“You two,” he singled out two of the men holding guns, “take the young man to Dr. Carrigan. Tomoe, you go with him.”
He gave Maeko’s mother a sharp look when she opened her mouth to protest and she stayed silent, nodding instead.
“You four,” Drake gestured to four more armed men, “escort the officer to my study and lock the rest up. I’ll deal with them later.”
The glare he gave Crimson then might have killed a lesser person, but she held her head high and faced it full on.
Two men moved in to take Chaff from Wells and Crimson.
Maeko stepped forward.
“Wait.”
Drake didn’t even look at her.
“Wells, give him the supplies for Chaff.”
Drake paused and held out a hand to the officer. Wells passed over the bundle of medical supplies. Drake in turn handed the bundle to Tomoe then turned and walked back into the manor, confident that his orders would be carried out.
A guard of armed men escorted them toward the house. Julia called out to Ash as they went past, but he didn’t look at her. He didn’t raise his head. For him, the mission had been a failure. She glanced back at the men helping Chaff. With the barely conscious street rat between them, their progress was slow. Macak followed them.
Tomoe glanced at Maeko, met her eyes for a second, and looked away. Maeko heaved a sigh and faced forward.
If only they had been able to get Garrett back. Then Ash would be happy and Drake might not be this angry. Instead, they had brought back a drugged, direly injured street rat who had seemed less than thrilled to see her, to put it lightly, and a Literati officer.
I only wanted to make it better.
She felt like weights were hung over her shoulders, trying to drag her down as she let the armed men prod her along.
Inside the house, they split into two groups, with a couple of men escorting Wells toward the stairs and the other two guiding them down another hallway. They stopped again halfway down and one of the men opened a door. It looked like a door to any other room, and the interior looked as elegant as any bedroom in the manor, albeit much more sparsely furnished. The door itself was three times thicker than any others she’d seen in the building and it had no knob on the inside. A luxury prison cell?
The man took Ash’s arm and guided him inside. Then he shut the door and locked it behind him. They escorted Maeko and Crimson to another similar room several doors down. The same man unlocked the door and held it open for them.
“You two can stay in here.”
Maeko didn’t move. “Why does Ash have to be alone?”
“Because it wouldn’t be proper to lock you ladies up in there with him. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut up and go inside. Don’t brass the boss man off any more than you already have.”
Crimson put a hand on her shoulder and pushed gently. Maeko relented, walking into the room. The door shut and the lock clicked behind them. She sank down on the bed and put her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry, Crimson.” Her hands muffled her voice, but she didn’t want to look into the woman’s eyes. She couldn’t. Not yet. “I mucked everything up.”
Crimson sat next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe it feels that way now, Kitten, but Chaff will get the care he needs now. It wasn’t all for naught. Besides, we all do daft things in the name of love.”
For some reason, those words broke a dam inside her and she began to sob, deep sobs that hurt her throat. Crimson slid one slender arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, rocking her gently as the tears fell.
CHAPTER TWELVE
For the next five days, no one spoke to them at all. They were delivered meals in the room and escorted to the nearest privy when necessary. Crimson remarked on the latter with surprise, having expected Drake would be angry enough to force them to use bedpans instead of the newly installed facilities. Maeko was underwhelmed with the little luxuries.
A guard tossed Macak into the room with them the morning after their return and Maeko called out insults at him for his rough handling of the cat until Crimson shushed her. Beyond that brief exchange, neither of them spoke much of the circumstances behind their shared captivity. Crimson taught her several card games using a deck they found in one drawer and they chatted about simple things. They spent most of a day discussing Maeko’s methods for picking out promising marks in a crowd and another afternoon vanished while Crimson explained the finer points of airship manufacturing.
The rest of the time, Crimson alternated between pacing while muttering under her breath and sitting at the one desk in the room with her head in her hands. Maeko amused herself with rearranging the décor, staring out the barred window, or petting Macak and trying to think of something worthwhile to say to her fellow prisoner. Since the whole mess was her doing, everything she came up with to offer consolation sounded completely inadequate in her head, so she said nothing.
Evening on the fifth day, the door swung open and a tall dour looking guard with a gun stepped into the doorway. He gestured to Maeko with the crooking of a finger, and she stood. Crimson stood too, but the man shook his head, giving the woman a hard glower. Awkwardly avoiding Crimson’s frustrated glance, Maeko walked across the room with a sense of marching to her death and followed the man out.
Another armed guard shut and locked the door, then fell into step behind her and they escorted her that way, like a dangerous criminal, to the familiar room on the second floor where Drake held his small private meetings. The two men stepped up to either side of the door and the first one gestured for her to enter.
With a knot in her throat, Maeko opened the door. Drake stood by the window, his back to her, his figure made dark by the light coming in, turning him into a shadow of himself. She stepped inside and the door shut behind her.
She waited quietly. Anything she started with was almost certainly going to heighten his ire. As with thieving, silence was the safest option here.
