King Among the Dead (Hell Theory Book 1)

by Lauren Gilley

  She noticed the physical changes in herself, too. One morning, she paused in front of the mirror, midway through combing out her hair. Hair that was fuller, shinier, bouncier. Her face had filled out, and the bags had gone from beneath her eyes. Her blue eyes had a sparkle to them. Her clothes, all the new, wonderful clothes that Beck had bought her, fit better; didn’t hang off her like she was an emaciated department store mannequin. She had color in her cheeks, and a softness to her skin, and she was healthy. Was getting an education, and was…

  More useful. More ready to go out into the world on her own.

  An oddly crushing realization.

  “Rose, is everything alright?” Beck asked, cutting off partway through an explanation of the Pythagorean theorem. “You seem distracted.”

  She’d been mindlessly tapping the end of her pen on her notebook page, and forced herself to still. Glanced up at him guiltily. “Sorry. Just thinking about something.”

  He’d been pacing slowly back and forth beside their table – sometimes lecturing filled him with a restrained passion for the material that took him up out of his chair and across the room, like his wonder at the topic was too powerful to be channeled sitting down – and returned to his chair, forearms resting on the tabletop, head cocked. “Something troubling, it looks like.”

  “Oh, no. It’s not.”

  His brows went up.

  “It’s just…” She sighed. “I guess I’m wondering if all of this” – she gestured to the books and notebooks between them – “is preparing me for a career. If I’m supposed to go out and find a job. My own place.” Her voice betrayed her on the last sentence, a slight quiver.

  His face smoothed. “Is that what you want to happen?” he asked with what felt like a careful lack of inflection. Beck wasn’t a demonstrative sort, but she’d learned to read him, his little tics and the slight shifts in his voice and bearing. She could tell now that he intended to betray nothing of his own thoughts or feelings.

  She didn’t want to answer.

  “It’s like I told you once before,” he said, and she glimpsed the faintest sparking of emotion in his gaze, one quickly snuffed. “You can pretend if you want to,” he said, “but you don’t have to. I won’t ever think less of you. You can be honest with me, about this, about anything.”

  She tried to take a breath, and couldn’t. Instead said, “No. No, I don’t want to leave.” Her voice shook and crackled; she didn’t even recognize it as her own. “But I will if you want me to. If that’s the plan. I won’t blame you. I won’t be mad.”

  He inhaled sharply through his nose. “That’s not the plan.” His voice wasn’t entirely steady either, and the wavering sound of it eased some of her anxiety.

  “It’s not?”

  “No. There is no plan.” He exhaled, and settled some, the tension bleeding away. “I only thought you might like studying.”

  “I do. I love it.”

  “Besides, what we’re learning here would hardly prepare anyone for a lucrative career out there in the world the way it is now. Not much call for trivial knowledge of the past,” he said, more than a little wry. “But if you wanted to leave…”

  “No.” Firmly, now. She’d known what she wanted all along, only been afraid to say it. It was a bold thing, saying you wanted to keep living with someone, wallowing in their seemingly-unlimited hospitality. “No, I want to stay here. With you. If that’s alright.”

  He smiled. “More than alright.”

  “But I don’t want to be a burden. You have to let me be useful.”

  “You already are. You listen to all of Kay’s bitching so I don’t have to.”

  She chuckled, and his smile widened. “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” He reached across the table and covered her hand with one of his. His slender fingers warm, his palm still with its particular pattern of calluses. “I’m glad you’re here, Rose. Kay is, too. We don’t want you to go anywhere, not unless you want to.” Earnest and kind and honest, eyes gleaming in the weak sunlight.

  It choked her, that look. She managed a nod, but didn’t trust herself to speak.

  He patted her hand and drew back. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes, Pythagoras.”

  SEVEN

  Beck still went out most nights. The next morning, the scent of spilled whiskey and cigarette smoke lingered in the library, over the by the fireplace where the coals still glowed faintly beneath piles of white ash. Rose hadn’t had another late-night run-in with the Beck Who Wore Black again, and she refused to ask about it. People had their secrets; they needed them. It had been weeks and weeks at this point, and she never questioned him; had no desire to. Beck was home, now; was warmth, and food, and comfort, and knowledge, and her loyalty had grown so great sometimes she feared it might choke her. A fear that wasn’t a fear at all.

