“I think I’m offended,” Officer Burke said, “that you think I would come into a hostage situation set up by a dangerous criminal alone. Especially since you’re well-informed enough to know how I feel about William Cartwright. This property is surrounded, Mister Albany. Over one hundred officers. We were already quite conveniently mobilized thanks to your disastrous effort to bring Emilia Banks’s stolen property into Darrington.”
Garrett Albany was no longer smiling.
Hannah Burke inclined her head with icy dignity. “It would be best if you surrendered,” she said. “There’s no scenario where you make it out of here alive.”
“Is there?” Albany stepped back. He wrapped one arm around Will’s neck. Placed the glowing barrel of the firepistol against his temple. Will whimpered. Chris ached. Albany smiled again. “You’re right. I am well-informed. Hannah Burke, is it? You’d do anything for this lad, I hear.”
“I could take you out right now,” Officer Burke snapped.
There was an edge in her voice.
Albany heard it.
His smile curled across his face like a happy cat, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Before I pull the trigger? Before one of my Young Bloods does it for me? If you shoot, I shoot, and this becomes a bloodbath, Officer. And would you believe that this isn’t even a quarter of my people? You could comfort yourself in your last moments that you’d cut off the head of my wicked movement, but consider that we might be more hydra than dragon.” He laughed. “I’ll bet that Hector Combs is regretting his campaign against Francis, now that it’s created me. What will your legacy be, Officer?”
Officer Burke didn’t so much as blink, but her words were brittle. “What do you want?”
“There we are!” Albany said happily. “I knew I could find the hostage negotiation training up in your brain, somehow, Officer Burke. Hannah. Might I call you Hannah?” When Burke didn’t reply, he shook his head. “Icy, aren’t you? Ah, well. You know what I want. I’ve already said it. I want Miss Buckley.”
“You can’t have her,” Chris growled.
“Turn yourself in and let everyone go,” Burke said. “We’ll have her visit you once a month.”
“Oh, please. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Burke’s jaw worked. Her eyes swept across the room, taking in all twenty-plus young people, all of their weapons, all of their dead-eyed, stone-faced expressions. “They surrender,” she said. “All of them. Your sister, too.”
“Absolutely not. I’ve only just got Rachel back. She comes with me. And Katie, too.” Albany laid his hand on the pretty blonde’s shoulder. “I need her, you see. We’re going to be married. It would be inhuman to split us apart.”
“But all the others?”
“Is that an actual offer?”
“… yes.”
“Interesting…” Albany mused.
Chris couldn’t listen to this. He struggled to his feet. “You can’t bargain with someone else’s life!” he gasped out. “Rosemary isn’t a tool! She’s not a pawn! You can’t—”
A hand touched his wrist.
Rosemary stared up at him. Her face was stony. Her jaw was set. Her eyes glittered like sapphires, hard and brilliant.
She turned to Albany.
“I come with you, only you, and you let everyone else go?”
His smile was chilling. “Tempting, isn’t it, pet?” he asked. His voice was like a velvet ribbon.
“Rosemary, no,” Chris said, gripping his sister’s shoulders and pulling her to him. “Haven’t you heard anything he’s said? Everything he’s done? He’s a monster! They’re all monsters. He wants to do exactly what I swore no one ever would: use you and drain you dry, only he doesn’t even have good, idiotic, short-sighted intentions! If you go with them… Rosie….”
“If I go with them,” Rosemary said and put her hands flat against his chest to push him away. Her arms were surprisingly strong. She looked up at him. “If I go with them, Chris, then everyone here walks away, the bad ones in chains and the good ones to fight another day and he can’t make me do anything. No one can make me do anything.”
“I’ve done everything I can possibly do to keep you out of danger. I’ve given up everything I can to protect you. I’ve dedicated my life to taking care of you,” he said, swallowing about a thousand and one things. “Is this how it ends?”
“Yes,” Rosie said, quietly. “This is where I start to take care of myself.”
She walked across the floor to Garrett Albany.
“Lovely little speech,” he said.
“I meant every word,” she shot back.
“Well,” he said. “We’ll see.”
He looked over his followers. They all met his eyes unflinchingly. “Family is family,” he said. “I trust you blighters to keep that in mind?”
“Blood is blood,” they all echoed.
All but his sister, crying quietly at his side. “Rach?” he prodded. “Come now. You got what you wanted. Best case scenario! No one else gets hurt. Isn’t that what you always say? Don’t you owe me this, after all I’ve done for you? After the horrible things, I’ve stood with you during! You owe me this, Rachel.”
She looked up at him. Tears stained her red face. “Blood is blood,” she whispered.
“This is where you want to be, isn’t it, Rachel? With me. Here with me. This is where you belong.”
She wiped tears. Nodded.
And he smiled.
“Ah. You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear those words, my dear sister. Charming.” He nodded his satisfaction. He extended a gallant arm to Miss Woodruff, who took it tenuously. Chris didn’t think he imagined the darkness lurking behind her expression. He wished he could make Rosemary see it, too. She’s vulnerable. She might help you. Go to her, Rosie.