He didn’t move or acknowledge her in any way. Perhaps he meant for her to begin the conversation, forcing her to risk heightening his anger. Not entirely fair, since she’d had no warning and his insistence on looking away gave her no visual cues to work with, but it would do her no good in the long run to let him intimidate her.
She swallowed, lifted her chin, and took a few steps closer to the desk between them.
“You should forgive Crimson. She only went along with us because she didn’t want us or your airship getting hurt.” She added the airship on the logical assumption it might mean more to him than they did and that, therefore, Crimson acting in its defense might carry more weight.
His shoulders tensed. “She should have told me what you were planning in the first place. It never should have gotten that far.”
The dangerous edge in his tone almost convinced her to let it go at that. Almost. But the whole mess had been her idea. That made it her fault, with no little complicity from Ash, but she wasn’t going to let Crimson take the fall for their behavior.
“I never told her my plan. She caught us when we were already taking off in the airship. It was too late for her to do anything…” She trailed off when he snapped one hand up by his side.
“She still could have stopped you. She was armed. She should have forced you to land the airship and brought you to me. Then I could have seen to it that you didn’t get another chance to attempt your foolish rescue.” He turned and gave her a warning look that made her hold her tongue. He looked every bit the wolfish rogue she’d thought him to be when they first met and she suddenly wasn’t as keen to test his temper. “Fortunately for you, your Literati friend has given us a great deal of useful information about the experiments and weapons development going on at that facility. If not for his willingness to cooperate, the whole venture would have been a colossal failure.”
There was a painful throb in her chest. Longing. Sorrow. Guilt. At the peak of it all, anger that he would consider saving Chaff a failure. A
flood of emotion she didn’t know how to manage. She licked her lips and made herself meet his dark eyes.
“How is Chaff?” The question came out as something of a growl.
He gave her a long measuring look, letting her sweat for a minute as worry quickly overwhelmed her anger.
“The Lits weren’t very kind to him, perhaps because his survival wasn’t all that important if he didn’t have any information to offer them. Gangrene had set into the wound and the infection was spreading fast. We had to amputate the arm to save him.”
Maeko’s stomach turned and she had to swallow bile.
Drake held up a hand again to stay any questions. “We’ve already modified one of the prosthetics we were working on to fit him. One much like mine with a few special features he should appreciate once he’s healed. The recovery should go well for him now and use of the arm should be relatively painless once things are a little more healed, but he hasn’t been very communicative. Some of that is the morphine. The amount they had him on was dangerously high and he is reacting poorly to having it reduced, but there’s a lot of emotional anguish there as well.” The corner of Drake’s mouth twitched with a hint of a bitter smirk as if to say that emotional anguish was her problem, not his. “He isn’t much use to us in his current state, so I thought I might send you to talk to him when we’re done here, see if you can make any progress.”
Did that mean he wasn’t locking her up again? She would almost prefer the fancy prison cell to facing Chaff right then knowing the extent of the trauma she’d brought upon him.
“Don’t think my letting you out means your extremely reckless behavior has been forgiven. The simple facts are that I need your assistance with more than just your ailing friend. Crimson had planned to send you to meet with Detective Emeraude later this week, so I need you involved in our planning.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “Yes. She told me when you arrived at their last meeting the detective seemed to respect you.”
“I’m not sure that’s the most accurate observation.”
He tapped the desk with his fingernails. A wry smirk twisted his lips. “Emeraude is a difficult woman to deal with, but Crimson is adept at reading people. If she says the detective respects you, I will trust in that. I can’t throw someone she doesn’t know into the mix and expect that woman to go along with it, so I don’t see that I have much choice. I need to trust you although you have quite frankly given me little reason to. To ease my own mind, I will send two of my most trusted men with you to keep you out of trouble this time. If you try anything rash, they have my permission to use whatever force necessary to keep you in line.”
Drake turned his back on her then and she stuck her tongue out at him.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t see that.”
She flushed. Of course, the window glass would have reflected her image just fine.
“The gentlemen outside the door will escort you to your friend.”
She didn’t move. “You should let Crimson out.”
“I’m going to. I need her working on my battleship.”
She blew out a huff. “That’s not enough. You need to forgive her too. She loves you.”
“I know,” he murmured as though speaking more to himself.
After perhaps a minute more of silence, she concluded that they were done and went to the door. There wasn’t much more she could do for Crimson and no amount of delay was going to make talking to Chaff any easier.
The guards still didn’t speak to her when she stepped out. The first man simply turned away and started walking. The second gestured for her to follow the first and fell into step behind her. Her gut twisted in knots while they walked, as if some malicious creature were living in there, trying to tear her apart from within. She clung to that thought, hoping the grossness of it would distract her from what waited, but with every step, she remembered his hand closing on her throat. The bruises there throbbed with the memory and her chest ached with a less tangible kind of pain.
He didn’t realize it was me. Chaff would never hurt me.
The thoughts lacked conviction. He had every right to be angry with her. To hate her, even. He’d tried to talk her out of getting involved with the Pirates. In the end, she’d refused to let it go and he’d stayed by her because he cared about her only to end up like this, mutilated and remade against his will. Did he regret his decision to stay with her now? How could he not?