  She never asked – but Kay asked her.

  It was a Tuesday, and not a sunny day, but the clouds seemed lighter, and higher, and it wasn’t actively raining. Pedestrians bustled back and forth on the sidewalks out front, Beck was in his study, and Rose and Kay shared a particular bustling energy about the housework, an infectious busyness that they traded back and forth with each announcement to one another that a task had been completed.

  As they passed one another in the hall, Kay hefted her basket of clean linens and said, “Come help me in Beck’s room for a bit.”

  Rose pulled up short. She’d never been in Beck’s room. Never even cracked the door. It lay at the very end of the hall on the second floor, and she’d never been brave enough to come within five feet of it. Not because he’d forbidden her – he’d never forbidden anything – but because it had felt like an intrusion. She’d never had her own personal space before now, and she treasured it for the gift it was; never wanted to overstep into anyone else’s private domain.

  Kay gave her a little elbow and started up the stairs. “Come on, it’s not that scary. He just never dusts, or picks up after himself, and if I didn’t go in occasionally he’d be swimming in empty mugs and candy wrappers.”

  Candy wrappers? That didn’t sound like Beck at all. Too curious to refuse, she hustled up the steps behind her; Kay was surprisingly quick when she wanted to be.

  “He won’t be mad?” she asked, though, as they turned the corner at the landing.

  Kay made a dismissive sound in her throat. “Beck doesn’t get mad. Not about this sort of thing.”

  But he’d been something that night in the library. Black-streaked hands lighting a cigarette.

  Doubtless it was only her imagination, and the lack of windows in the hall, but the hall seemed to grow colder the closer they got to their destination. The air denser; she swore she felt it swirling around her legs.

  Which was stupid, because Beck had bowed to them in the kitchen a few hours ago, dressed in a threadbare fair isle cardigan, as golden and lovely and sweet as ever. He wasn’t the sort of person who had a lair, that was cold, that would frighten anyone.

  She squared her shoulders, and Kay opened the door, basket balanced on her hip, and Rose walked straight in behind her and wouldn’t allow herself to hesitate.

  The room wasn’t a lair, but it was cold, and it did frighten her, but not in an exaggerated horror-movie sort of way.

  It was dim, and at first full of nothing but the indistinct shapes of furniture corners, until Kay set the basket down with a tsk and went to push the drapes wide, flooding the room with the brightest light they’d had in weeks.

  It was a grand room, a proper master suite, and it dwarfed Rose’s room. A seating area over by the window with tables, chairs, and a sofa. Straight back from the door, a raised dais housed the bed: a massive four-poster with gold-fringed, green velvet bed hangings, a rumpled green coverlet, a huge steamer trunk waiting at its foot. The bedside tables were topped with white-veined green marble, topped with lamps with green and gold shades. Two sets of double doors stood open, and she glimpsed a huge walk-in closet and an elaborate marble bathroom.
/>   “Wow,” she breathed.

  “It’s stupid-fancy,” Kay agreed, distracted. “Oh, look at this.” She was over in the sitting area, gathering mugs. She brought them over to Rose. “Set these in the hall. There’s more on the nightstands.”

  There were, Rose saw when she returned. She hadn’t noticed them at first, lost to the dark, velvet grandeur of the space. But Beck had enough mugs to host a large brunch party scattered across the room, along with the promised candy wrappers, she noticed when she approached the nightstand on the near side of the bed. He had a thing for Werther’s caramels, it seemed, the distinct gold wrappers piled up on the marble. Rose smile as she picked one up and twirled it in the light, the sweet scent wafting toward her. He had so many admirable qualities, but his vices made her smile: the cigarettes, the whiskey. And now she could add old-lady hard candies to the list. It was sweet, really; the color of them matched his eyes and hair. A nostalgic, quirkily charming choice of sweet.

