Chapter Seventeen

"You once said you knew I was fond of raspberries," he said, staring at the glass he had balanced on his knee. "Outside of the bank, do you remember?"

There was something…tired about his tone. As if this was not about to be only a story Violet wouldn't like, but that he wouldn't either. When she said nothing, instead trying to puzzle out the expression on his face, he looked up at her.

Violet nodded, then cleared her throat and added, "Yes, I remember. I remember you telling us when we lived with you."

Count Olaf nodded, more to himself than her, as if he'd forgotten that he ever told them that. Despite his high spirits through the day, there was a solemnity that had fallen over the office and Violet almost wished for his jokes at her expense instead. He'd just been so happy and smiling a few minutes prior and then it was like a cloud had suddenly moved over him.

"And you remember I told you I had a sister?" he said. He was still looking at her and she again nodded.

"Yes, but you never said her name."

"Astrid," he said quietly, running his finger along the rim of his glass, eyes fixed on it. "Her name was Astrid."

Violet remembered him using the past tense that day at the market and noted how he used it now. "That's a beautiful name," she said quietly, afraid that speaking too loud may break the reverence of the moment, even though she did not know what the reverence was for.

"It was. It is. She was three years older than me and, much like you always were with your siblings, she always felt she had some amount of responsibility for protecting me, even if that meant putting too much on herself."

Violet blinked, taken aback. With one offhand comment, she felt more seen than in her entire life. She had never said as much, never muttered a single word or complaint about taking on more than her fair share of their trials, but he had seen it. He had seen her suffering more than her siblings with the weight of responsibility she carried. It was something Sunny and Klaus had never noticed.

"My father owned several raspberry farms," he said. "My childhood summers were spent visiting them. Astrid and I would always sneak handfuls of berries, but we never got away with it." He paused and smiled, recalling some image that she couldn't see. "Our hands and mouths were always stained. We would wake up with the staff and go help with the crops, weeding, plucking, and whatnot. It never seemed like work, though."

Violet smiled and gave a little pleasant hum. "It sounds perfect."

He gave a huff of a laugh and looked up at her, smiling. It knotted her stomach into a fluttering mess. He looked almost boyish. "It was. And Father was a good business man. We were very well-off. My sister was a lot like him - business minded, clever. She enjoyed making up little codes. We had an entire language of codes that only she and I understood. And I have always been like my mother, driven by the arts. Father thought it was a fine hobby for his wife, but not a good interest for his only son."

Violet frowned. "Well that's silly."

Count Olaf shrugged and took a long drink before continuing. "He wasn't a bad man. Just old-fashioned. So as I got older, he would push me to learn about the business and I would dig my heels in and run off with my notebooks to scribble out scenes for my next play. And while I was being the difficult child, Astrid was the shining star."

Violet noticed he didn't sound bitter in the slightest about that. In fact, he sounded a little proud.

"What started as making codes for fun grew into her winning several code breaking competitions. All while taking an active interest in our company and finishing her homework every night. That's when she started to get serious about being a cryptanalyst. And it got her noticed by the time she was fourteen. These people suddenly showed up in our lives with an offer for education at a special school that hones certain skills. This was, of course - though we didn't know it at the time - the training grounds for VFD."

Violet's fingers tightened on her glass. "VFD had a school?"

"Has," he corrected. "Or at least I believe it's still operating. They used to be much more relaxed - they thought if one sibling was talented, then the whole litter must be. It's not like that anymore," he said, voice growing bitter. "They're much more selective. They want absolute loyalty. Now if a child gives any indication that they may falter, an invitation is not extended. But that was not the case for me. I enjoyed my sister's codes in a fun, hobby sort of way, but I was never much good at cracking them without her. But after they interviewed me, they had a great interest in the little plays I had written. They started telling me I could study to be a scriptwriter or work in rhetoric, or both. I was only eleven, you can imagine how that sounded like heaven compared to sitting through Father's business meetings. The school took us both and Father had never been more proud that his children were invited to a special school. And all it would cost him was forty grand a piece annually and his life."

Violet's mouth popped open in surprise as she leaned forward. "What?"

Count Olaf waved a dismissive hand and took the moment to refill both of their glasses. Violet knew she ought not drink so much, not with the wine she'd had at dinner, but she didn't protest.

"We'll get to that part later. So the VFD, like all organizations - secret or not - operated on money and favored those who had it. There were scholarships, of course, given to children whose families did not have the means. But those children had to be especially talented to offset the cost. Both of your parents were such students."

