I, on the other hand, am voracious. Eating for two with an appetite I’ve never known before.

I’ve become a hedonist, sleeping ten hours at a time, taking long indulgent showers behind a locked bathroom door, making myself meals of meat and potatoes and more meat, which I’ve not had in months.

Nothing, no one, disturbs me here. No emotion, no voice, no seductive dark prince.

These five days and nights have been transformative.

I’ve realized, during this brief, unexpected, only vacation I’ve ever had from the world, what my problem is.

I’ve never been able to fully block the emotions of others because I didn’t know what silence felt like. I found it impossible to strive for a goal I couldn’t fathom, to re-create a thing of which I’d no knowledge, like a blind man trying to paint a picture of sky and clouds and sun.

I now know a stillness in my center, that it exists and where to find it, and I’m certain I can locate it again amidst the boisterous din of Dublin, the abbey, even the desperate and dangerous shark tank of Chester’s.

The man who isn’t there brought me to the blessedly silent lair of another man who isn’t there and gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received: the time and space to take a deep breath and explore my inner terrain, comprehend the strengths I have to work with and the weaknesses that have crippled me.

I can’t begin to imagine why he did it. It seems a kindness from a man I would never have counted kind.

He has shown me that goal which always eluded me. That sacred inner place that is mine, and no one else’s, the eye in the storm where I can stand unharmed by the chaos whirling around me with jagged sharp edges and bulk enough to knock me from my feet.

Rather than locking me away to torment me, he did it to show me a thing I was desperate to find.

It confounds me. I find myself questioning everything I thought I knew about Ryodan. Running prior conversations through my mind, realizing the man I believed moderately intelligent and highly manipulative of others—to their own detriment and destruction—is in fact highly intelligent and enormously manipulative of others, but I’ve begun to suspect it’s because he’s trying to fix what he perceives as the things they want fixed but don’t know how. He sees the bird’s-eye view and takes the hard, catalytic actions. Unsettling, disturbing to those of us that don’t, makes it easy to call him bastard, heartless.

But why would he bother?

There are only two possibilities: either he wants whatever goal he will achieve by altering that person, or, unfathomable as it is, he cares about the world he pretends to scorn, and the people in it.

Then why run a den of such depravity as Chester’s?

Unless … where better to sort the wheat from the chaff?

Even I know it’s impossible in times of war to save everyone. For the love of Mary, it’s impossible in times of peace. Is the nightclub his distillery where he sorts the vintages and tucks into his personal cellar the most complex, interesting wines, the most potent and impressive whiskeys?

And he considers me of value.

Easier to believe he wants something of me, although I cannot imagine what.

I’m eager to test myself, experience emotional commotion. See if I can maintain my newfound balance.

Yet I’ve developed a grudging respect for the man who brought me here.

You’ll remain with him until I decide you’ve gotten what you came for, he said.

So I remain. I came for the strength of concrete without the price of it. If Ryodan is true to his word, I will leave with it.

I’d stay here a very long time to reach that goal.

Before I sought him out that night, I’d already admitted to myself I wasn’t good for the abbey. I knew I wasn’t the one to replace her, a mere week after Rowena died. But there was Margery and she was toxic, and the Sinsar Dubh was stirring and my women were in need, so I stayed and battled to the best of my ability, without weapon, without the strength of sometimes-necessary deceit and sleight of hand.

I was unfit to lead.

So I don’t hammer the door, I don’t shout for salvation.

My salvation is currently stretched on his back on the floor, staring up at the coffered ceiling, wearing black camouflage pants, tattooed and hard and silent.

Ryodan brought me here to give me silence.

I wonder, clever man that he is, if he brought me here also to somehow give this man words.

What could make someone stop speaking a thousand years ago? I can barely grasp, much less accept that anyone has lived so long.

How would it feel, if you cared for such a person, to watch his complete retreat? To see him day in and out, yet never converse again? To know that he could speak to you if he chose to, but won’t? Day in, day out, your brother in arms, in your reach yet completely unreachable.

Ryodan has ordered this mute, dark man to be my teacher.

Will he obey?

I need instruction to cement my newfound center. I need training, discipline, and strength. I’m not leaving without it.

I lean back against the wall and study him, as I have for nearly a week now. He’s not catatonically withdrawn. He simply doesn’t interact with anyone around him at all.

“Kasteo,” I say. “I’ve stopped feeling the pain of the world. Help me learn to control my environment. Teach me to fight.” To one who stopped living a millennium ago, I say, “Show me how to live.”

The man who has stared at little but the ceiling for nearly a week, who has not so much as once acknowledged my presence, slowly turns his head to the side and looks across the floor at me.