  “I brought a trash bag,” Kay said, producing one from her pocket and snapping it open with a few good shakes. “Let’s start putting those in it. And then I’ll need help with the linens. The bed’s so damn tall and wide I can’t wrestle the sheets by myself. They’re like ship sails!”

  Kay was like a little whirlwind of activity. Wrappers went into the garbage, mugs and spoons went into the hall. Clothes were picked up off the floor and carried out to the laundry chute. It was a distraction, and a good one, at first. But in the midst of tugging the old sheets off the bed, Rose was struck by the obvious – but oh-so-shiver-inducing – realization that this was Beck’s bed. The place where he slept, and dreamed, and maybe had nightmares. The pillow where he laid his head; the sheets he slid between when he was damp and pink from the bath; maybe in silk pajamas; maybe in nothing but his skin. The sheets smelled like him: cedar, and smoke, and faint traces of something muskier that must have been his skin and sweat, his natural scent.

  “Yoo-hoo,” Kay said.

  Rose stood stock still, a corner of sheet held up to her face. She was sniffing it.

  Her face heated, and Kay laughed. “You got lost in fantasyland there for a sec.”

  “No.” Rose went back to wrestling with the sheets, movements clumsy in her haste.

  Kay laughed again, but not unkindly. “Aw, honey, it’s only natural. No shame in it. You’re young, and he’s pretty. Those legs.”

  “Kay!” A helpless laugh bubbled in her throat.

  “Hey, you don’t have to play innocent with me, honey. Every girl’s got her fantasies. No harm done.”

  But Rose hadn’t had any fantasies, per se. Nothing concrete, no particular scenarios that played out in her imagination involving Beck’s long fingers, and longer legs, and the way his hair would fall in his eyes. She noticed the way his pants rode low on his hips; the shadows beneath his collarbones when he undid another button on his shirt. The clean, hard length of his forearms. But she hadn’t thought of touching him any of those places.

  Until now.

  She had the sense of a floodgate being opened, and was shocked by it, even as she bundled up sheets and piled them on the rug, her pulse thumping hard in her temples – and regions farther south.

  She was straightening to go back for the pillow cases when she lifted her head and saw them: the portraits.

  They were on the front wall of the room, to the left of the door; visible from the bed and the sofa, but half in shadow now, in the afternoon, the silver light slanted. She walked toward them, pulled by an inexorable curiosity. She’d studied the portraits on the staircase, aunts and uncles and great-grandparents and second cousins. Beckets from previous decades, and a previous century. But who had pride of place here, in Beck’s room? Only a glance away from the bed. An art light was positioned above them, and she reached for the switch on the wall, and flipped it.

  Beck stared back at her. Two Becks.

  Kay’s voice sounded behind her. “You noticed those, huh? Hard to miss, I guess.”

  “Who…” But she knew who. She just wondered why two.

  “That’s Beck, and Beck’s twin, Arthur.”

  “He has a twin?”

  “Had.”

  She knew a swift, sympathetic jolt of grief for him. She’d never had a sibling, at least not to her knowledge, but to have a brother on your wall beside you like this was a sign of love, and it was a brother he’d lost.

  “What happened?” There was no need to whisper, but Rose felt there was, staring at that familiar face set down in oil – set down twice. The portraits showed the twins in three-quarter turns toward the eye of the painter; they would have faced one another if they’d been able to turn their heads. Same tawny hair, same golden eyes. They were younger, here, no older than she was now, but she could still pick which one was Beck. That particular set to his mouth; the artist was good, had captured the sparkle of his eyes.

  “He was sick. Nothing the doctors could do – it wasn’t contagious. A kind of cancer. He passed about ten – no, eleven years ago, I think.”

  “Poor Beck,” Rose murmured, taking a step closer. There were little brass plaques below each portrait: Arthur Augustus Becket, and Simon Walter Becket.

  Walter. He didn’t look like a Walter…

  Wait. Belatedly, she realized the painting labeled Arthur was the one she’d taken for Beck.

  She looked at them again; took another step and a closer scrutiny. But, no: there was no mistaking the twins. She knew which one was Beck – and it wasn’t the one labeled Simon Walter.

