Battle Royal

by Lucy Parker

  Libby chose that moment to cruise past Adam’s station and say something to him that made his sweet, thin face fall, his eyes darting toward Emma, back at her own counter. He looked down at himself and touched his crumpled tie. His shoulders folded inward. Even at that distance, crystal clear stance of someone who had just taken a hit to their self-esteem.

  Sylvie decided to take up Mariana’s suggestion. Lest she pick up a dessert from the snack table and follow Nadine’s example with the tart.

  If nothing else, this job and working side by side with Dominic was doing wonders for her usual aversion to confrontation.

  Halfway up the grand stone staircase, her phone vibrated in her bag and she pulled it out with embarrassing haste.

  Unknown number, which she almost ignored as a possible scammer.

  However, as the lord of the manor was coming down the stairs and casting her a lascivious glance, it was advisable to close off every opportunity for conversation. After their brief introduction upon her arrival, even speaking to a faux bank or purveyor of penile enlargements seemed favorable.

  “Sylvie Fairchild speaking,” she said into the receiver as Lord Middlethorpe continued on his way with a regretful backward glance. The man reeked of the old boys’ club. She bet he regularly sat over a whisky with his cronies and reflected on the good old days, when he could behave as atrociously as he liked with impunity. “To save time, I’m not giving you any financial details, I possess no appendages that need enlarging, and if you’re claiming to be a member of a royal family, I’m going to need multiple sources of evidence.”

  There was barely a pause before the very cut-glass voice of Rosie’s secretary said, “I make no claim to royal birth, merely employment, madam. This is the Honorable Edward Lancier.”

  Of course he used his full title even on the phone. She bet he entered it in the address field when he was doing his online shopping, hitting up Marks & Spencer for his Honorable hankies and jammies.

  Sylvie exchanged a companionable grimace with one of the gargoyles on the landing wall. “Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat. “Yes, Mr. Lancier.”

  “With respect to the previously discussed commission, one requests a short meeting at your earliest convenience. Would tomorrow afternoon be suitable?”

  She agreed without hesitation to a meeting with one, drawing out her notebook to jot down the directive. Not a meeting at St. Giles Palace this time, but an office on a street she’d never heard of. Apparently, every step of this commission was going to be laced with intrigue.

  Still a lingering chance of that recruitment into a band of misfit do-gooders.

  When she reached the third floor, it was eerily quiet after the pandemonium downstairs. The walls in the Grange must be a good twelve inches thick, and where it fell down in central heating, it provided in spades for soundproofing.

  If that particularly malevolent-looking gargoyle were actually moving and had grand plans to reach out and strangle her as she went past, her demise would likely pass unnoticed until they needed her for the opening shots.

  Dominic was possibly correct that her attraction to all things fantastical had grown to epic proportions since she’d taken this job.

  Nevertheless, she was fascinated when she found the gallery and discovered an art collection with all the eclectic disorganization of a junkyard, nestled in a dramatically spooky setting—and contents that wouldn’t be out of place in a national museum.

  The silence was even more cavernous here, and she jumped at the distant squeak of a footstep.

  She had the passing neck prickle that usually heralded watching eyes, but her attention had caught on a large oil canvas. They hadn’t seriously just tossed a Caroline Beckwith onto the wall, with no obvious security? If she wanted to whip out her keys right this second and scrape that £50,000 painting into shreds, there was literally nothing to stop her. And given the abrasive personality of its owner, she wouldn’t be surprised if half the neighborhood would quite happily wreck the family valuables.

  Living truism that you couldn’t buy common sense.

  Several glass works were arranged on podiums. She was immediately drawn to a beautiful little sculpture of clear glass shot through with shimmering silver, as if it had caught a forever sheen of moonlight. Lovers, their heads lowered together in a perfect curve, limbs entwined in a sinuous twist, two bodies forming one continuous shape. One figure was cradling the head of the other, hand cupped in a protective shield. She’d been raised by a curator; she knew better than to touch an exhibit without permission, but her fingers almost went out and traced the gentle lines of that revealing gesture.