Violet's eyes nearly popped out of her head. "My parents went to this school?"

"Yes, we were in the same class."

It felt like someone had torn a rug out from under her feet.

He waited for her to collect herself before continuing. "Like many social circles in life, money dictated popularity. And so your parents were outcasts that became friends -"

"But my parents had money," she protested, realizing this made her sound a bit like a spoiled heiress, but she didn't care. What he was saying made no sense.

"Not yet they didn't," he said, his expression sour. "So they befriended each other and eventually the Snicket's -"

"Kit?"

Count Olaf paused for a moment, then nodded with a sigh. "Kit, yes, and her brothers."

"Jacques and?"

"Lemony, if you must know, but I'm loathe to even speak his name."

"Fair enough, it's a terrible name."

He gave her a small, satisfied smile. "Yes, I always thought so. Well, your parents befriended the three of them and they became thick as thieves. The Snicket family had been part of the VFD for generations, which in turn lifted your parents up in popularity slightly."

"And you?"

"My family's money and my sister's status as a star cryptanalyst in the making shielded me from the crueler aspects of the social hierarchy, but I prefered to keep to myself either way."

Violet felt the question forming on her lips and tried to stop it, but it was impossible. "Were you friends with my parents?"

"No."

The word was absolute. Final. It hung in the air between them like a shroud. He drew a breath and continued. "We did not really think much of each other at all, I think, at least not in the beginning. We didn't dislike each other in particular."

He stopped then, focusing heavily on the glass in his hand. The corners of his mouth were tugged down in a grimace. "The summers stopped being so fun. As I got older, Father pushed and pushed me toward business. He would get so frustrated with me that he would send me to my room with no supper. And Astrid would always do what she could to diffuse the situation and if she couldn't, she would sneak up snacks so I didn't go hungry. One time she had been working on solving a code for a sweepstakes - I don't remember what it was called, but there were a series of drawings and each drawing was a word. The letters of the word were hidden in the lines of the drawing, so there was no actual correlation between what the picture was and what word it represented. There were three pictures - a cuckoo clock, a holiday wreath, and a matchbook. She had the last two figured out. The wreath translated to 'your' and the matchbook translated to 'breath', but she mulled and mulled over the first picture for days. The deadline for the sweepstakes was arriving and she still hadn't figured it out, so she brought it to me and we puzzled over it late into the night until I saw it. A-V-S-E."

Violet's brow tucked. "Avse?"

"Well, not in that order. It was 'save'. The answer to the puzzle was 'save your breath.' Astrid looked up at me with a big grin and said, 'Olaf, you really cuckooed me on this one!' And so that became one of our little codes. When Father would send me upstairs with no supper and Astrid couldn't unwind him enough to let me out, she would slip a paper under my door that said 'cuckoo'. It meant to sit still and she would save me. That's how I knew she would bring me snacks. One time, after I'd gotten into my first fight at school, I was sitting on this long bench outside the principal's office and she must have heard about the fight because she marched right by me and said, 'Olaf, you're going to drive me cuckoo,' before she went in to argue on my behalf. And she did save me, that time. I was facing expulsion, but she was so favored that they lessened it to compulsory volunteer work."

"That's…a bit of an oxymoron," Violet said, surprising herself with a little laugh. She wasn't sure she'd ever laughed in his company.

"Everything there was," he said. "It was an odd place."

He paused, mouth ajar like he meant to say something and it got stuck. Violet tucked her brow, wondering what it could be.

"The summer after she graduated, Astrid fell very ill very quickly," he said, then paused again. He was staring intently at the glass in his hand again. "My parents were beside themselves, but my Father was worse. He had given up hope that I would ever grow to take over his company and there had been a lot of pressure put on Astrid to be the one who continued it after he was gone. She was so very thin and sick at the end. She couldn't even sit up on her own. It was the end of summer and I was getting ready to go back to school soon, but I didn't want to leave her. One night I sat up late with her because she liked when I read her my scripts while she rested. So I was reading her my second draft of a summer school project when she was taken over by such a fit of coughing that she could hardly draw a breath. At this point all the doctors had come and gone, all of them said the same thing. There was nothing to be done. And I don't know what I thought I was going to do that a doctor couldn't, but I grabbed her hand and said, 'Cuckoo.' But she had already accepted what I hadn't. She shook her head with a weak little smile and said, 'No, Olaf.' And the next morning, she was gone."