“Goodbye, Rachel,” Albany said sweetly. “Maybe now you’ll see what it’s like to be left to rot, the way you left me.”
“I….”
Rachel swayed on her feet and then collapsed to the floor.
Garrett Albany looked as if he’d just eaten the world’s most satisfying meal.
“All right, then. Katie, Miss Buckley, and I are leaving now. You all know the signal. If I don’t give it in ten minutes, shoot every single hostage and copper you can get your hands on before they take you down.” He smiled at Officer Burke. “Just in case your unis get it in their minds to arrest me.”
“I’ll accompany you out,” Officer Burke said. “As far as the gate. Just to ensure that none of them feel like seeking glory.”
“Don’t doubt they’ll do it,” Albany said. “After all, my people were all willing to shoot their own faces off after our little show at the Piffleman’s this summer.”
He went to move, and then stopped all at once. The thoughtful expression on his face seemed very much like that of an actor on stage. Once again, he pulled that bundle of yellowed paper from inside his breast pocket. “I suppose you’d like to have this, Mister Buckley. Mister Cartwright. The lifetime of work from Doctor Cartwright. His passion, his purpose for living. So much insight. So much research. So much knowledge. You could unlock every secret to your gift, Christopher. You might even be a match for Rachel, someday.”
He turned and threw the pages into the fire.
He swept out like a king. Miss Woodruff on his arm seemed more slave than queen. Rosie trailed behind. Chris watched her. He watched her brilliant mind working. He watched her weighing her options. He watched her already planning how to disembowel the blasted beast from inside its belly.
“Rosie,” he called.
She turned.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m proud of you. I believe in you.”
She smiled. Nodded.
Moments later, they were gone.
What felt like a lifetime later, but couldn’t have been even ten minutes, Albany’s people all threw down their weapons as one. They offered their hands to the police officers who flooded the house, and they went quietly into
the night.
ime slowed to a torturous crawl.
Minutes passed like hours and hours like days. Words seemed to lose meaning. People asked him questions. About everything that had happened at Summergrove. About Sister Margaret, or Margaret McKenna, or Margaret MacLean, or whichever of those names was really her. About Emilia Banks, about Maris Dawson, about Will and Olivia and Livingstone and Norwood and Rosie.
Rosie.
People put food in front of him. He ate it. It tasted like nothing. Olivia sat beside him, tried to talk, but he couldn’t understand anything she said. Her words seemed to turn to droning sounds. He only felt anything at all when she wrapped her arms around him and held him. After that, he fell asleep on a couch in an interrogation room at the precinct.
Someone found him and sent him home. He stood on a street corner for maybe an hour and maybe three hours and maybe five minutes before a cabbie stopped and asked him if he was headed somewhere and whether he would like a lift.
The Buckley estate was empty of life and full of ghosts. Rosie. Fernand. Will. Will was in the hospital, they said. He needed care. He could lose the leg or the use of it. He couldn’t have visitors, not until he was out of the woods. Chris stood before the mirror. If he summoned up Olivia, would her words still be the buzzing of insects, or would she be real? Would there be comfort he could take from her words?
He couldn’t remember the frequency at her flat.
He thought to call an operator, but could he speak to a stranger? He could barely speak to a friend. He found himself shivering, but he wasn’t cold. His fingers looked blue in the mirror. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
Was he sick?
Maybe.
He didn’t remember leaving the estate, or finding another cab, or climbing the four flights of stairs—the lift was still out, he thought the doorman had told him. He knocked at a door with a 4 and a J on it, and Olivia Faraday answered in a royal purple and rich fuchsia dressing robe.
She drew him inside.
He discovered a blanket around his shoulders and a throw pillow in his lap. Olivia was saying something in the kitchen, something he couldn’t hear. Tremaine weaved between his legs, meowing his anxiety, but Abigail, who was usually shy with Chris, climbed into his lap and began to knead the pillow, purring hard enough to vibrate his thighs. Perhaps he had custody of her pillow. He hesitated and then began to pet her in long, gentle strokes. She rattled against his hand, settling down into a shape that resembled a loaf of bread with a cat’s head on the front, her eyes closing and then opening in time with her purring.
“Pathetic.”
He looked up in dismay. It felt as if the word was the first thing he had heard clearly, experienced clearly since Rosemary had walked out of the Cartwright house with Garrett Albany. And it was something so cruel, so… true….
Olivia must have seen something in his expression because she flinched. The tea tray she held rattled ominously, and she hurried forward. “Gods, no, don’t look at me like that. Not you. Never you, Christopher. The cats. They’re pathetic, they’ll throw themselves into the arms of whoever looks most likely to shower them with affection, it’s not—” She set the tray down on a table and then she was with him, beside him. She sat on the arm of the chair and then her long, delicate fingers were in his hair, combing it back, touching him, pulling his head to her breast. “Not you,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.”
Something… broke.