  She pulled out her phone and bent to snap a few close-up photos.

  A strange skittering sound brought her head around sharply. There was nobody behind her, but one of the long wooden panels in the wall appeared to open a few centimeters. It closed again just as quietly. The dizzying effect of the black-and-white floor tiles was messing with her eyes, not helped by the leering gargoyles sprouting from every corner, but she was quite certain that was a door.

  Cautiously, Sylvie rose and approached the panel. When she tugged on a protruding beam, it slid back easily, revealing a narrow corridor. Her vision slipped into darkness beyond a short distance, and she couldn’t see where it ultimately led.

  This was now entirely too Famous Five for first thing on a Monday. She ought to have sandwiches and lemonade in a rucksack, an intelligent dog at her leg, and a gang of smugglers to foil.

  As it was, she had a roll of breath mints in her handbag, Middlethorpe Grange was miles from the coast, and if any lost smugglers had walked these fields, they would now be very old bones.

  From somewhere in the creepy abyss, a board creaked, and a murmuring susurration drifted on a gust of cold air. At least she knew there was a window somewhere.

  “Hello?” she called, purposefully raising her voice and injecting a note of cheerful normality.

  Another creak, another singsong murmur.

  Okay.

  Rapidly becoming less Famous Five, more The Haunting of Bly Manor.

  “For God’s sake,” she muttered, flicking on the flashlight app on her phone. She took several steps forward and flooded the cramped interior with light.

  Her eyes adjusting rapidly, she looked around a musty hallway that led to a door, about fifteen feet away, and to her side, a few rickety-looking shelves containing the odd unloved book and a bowl of the most disgusting, desiccated potpourri.

  Potpourri that appeared to be . . . undulating.

  With the feeling she was seriously going to regret this, Sylvie reached out and poked the bowl. Just as a hairy twig-like leg nudged aside a shriveled petal and delicately waved at her, she caught sight of the pale blur of a face in the darkness.

  By time her brain had caught up to the facts of mirror and own reflection, her poor heart was doing its best to wrench out of her chest.

  For all Sylvie’s love of everything whimsical and extraordinary, she actually considered herself quite a straightforward person, not prone to panic. She could have handled the horror of whatever was living in the potpourri. The fright over her reflection was a passing blip.

  But what was written on that mirror, smudged very, very clearly into the dust, wrenched a sound from her that she’d never made in her life.

  Her left foot skidded on the floor and she almost fell. Something moved behind her, and on instinct, she fought back with the ultimate weapon: a direct shot of infested potpourri to the face.

  The unknown presence in the dark screamed loud enough to wake every gargoyle on-site.

  As he or she thrashed about and a piece of potpourri rebounded into Sylvie’s chin, she turned back down the passage, almost hurling herself into the comparative brightness of the gallery.

  Her breath was coming in small, squeaky hitches, and her legs were shaking.

  All she saw then was Dominic, standing alone in front of an ugly metal sculpture of a tractor, a heavy scowl on his face
—and she acted on sheer, driving instinct.

  “What the fuck is going on up here—?” He didn’t have a chance to finish the incredulous snap of words before she was at his side, only just catching herself seconds before she could follow through on the immediate plan announced by her brain.

  Basically, to throw herself into his arms, burrow into his body, and stay there for a while. Five minutes. An hour. A decade.

  Her chest was rising and falling rapidly. One of her hands still hovered in the air millimeters from his chest.

  She had hesitated; he did not.

  As he’d done once before, Dominic took her hand in his, this time drawing it around his neck and pulling her into him. Her hot cheek coming to press against the cool silkiness of his shirt, Sylvie exhaled through her mouth and felt the first tension wash out of her muscles, as if her body were melting into his.

  His fingers stroked her hair, gentle, unbelievably soothing, and then his hand moved to cup her cheek, holding her head as she nestled into the curve of his neck. She could feel the steady movement of his pulse beneath her fingertips.