Violet's heart constricted, just as her fingers did around the glass. How horrible. She had never really thought of Count Olaf as a person before she'd met him. She'd never given thought to what sort of things he might have lived through to shape him into who he was.

"What happened? To Astrid, I mean? She was so young."

Count Olaf finally looked up from his glass and gave her a small smile. "Sometimes, unfortunately, extraordinary people have ordinary ends."

"And your parents?"

"My father started to decline after Astrid's death. He was not handling the business as he should and my mother knew very little about running a farming empire."

"And…you?"

Count Olaf gave her a bitter little smile. "I had never felt so alone in my entire life," he admitted. "There had always been two of us and then it seemed I hardly prepared to be the only one before I was. My grades suffered. And I'd never been one for friends. I no longer had the good graces of my favored sister in the school halls and Father's business was tanking. I began to get into more fights. And then, one day, Kit sat with me at lunch and told me she was very sorry about my sister. No one else had ever done that."

Violet gave a little smile. "Kit was remarkable, from what little I knew her."

He smiled, too. "She was. And I loved her until the end, even after her betrayal."

He assessed the question in Violet's eyes, then finished off his drink with one swallow. He refilled his glass. He downed it. He refilled it again.

"You're going to make yourself sick," she said.

"This next part does make me sick," he said, his tone heated. Violet, wisely, kept quiet at the sudden shift in his tone. "After we graduated, Father had still never recovered from Astrid's death. The grief never subsided and it started to drive him mad. Mother was beside herself trying to run the business having very little experience and I was poor help." He was speaking faster, his cheeks growing red. Violet gripped into the seat cushion with her free hand, the fingers of the other tightening around her glass. "Kit had dinner with us one evening and suggested Mother bring on your parents." Violet's stomach clenched, she did not like where this was going. "She told Mother that the Baudelaire's were a recently engaged young couple capable of helping run a business who were looking for a good start to life. Well, Mother loved Kit and had never been more relieved at the thought of assistance. Your parents drew up a contract and my father half out of his mind with grief and my mother with little business knowledge signed it without much thought."

"My parents would never -"

"They did," he said in a nasty snarl. "They wrote themselves in as co-owners of the company and my parents didn't have the sense to see it, they -"

"My parents were good people!" Violet burst out over him, but her face was stricken.

"Were they good when they took us out to a celebratory dinner before proceeding to assassinate my parents at the opera afterward?"

"Stop it!"

"And all of our money was tied up in business assets, so who do you think got it?"

"It's not true!"

"The Baudelaire fortune has always been mine."

A deathly silence fell over the room. Olaf slammed his glass down on the desk and then looked over at her. She was staring at her lap, one hand fisted in her skirts, but he could see the tears brimming in her eyes.

"It is no wonder you hated us," she whispered.

Count Olaf let out a sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I do not hate you, Violet."

She was silent. He lowered his hand and watched her fisted hand tremble. A tear finally fell loose and stained her skirt. "Why would they do that?" she asked, voice so quiet it could have been a breeze.

"Because to be anybody in the VFD, you have to have money," he answered with disdain. "And if you're clever enough to steal it without repercussions, then you're clever enough to be in their little club."

"I-," she started, but any other words fell silent on her tongue. What could she possibly say? Her mind was spinning.

"You don't have to decide tonight how you feel about it," he said. "Or tomorrow or even the next day. I only wanted you to know."

"But why?" she asked.

"I just did. Isn't that reason enough?"

"But why now? Why not tell us when we were children?"

"I assumed you knew. I never imagined they would hide what they'd done, I thought they were raising you to be little Volunteers."

Violet's brow tucked. "You thought we knew our fortune wasn't really ours?"

Count Olaf was greatly pleased with that statement. She had not offered as much resistance as he initially thought. Although, the wine at dinner and the liquor in her hand had likely dulled her usual sharpness. He thought, perhaps, he might have to supply such spirits more constantly if it meant a more agreeable Violet. Not to mention the part of him - separate from the revenge he so wanted, but he wasn't willing to admit that to himself yet - that found the image of her on his leather loveseat, face flushed and drink in hand, quite welcoming and…lovely.

Violet looked at him expectantly and he realized he'd not answered her question.

"Yes, I thought you knew," he finally said.

She was quiet for a long moment, her brow still creased. "That does not forgive any of the things you've done to us."

And continue doing, they both thought in unison, though it went unvoiced.

"People are very rarely wholly good or wholly evil," he said. "You have done some not-so-nice things, murderess."

