heart was beating fast again, and she had to turn on the light. Wrapping her coral-colored duvet up around her bare legs and pulling her shirt closed, she tucked her knees in tight and waited.

It was a while longer before Craeg answered her. “The first thing I did when I had any strength was try to find my father where he was working at that mansion—when I got there, it was pretty much the same as my house. Blood and bodies everywhere, but there had also been a lot of looting of paintings and silver and that kind of shit. Some of the corpses had burned up because they had been in patches of sunlight. The ones deeper in the house were still intact. I found my father … in the room where he had been laying a new mahogany floor. And what else did I find? The fucking open door to the safe room that the family hadn’t let him or any of the other servants and workers into.”

“What … do you mean?”

“The family who lived there, the aristocrats who lived there, went to take shelter in a steel-clad safe room—and they wouldn’t let any of the workers in. They locked them out so they got slaughtered—I saw the open door, and their footsteps through the blood of my father and his class as they went for the exit and escaped either right before the dawn came or the following evening.” There was another pause. And then in a low voice, he said, “I buried everyone but my father there. Him, I took back home. I just couldn’t … leave the others like that. A doggen came back while I was taking care of the bodies and told me that they’d been trying to find kin, but everyone had been killed at all of the workers’ houses—just like mine. There were … literally no survivors to tend to the dead. Oh, and that classy family? They ran. I’ve tried to find them—and I will not rest until I do. They lived on an estate called Endelview.”

He cleared his throat roughly. “I mean, how do you do that to someone else? How do you live with yourself knowing that you could have helped somebody and didn’t? The staff, the servants, they had served that family for generations. And there were a lot of those commoners in that parlor. They came there, from what I was told by that doggen, because the construction guys knew about the passage and herded people in the direction of that room. They were pounding on the panels to be let in while the house was sacked—I know because so many of the bodies were grouped together against the wall. But nope. They weren’t good enough, important enough, worthy enough.”

Oh … God.

That was the only thing going through her mind—because she knew that story, too. Peyton had shared the terrible tale with her during one of their long, all-day phone calls about a month after she and her father had left for their safe house. The first son, a middle daughter, the mother and two cousins, had claimed to come back from out of town to discover the carnage … but maybe they had been there all along?