  “Sylvie,” he said in a low voice. His arms tightened on her as she struggled to stop the residual trembling right down through her wrists and ankles. “What the hell happened?”

  Her eyes were squeezed closed. All she was aware of in that moment, as she forced her breathing out of that asthmatic wheeze and into long, juddering inhalations, was his scent and his warmth wrapping around her. “Dom.”

  It was nothing more than a whisper, but he heard her. His hold, already tight, drew her in even closer to the long planes of his body. She felt the abrasion of his jaw against her temple, and the weight as he rested his cheek on her head.

  The fingers entwined in her hair played gently with the fine strands.

  “I know all this place is missing is a young David Bowie before it goes full Labyrinth,” Dominic said against her temple, the words light, the underlying tone anything but, “but I don’t think there’s much danger beyond appallingly bad taste.”

  His thumb ran lightly down her nose, before his fingertips touched under her eyes. Sylvie hadn’t realized that she was crying a bit until he made another low sound, and was so horrified that she immediately stopped.

  He was just pulling her back to look into her face when the panel door banged back open behind them, and she almost jumped out of her skin yet again.

  With complete and total outrage, a high-pitched voice roared, “You threw a spider in my face.”

  She twisted, Dominic’s hand falling to hold the curve of her waist, and saw a small, furious-faced boy with violently red curls, extremely round freckled cheeks, and waving fists. He shook one at her, like a crabby policeman in an old-fashioned children’s book. She half expected his next words to be Look ’ere!

  “It ran down my neck,” screamed the very loud child. “It had legs!”

  Dominic was running his fingers up and down Sylvie’s back. She thought he probably wasn’t even aware he was doing it. Normally, that would provoke a renewed rush of sensation, but the initial shock of that experience with the mirror was creeping back.

  “Friend of yours?” he inquired mildly, eyeing the child with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

  Even in the light of day, holding on to Dominic’s body, her heart was starting to beat too fast again, throwing another little catch into her breath.

  His hand came up to cup her cheek again, but that typically shrewd gaze swung back to the child.

  The little boy clearly had some brain cells to go with the lung power, because he’d stopped hollering at her and was giving Dominic a slightly wary look.

  One small foot edged back.

  “Don’t move.” It was Dominic’s most grim sergeant-major tone, usually reserved for the absolute worst offenders on Operation Cake, and the kid’s hair almost stood on end.

  Amazingly, for a child who looked as if he’d never heard the word “no” in his life, he did not move. Even when Dominic squeezed Sylvie’s hand and crossed the distance to the panel door in long strides, both she and her erstwhile spook-in-the-dark stood in silence.

  Dominic activated his own phone light and disappeared into the corridor. He was back in less than ten seconds, and when he closed the door behind him with a slow, deliberate click, Sylvie wasn’t surprised the little boy quailed.

  In all these years of icy words and withering looks, she’d never seen Dominic so angry. There was nothing cold and restrained about the expression on his face now; it was intense, burning fury.

  The kid reanimated with a vengeance. Scooting behind a metal statue of a soldier, much taller than his own four-foot-nothing, he peeked out at the Angel of Death descending upon him. “You can’t do nothing to me,” he said, chin jutting. “My daddy owns this place and he can have you killed.”

  “Your daddy and I,” Dominic said, his eyes lethal, “are shortly going to have a chat. You cruel little brat.”

  The freckled chin lifted higher. “I’m a Middlethorpe,” he retorted, as if that should say it all.

  Actually, having met his daddy, it probably did say it all.

  Middlethorpe Junior shot her a quick look. “It was a joke.” A sullen note was creeping in.

  “It was a disgusting thing to do. And I’m betting it’s not the first time you’ve tried out your ‘joke’ on unsuspecting visitors.” Dominic’s hard stare hadn’t wavered, but he looked at Sylvie now, and she swallowed hard at the immediate change in the depths of his eyes. Very gently, incredibly gently, he said, “Did you mention your aunt’s name at some point this morning?”

