"Victor found me six years after that," Emmet said.
He said it with the flat evenness of someone who had made peace with a thing a long time ago and was now simply reporting it, the way you reported weather — it happened, this is what it was, here is the shape of it.
"I had built something by then," he said. "Not much. A place. A life that fit around Carlyle, around making sure he had what he needed. We were not found, I thought. We were careful. I thought careful was enough." A pause. "It wasn't."
"Lisa Stone," Thomas said. Not accusingly. Just placing the name in the account where it belonged.
"Lisa Stone," Emmet confirmed. "She came first. She came to the door looking like something she wasn't, which was what she always did, and I let her in because I was not careful enough in the specific way that mattered. She put Carlyle to sleep first. Small, quick, the sleep that looks like sleep. And then she turned it on me." He looked at his hands. "The last thing I saw before it took me was Carlyle, asleep on the couch with his book still open in his lap."
The room absorbed this.
Carlyle's jaw was tight.
"What did Victor want with you," Dean asked.
"Information," Emmet said. "What I knew from the dark war. What I knew about the chosen ones and the team and how the powers worked together. He collected information the way he collected everything — systematically, completely, with the patience of someone who had been building toward something for long enough that one more piece was worth any amount of time spent acquiring it." He paused. "He didn't get most of what he wanted. The sleep magic kept me from being questioned properly. Lisa Stone's version of it went deeper than she intended, I think — deeper than Victor wanted. Too deep to reach while I was in it."
"So he kept you," KaSandra said from the chair near the hallway.
Emmet looked at her.
"He kept me," he said. "The way he kept everything he couldn't use yet but believed he would eventually find a use for. A resource. Patient." He looked at the room. "I was in the sleep for — William told me how long, after. A long time. Long enough that when he found me I didn't know what year it was or what had happened or anything except the specific stillness of the room in the spell and the image of Carlyle with his book."
The room was very quiet.
Niall was looking at the floor with the expression he had when something had landed in him and he was processing it with the particular interior work that Niall did quietly and thoroughly and without showing most of it.
Grace had her hands in her lap and her eyes on Emmet and the steady quality of someone who was receiving every word and filing it somewhere that mattered.
Katherine felt the dark element of her power cycling in its slow spiral — the motion that came when old things were being spoken of, when the weight of the world's longer history moved close to the surface of the present.
"And then William found you," Courtney said. Quiet. Wanting the next part.
Emmet looked at William.
William looked at the floor.
"Yes," Emmet said. "Then William found me."