She flinched at that and looked away. "I have not been in a good place for a long time," she admitted.

Lonely. She was lonely and angry and wanted to hurt the people who hurt her.

In a horrid, dawning realization, she saw her own actions aligning perfectly with the man in front of her. He had been no different. The thought was terribly overwhelming.

"Yes, I noticed," he said, thinking of those dark circles that had been under her eyes and the thinness of her hands when he stole her. But he did admit she didn't look quite as gaunt now as she had only a few weeks ago.

Of course he'd noticed, she thought bitterly. Of course he would be the only one to notice. Why was it that this villain of her life had been the only one to see her suffering as unique from that of her siblings? Why had all her neighbors and food stall workers and librarians looked at her and smiled as if nothing was amiss when he could see it, acknowledge it, as if it were plain as day? As if it was so obvious there was no need to bring it up other than a single comment after she herself had spoken on it.

"Things are not always black and white, Violet," he said when she did not reply. He noted the pained expression on her face. "More often than not, things are complex. You are allowed to have complicated feelings about your parents or the things you've done." He stopped and his eyes shone fiercely for a split second. "You are allowed to have complicated feelings about me."

His fingers trailing along the neckline of her dress, his hand splayed across her stomach pulling her closer -

Violet shifted, sitting up straighter, heat once more covering her blasted cheeks. "And what about Kit?" she said suddenly, pushing her previous thoughts to the very back of her mind. "Why would she participate in such a plot if she loved you?"

The words seemed foreign on her tongue - the admission that someone had loved Count Olaf. That he, perhaps, had not been the one unworthy of love.

"It was a dark time for me," he admitted. "She swore she had no idea, that she would never, but I did not want to listen to either lies or rational reasoning from her, whichever it was. I broke off our engagement, pushed her out of my life, and lost track of her."

"But you never stopped loving her?" Violet asked, which seemed equally as foreign as her previous question - that Count Olaf was capable of love.

"No, not even when she twisted the knife in my back by naming her daughter after your mother."

Beatrice.

Violet's chest constricted at the thought of her adopted daughter, at how she was now irreversibly gone.

"I imagine you must love her still," she said, unable to make a comment on his previous statement.

"In the same way I suspect you still love yours," he said. Quigley. Her chest tightened further. She looked down at her lap. "It's a sad sort of love, knowing that they are gone and accepting that. It's more of a fondness after they've left us."

"Yes," Violet whispered, her engagement ring feeling heavy hanging by the cord around her neck, more so after her wayward thoughts on Count Olaf of late. "I would agree with that."

He admired her while she sat, staring intently down at her lap. She was slightly slouched, as she had never been one for proper posture, but otherwise the very picture of a lady. Well, except for her bare ankles, of course. A terrible ache crept down to the base of his spine - she never had been one to wear her stockings, like a proper girl. He wondered if, perhaps, she also disliked her other underthings.

Count Olaf cleared his throat quite suddenly and she looked up at him. Violet thought he seemed flustered for some reason.

"What were you thinking of today in the car?" he said, swiftly changing the subject of his mind. It had bothered him that she'd given him such a non-answer when he'd first asked.

"Oh," she said, eyes dropping back down to the glass balanced on her leg. Now it was her turn to drag a finger around the rim and avoid looking at the person opposite her. A heat crept over her cheeks and his attention on her heightened. "I was only thinking of how terrible things have been since the fire."

He looked at her, brows raised expectantly. "You'll have to be more specific."

At that she gave a little helpless laugh, like a person who'd just wanted to add one more piece of straw to the camel's back and watched the animal collapse, but decided to give a giggle of dismay instead of crying. "Since the fire that took-," she said, but paused, unable to say it. "Since I left Sunny and Klaus."

Since she lost Quigley and Beatrice.

"I have been all sorts of…out of sorts," she continued, hand finding her brow. "It was always the three of us and then the five of us and then it was just me."

She did not know why she was telling him any of this, but in the way that alcohol often affects us - and she had had far too many drinks on this evening - she felt she did not care. Violet had never complained, all except for once during her fight with Klaus. She felt as if she were standing on a great chasm, about to jump, knowing how scary it would be to admit such terrible things that she'd bottled up but wanting that moment of freefall when she felt unburdened. Perhaps if she told Count Olaf these things, she would not hit the bottom of the chasm. Perhaps if she told him, told anyone, she could stay in a perpetual fall, tumbling and tumbling but free and unburdened.