The first guard stopped outside a door and pulled a ring of keys from his pocket. Her nerves twittered like a flock of peeved birds. She twisted her hands together. It seemed to take forever for him to find the right one and the jangling of the keys as he flipped through them seemed absurdly loud. It was all she could do not to grab the ring from him and start trying them herself.
Finally, he selected a key, pushed it into the lock and turned. The click of the mechanism swept her back to the moment when she and Chaff had gone to try breaking Ash’s brother out of the Literati orphanage. The way he had deferred to her skill in lock picking. The way their hands had touched upon the door handle. The spark of merry mischief in his blue eyes and the unexpected fondness in his smile.
She tried to swallow the painful lump forming in her throat. It didn’t work.
The guard opened the door just enough for her to enter and stepped aside. She leaned in. The interior was dark. Curtains drawn over all the windows masked the undoubtedly bright and ornate interior with deep shadows. Her feet were stuck to the floor, refusing to move into the room.
The other guard put a hand on her shoulder and put a little pressure there. Her hackles went up when he touched her, not only with his nerve at feeling he had the right to do so, but also with her own cowardice. She moved out from under his hand and into the dim interior. The door closed behind her, taking away the light that came in from the hallway.
She stood there for a moment, letting her eyes adjust until she could make out the long, lean figure stretched on the bed with his back to the door. Delaying a little longer, she searched out the knob on the gas light next to the door and turned it, chasing back the shadows with flickering light.
That light reflected off the metal arm attached at his shoulder, dancing upon its cold, unyielding surface. His torso was bare, revealing leather straps around his lean frame that helped support the mechanism. She stared at the prosthesis, trying to swallow around the lump in her throat and fighting the temptation to turn the light off again and leave.
He didn’t move. Perhaps he was asleep and he probably needed the sleep after all he’d been through. She would come back later.
She started to turn toward the door.
“What do you want?”
The bitter tone didn’t do much for her confidence. She opened her mouth to answer, but no words came out. What did she want? What did Drake think she could do here?
“Unless you’re bringing something for the pain, I’d rather you buggered off.”
“Chaff?”
His entire body tensed as if he’d received an electric shock. “Maeko?”
No teasing mispronunciation of her name. No annoying nicknames. She took a few steps toward the bed, her gut squirming. “Yes.”
“Leave me alone.” His voice sounded tight now.
Her chest tightened in response. She reversed her steps and turned to the door, lifting her hand to knock for the guards to let her out, but her hand hovered a few inches from the door then sank back to her side. If it was possible to make this better, it wasn’t going to be through giving up and walking away.
Still facing the door, she said softly, “You’ve always taken care of me. Let me take care of you this time.”
“Feeling guilty, Pigeon?” His tone was sharp, meant to cut her. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough already?”
The words tore through her like a mess of flung daggers. She turned. He was sitting up on the bed now, facing her. His bare chest showed off the collection of scars from a lifetime surviving on the streets
. She’d witnessed the making of many of those scars, more than one the result of him coming to her defense. The arm was the one injury she couldn’t quite come to terms with.
Did she feel guilty?
Yes. Very much so.
“I never meant for this to happen.”
“Get out.” His bloodshot eyes bored into her. His face was a pallid impenetrable mask. More than unfriendly, but she could see pain behind the hostility in his eyes, an all-consuming misery that she yearned to fix. “I don’t want to see you. Not now. Not ever.”
There was snapping sensation inside her, as if something broke apart with his words. That something fell away, revealing a desolate, hollow space inside. She didn’t realize she was moving back again until her heel bumped into the door. The door opened, the guard apparently mistaking her impact for a knock, and she stumbled back out into the hallway. The guard shut the door, cutting off her view of those eyes.
“Maeko.”
She turned.
Ash’s mother, Julia, was across the wide hall, stopping mid-stride to look askance at her. Ash was beside her, his pale green eyes hard and cold as Chaff’s had been when he looked at Maeko, still resenting that they had rescued Chaff and not his father. He held her gaze for a few seconds then his focus moved past her to the door. His jaw tightened, his lips pressing into a bitter line. He turned and walked away.
The hollow inside deepened and filled with ice.
Maeko pulled her shoulders back and walked down the hall away from Chaff’s room and in the opposite direction from Ash. The guards didn’t follow this time. She walked to the back of the manor and opened a door to the rear gardens. As soon as she stepped through the door, it began to rain, going from no precipitation to downpour in a few seconds. That was fine with her. It would hide the tears.
A few horses in one of the rear pastures trotted out to shelter under a stand of trees. She walked to the fence and stared out at them. They stared back, their ears perked, but they weren’t willing to venture into the heavy rain to investigate. Eventually, they lost interest, turning to grazing the sparse grass beneath the trees. She sank to her knees in the wet grass at the edge of the fence and let the rain wash her hair into her face, let the water run together with the tears, let the cold outside soak into her skin to merge with the new cold place at her core.
The Girl and the Clockwork Crossfire Page 9