  “A sad story,” Kay said, and patted her shoulder. “Come help me with the fresh sheets.”

  Why are the portraits mislabeled? she wanted to ask, but didn’t. Kay hadn’t mentioned that they were. Did she know? Maybe she’d thought it an unimportant detail. Maybe, given the state of the rest of the room, she’d thought it obvious that Beck didn’t hold any great care for his personal suite.

  She glanced over the vast expanse of bed as she and Kay tucked the fitted sheet in up at the headboard, trying to gauge the other woman, to see if she could sense whether or not she was hiding something. But Kay looked as maternally disgruntled as she had the whole time, so that was–

  Her hand bumped something hard and cool.

  She squatted down on her haunches and managed to lift the corner of the mattress up a fraction; enough to slide her hand deeper, feel for the object, grip it and draw it out.

  A gun. Matte black, heavy in her hand. Loaded.

  “…Rose. Rose?”

  She didn’t know how many times Kay had said her name, only that she’d zoned out. She snapped out of it as Kay’s slippered footfalls came around the end of the bed. Rose stood, gun still in her hand, wishing she’d just shoved it back where she’d found it, but caught now, uncertain.

  “Oh.” Kay’s brows gave a big jump up above the rims of her glasses when she saw what she held. “It’s okay.” She closed the distance between them and held out her own hand. “He’s got all sorts of things tucked away. We’ll put it back.”

  Rose…didn’t hand it over right away.

  “It’s okay,” Kay said again. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

  “I’m not.” And that was the funny thing: she wasn’t.

  Rose didn’t hand over the gun. She knelt again and replaced it. When she stood, and faced Kay, she was surprised to find the woman giving her a strange look, her brow furrowed, mouth pressed flat. Worry.

  “He wouldn’t – I mean, you know Beck’s not the sort to – he doesn’t–” She’d never struggled for her words, and Rose felt a swell of sympathy for her.

  “I know.” It was her turn to say, “It’s okay.”

  Kay huffed out a breath, looking frustrated with herself.

  “I’ve seen the knife he keeps up his coat sleeve,” Rose said. Kay’s hand was still outstretched, trembling faintly, and Rose took it between both of hers, squeezing in what she hoped was a comforting way – she’d never done this for anyone before, but she liked whe
n Beck did it for her. “I’ve seen his holsters. It’s not shocking that he has a gun.” Kay looked very small; her hand felt bony and fragile. “I’m not afraid of him,” Rose said, hearing the warmth in her voice.

  Kay looked up at her, still brimming with worry, and studied her face. Finally, her brow smoothed, and she nodded sharply, once. Pulled away and went back around to the other side of the bed, pointing Rose back to her own corner.

  They got the fitted sheet squared away in silence, and shook the flat one out between them; it bellied up, full of air, throwing off the scent of lavender and clean cotton, fluttering the gold tassels on the bed hangings. Then it settled and they began smoothing it with broad swipes of their palms.

  “When did you see his holsters?” Kay asked. Her voice had lost some of its usual shine. Was instead flat. Guarded, Rose thought. “The night he got Tabby?”

  “No. It was a few weeks ago. I accidently stayed up late reading in the library, and I was still there when he got home.”

  “Oh.” She paused, hands braced on the mattress until Rose met her gaze. Hers was narrow, and dark, and totally foreign. “What did he say?”

  Rose replayed it in her mind, each little detail plucking her nerves with pleasant shivers. The way he’d gripped his whiskey glass; the shadows on his cheeks when he took his first drag; the tension in his throat; and his eyes, always his eyes.

  A portrait she found herself wanting to hold close. Something just for her, and no one else. She said, “I was reading Jane Eyre. We discussed Rochester.”

  Kay stared at her – stared her down. Searching for a crack, waiting for her to flinch. Rose wanted to rewind time, to leave the gun where she’d found it and pretend she’d never noticed it. But, given that wasn’t possible, she wasn’t going to flinch. She’d known Kay long enough now to regret this sudden, oily tension spilled between them, but also to know that, while the woman doubtless had her own secrets and dangerous qualities, Rose wasn’t afraid of her. Not of her or Beck.