"You never did tell me why you left that night," he said.

She should talk to someone about these things. She knew she should. She also knew Count Olaf was not the person she should do the talking to. But, he was there and had been open with her, had he not? He had been the one - the only one - who had seen her truly. Perhaps if she did unburden herself…

"Violet?" he asked, her name a question that lingered in the air.

"I was in the hard, early stages of grieving," she said. She could clearly picture one of her feet outstretched over that dark chasm, the other ready to propel her forward into her fall. "Klaus kept reassuring me that it was just a tragic accident -," her eyes darkened, face hardened, "-and he would not listen to me. I tried to tell him so many times and he kept brushing me off, acting like I was paranoid."

Count Olaf watched her intently - that sharp edge in her dark eyes, like flint. He'd not often seen her angry. Especially at someone other than himself. He found it particularly delightful that this time he was the one unto whom she would divulge her anger. In fact, it pleased him greatly and he thought perhaps his advances toward her had affected her. He was suddenly very glad she had run away from her siblings. He was very glad, indeed, to have her separated from those she could lean on before - to have her alone with only himself. He grabbed the decanter and stood to refill her glass, but instead of taking his seat, he - with a sly look, of course, to see if she'd noticed - took the seat next to her.

"I was not paranoid," she continued hotly, lost in her rant. Count Olaf placed the decanter on the floor between their feet and then sat back against the cushions, watching her. "The fight was terrible. We were screaming so loudly that Sunny began to cry. And I just, I couldn't stay there anymore, I felt - I felt -"

"Betrayed," he offered. Violet looked over at him from under her dark lashes and nodded, turning back to stare ahead of her.

"Betrayed," she whispered and felt herself go off that ledge, tumbling down into the chasm. She had never before spoken about how horrible Klaus had made her feel that night or the complicated, terrible things that she'd felt since. "I just felt swallowed up in grief," she said, crossing her legs toward him. That was good, wasn't it? Wasn't there something about that in his espionage seduction courses? He had never been one to pay attention in class, but he was now paying extreme attention to her bare ankle near him and those previous thoughts he'd had about other bare places on her. Count Olaf stretched his arm along the back of the loveseat - not touching her, but close. "And I…I had never felt so alone. Have never felt so alone," she finished.

Her brother acting as she described seemed rather uncharacteristic to him, but he would not dare voice his opinion and make her rethink her resolute anger toward the boy. Count Olaf did not want her to want them. She was much more vulnerable in her self-isolation. But it did make him wonder why Klaus was so against the idea of the fire being arson.

"It is their loss, Violet," he said quietly and then, for he could not quite stop himself, his hand behind her on the couch found the back of her neck and he traced lazy circles against her skin.

"And then I found myself in that lousy, run-down apartment complex-," Olaf smiled at that, it had been a slum, "- and everyone just went about their day, all hellos and how-do-you-dos and no one, no one, actually saw me or the state I was in, no one saw how much pain I've been in -"

His fingers slid along the curve of her neck closest to him, up under her ear, down across the line of her jaw. "I did," he breathed, watching the dark wisps that had come loose from her braid slide over his wrist. "I do."

"I know," she whispered, looking down at her lap.

"Nothing they could have done would have made you feel any better," he said, leaning all the more near her, drawn in by the beauty of her profile and the softness of her warm skin under his fingers.

"I felt so invisible. I wanted so badly for someone to look at me and say, 'What's a nice girl like you doing in a bad place like this?' To just acknowledge that I was in a state of conflict."

"Violet," he murmured, his fingers drifting under her chin and steering her face toward his. She allowed him to lead her and he could see how dilated her pupils were when she looked up at him from under those lovely lashes. All he could think about were her bare ankles. "What's a nice girl like you doing in a bad place like this?"

He watched the color blossom across her entire face, watched her eyes widen and mouth gape as she realized how close he'd become.

"What indeed!" she said in scandal, ripping herself away from his warmth and stumbling a few feet away, next to his office chair. Yes, she'd certainly had too much to drink to allow that!

She watched Count Olaf's glassy eyes as he stared…at her feet?

"Come here, Violet," he said, looking up at her. The cloudiness came over her mind and she moved forward, but was keenly aware of the predatory gleam in his eye. "Sit," he ordered next. "And give me your leg. Your stitches are still in and need to come out."