  A fine tremor had come back into her hands. Tucking her fingers under her armpits, she took a steadying breath, trying to clear the last of the fog that had netted her thoughts since her light had landed on that mirror.

  And she’d seen Mallory’s name smudged in the dust and grime.

  She closed her eyes for a second. “Mariana did,” she said, and her voice cracked. “Just for a second.”

  A muscle ticked in Dominic’s jaw as he turned to the belligerent, wary boy. “It’s not a joke. It wasn’t funny. Don’t you ever do something like that again.”

  The child stuck out his lower lip, darted out from behind the statue, and took off. Sylvie heard the echo of his footsteps on the stairs a moment later.

  Her arms were still crossed tightly. “A kid’s prank. I completely freaked out. That’s really embarrassing. I’m sorry.”

  Dominic stood still; then, as if in the passing of mere seconds, he’d come to a decision, he crossed to where she stood. Their eyes locked as their chests moved with ragged snatches of breath. His hand lifted to touch her cheek, the lightest, softest heart clutch of a caress. Trembling again, she reached to fold her fingers back over his, and he exhaled.

  And then his hands were slipping under her hair, lifting her lips to his own, and Sylvie’s whole world shrank to that warm bubble where nothing existed but them.

  In a sound almost like a tiny sob, her breath hitched again as he kissed her—nothing tentative or exploratory this time; it was hard, hot, deep, his tongue a silken stroke around hers. Her hands fisted against his ribs, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.

  It was an intense kiss, but not a long one. Neither his hands nor his lips had traveled lower than her collarbone. Yet, when he lifted his head, her mind was swimming and her stomach was clenched. Her heart had jumped into thumping beats, pounding so hard it was almost painful.

  Powerful chemistry was quite a ride.

  With his thumbs under her chin, voice husky, he repeated, “It was a repellent thing to do. The kid’s a nasty little shit.”

  She reached up and held on to his wrists. “I just—I was already thrown, and . . . in the dark, when I saw Mallory’s name—”

  “I know.” His gaze very steady, he traced his thumbs in circles over her cheeks.

  Sylvie could feel heat creeping into the skin under his touch. Suddenly, ridiculously, shy, she lowered her eyes
to the base of his throat, where his pulse beat quickly.

  A thread of renewed tension etched into the air between them, and Dominic released her, his hold dropping away.

  “You made it out of traffic,” she said at last, foolishly, to his top shirt button.

  “Eventually. They’re almost ready for us downstairs.” That same sense of constraint had come into his body.

  “Oh, good.”

  “Your favorite contestants were holding hands when I left the ballroom.” A flicker of amusement broke through the complicated, conflicted expression in Dominic’s eyes. “I think you just bounced up and down without moving a single muscle.”

  She couldn’t help the return smile. “I have a text bet with Pet. She says they’ll be living together by Easter. I’m slightly less optimistic. My money’s on June.”

  Dominic shook his head, but the amusement was still there. “My sister’s texting the enemy now, too, is she?”

  Her smile faded as she asked, quite seriously, “Do you mind?”

  He was, as usual, difficult to fully read. But there was nothing uncertain in his response. “No. I don’t mind.”

  They were still standing very close. Suddenly, impulsively, she reached up and kissed him again. Just a soft, dancing press of her closed mouth against his.

  “I suppose we should go down, then,” she murmured, and he moved his head, a slight gesture of assent.

  As they walked back through the artworks, she stopped, her attention fixed on a wooden cabinet. Behind the display panel was a selection of smaller pieces of blown glass.

  One in particular—an exquisitely rendered little sculpture of a deer.

  And in the space of a blink, a heartbeat, the indrawing of her breath, it was fifteen years ago. In a room that was a sterile blur in her memory, but for the oddly specific details of a crack on the wall that looked like a butterfly and the blue-and-white star-print curtains. Someone had hand-sewn those. A valiant effort to introduce some cheer into four walls where hearts were inevitably going to break, over and over and over again.