She did as she was ordered, as she had no choice in the matter, and found herself reoccupying the couch and stretching her leg out onto his lap. He laid a warm hand just above her ankle and she tensed. Count Olaf reached under his shirt and pulled forth a small switchblade.

"Do I even want to know where you keep that?" she said, trying to say something, anything, to fill the charged silence.

"I keep a hidden breast pocket in all my shirts," he said. "One should always have a spare knife on their person."

She clenched her teeth, biting back a remark about how normal people did not feel the need to carry a knife on their person at all times. Count Olaf took a moment to roll up his sleeves to mid-arm, which alarmed her in how attractive she found it. She resolutely pushed the thought from her mind.

He opened the blade with a succinct metal fwip and laid his free hand back above her ankle. Saints, his hands were so warm against her skin. She looked away when he lowered the knife - she felt a tug, then a tickle. Then another tug and a tickle.

"Pray tell, Count Olaf," she said sharply, angry that he not only managed to cozy up to her in such a way, but then was able to call her back to his side like some well-trained dog. "What exactly is the purpose of your little schemes toward me all day?"

"Violet," he said in a dry tone, concentrating on the stitches. He was almost done. "Surely you are intelligent enough to guess."

Her face flamed. "Well I certainly cannot imagine why given our history."

Count Olaf pulled the last stitch and let his hands linger on her bare skin. "Perhaps if you covered your ankles with stockings like a proper girl, I wouldn't get such notions."

He looked over at her and she was making such a face that he couldn't help smiling. "Stockings are atrocious," she argued.

"Oh, yes, I agree."

"And you can hardly complain, you have never even asked Lucia to craft any for me!"

"Nor shall I."

"You cannot expect me to believe you have accosted me all day over bare ankles!"

Count Olaf's brow furrowed and he looked from her down to her feet. A little smile tugged, only just, at the corner of his mouth. "Well they are attractive ankles."

"Attractive ankles!" she said. "They're just ankles! It seems pointless to be miserable and itchy all day just to cover such an unremarkable piece of skin."

"Just ankles?" he asked, looking over at her with a grin. Again he looked boyish. And mischievous. "Violet, my dear, you are alone in the presence of a man." This observation and sudden turn in topic made her stomach twist. "And men are very logical creatures."

"Hardly."

"You see, if this-," he said, running his thumb over the inside of her ankle, "-is just an ankle," he continued, letting his fingers drift up the back of her leg. "Then this is just a calf. And if this is just a calf-," he said, hands crawling higher under her skirts. Violet stiffened, her heart hammering wildly. "Then this must be just a knee, therefore it would be perfectly logical to assume-," he said, his warm hand sliding farther under her skirts, his hand splayed and trailing up her thigh. "-that this is just-"

"Just quite enough!" she said sharply, clamping her hand down and trapping his fingers between her thigh and her skirts. His expression was all mischievous musement. "You must stop being so…so shameful!"

"Must I?" he asked, but slid his hand free, though only after pausing to gently squeeze her calf. "Funny, I do not feel full of any shame."

"Perhaps I ought to have said lecherous instead!"

He sat back, his hand still wrapped around her lower calf, and grinned. "Yes," he said, fingers wrapping around her leg as he lifted it and bent to place a warm kiss where her stitches had been. He pulled back perhaps an inch, his warm breath ghosting over her skin. "Perhaps you ought to have."

Violet jerked her leg free and sat upright. "May I go now?" she asked through grit teeth, staring resolutely across the room.

Ah, but she did not need to be looking his way for him to see how uneven her breathing was. He smirked, triumphant, and stood. "No," he said, enjoying the way her jaw clenched and allowing her to wallow in dread for a moment. "You did well today. I was not lying when I said I was proud of your performance today at the bank. Since I know you cannot run away, I will permit you to sleep in here where it is more comfortable."

Violet's mouth popped open. Why - why this room was just across the hall from his!

"I don't want to sleep up here," she said sharply.

"Violet," he said. She shot him a glare. "You will sleep in here from now on, until I tell you differently."

Differently. Well she certainly would not be sleeping where that differently would be - in his bed, no doubt!

She glared at him as she had never glared at another before. He grinned, thoroughly amused, and moved for the door. "Good night, Violet," he said.

She was resolute in her silence and he lingered at the open door, hand resting on the knob.

"Violet," he said, as though chastising a child. "Tell me good night."

Her eyes clouded. "Good night, Count Olaf," she said, the words spilling from her mouth before she could stop them.

He grinned his wicked grin and closed the door, right as a throw pillow crashed into it.