He drew in a breath, and it was a sob. It scraped through his throat, and it hurt, and he shook. He shook all over. He trembled like a leaf in an autumn wind, like a police officer bleeding out from a knife strike to the throat, like a winged carriage held aloft by three sung sylphs, like a man who’d been shot in the leg and had to sit there thinking he might be about to die, like a scared fourteen-year-old girl out there in the world with a monstrous man who could do any number of awful, awful….
He tried to breathe out. In. His lungs didn’t work. Breath didn’t come; tears did. His throat was aflame. His fingers found themselves buried like claws in Olivia’s robe. His entire middle was on fire. He might throw up. His shoulders wouldn’t stay still. He heaved, he jerked, he convulsed, and he wept.
By the time Olivia stood up and poured tea, the night was heavy. The moon shone through the windows, and the room had gone quite dark. She absently tapped a lamp, which swirled a salamander to life. “Tea’s cold,” she said.
He swallowed hard. He drew in a shuddering breath. The place where his face had pressed against her robe was utterly soaked.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“You really ought to have some sugar in it. Black tea is ghastly cold.”
“No, thank you.”
She sighed. “If you insist.”
The cup and saucer she handed him were more lukewarm than cold. Despite the temperature, there was still a comfort in sipping at it, and he held it close to him.
She sat in the closest chair, this time. He was glad for the distance. Things seemed more… concrete, now, and he was embarrassed by how he’d clung to her and bawled as if she was his mother. Tremaine curled up around her shoulders in an instant. Chris was strangely happy when Abigail didn’t leave her warm spot in his lap. He thought he might break again if the cat left him, silly as it was.
“I think she’ll survive him, Chris,” Olivia said eventually into the quiet. “She’s a fighter, and she’ll outlive us all.”
His stomach did three consecutive backflips, but he nodded solemnly. He couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t think about her with him. He believed in her, Gods, he did. She was the strongest person he’d ever known. She wasn’t the little brat who’d sworn to him that she’d bind for the first traditionalist who came looking for her. She knew what she believed in, and it was what Emilia Banks had given to her: a future where Tarls lived without categorization. Where they lived better lives.
Yes. She could survive Albany. He believed that.
But who would she be, after?
“What about Maris?” he asked quietly.
“No change,” Olivia said, rubbing Tremaine under his black chin. “Mother had me on the mirror not long before you showed up at my door. She’s… holding the place together. Beyond devastated about Rosemary.” A cruel twist touched Olivia’s lips. Her free hand fisted. “Would you believe,” she said, so mildly that the tension was all the more obvious, “that I truly think she loves your sister? I think she’s most heartbroken that a potential heir to Miller is in the wind.” She shook her head and sighed. “Honestly. Honestly, she’s had a day of it, too. Blood everywhere. At least one staff member dead, with others missing. No obvious choice to take over the stables. Guests terrified and confused. Are there agents still on her property? It seems likely there’s at least one. I suppose not even the country is free from politics.” She sighed. “My entirely safe childhood home certainly turned into the most dangerous, politically motivated place in Tarland, didn’t it?”
Chris looked into the depths of his tea. He stirred the ball of leaves, watching colour spread from them. The rich russet reminded him of the colours of the trees in the country. He shook his head. “That was my fault,” he murmured. “I sent Rachel there.” He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair. “I can’t believe what an idiot I’ve been. All of this, it’s all me. I put Rosie in all of this danger. It’s all on me because I couldn’t question the intentions of a woman I admired.”
“Stop that.” Olivia clucked her tongue, sounding annoyed. “She was good at what she did. She was damned good. I think she’s been doing it for a very long time. Moreover… in truth, I think her affection for both you and Rosemary was quite real. I don’t think it was so unreasonable that you didn’t see this part of her.”
He opened his eyes. “But you saw it. Gods, how did you know?”
Olivia shrugged one shoulder. Tremaine grumbled at being disturbed. “First off, I didn’t know. I suspected, and far too late, at that. By the time I had an idea that she was
working against us, all her plans were in motion. I just… there were too many little things. How determined she was that we would have to personally negotiate with her brother. How doggedly set she was on being there herself. Her assurances being the entire reason we didn’t take more precautions when going after Norwood. Oh, and the little fact that she knew about Mabelle’s death before we told her! I assumed you said something, idiot as you can be, but…” She shook her head. “Pieces. A million tiny pieces. Slips of the tongue, micro expressions. All come together too late.”
“I trusted her.”
“Which made it harder for me to see it! But don’t feel bad, Christopher. In all honesty—you had no reason not to.”
“I spent so much time with her. She told me things. I should have known.”
“How do you think I feel? I first met the damned woman half a year ago, and she operated in my plain sight. I’m supposed to smell lies. She passed them right under my nose.” Olivia shook her head. And then she eyed him carefully. “She had an advantage over everyone. Who can even say how many worms she put into people’s minds? It’s a powerful thing… playing with someone’s head. Their heart. She’s frighteningly powerful, with her combined gifts. To be able to read someone and then overwrite it? I can’t even imagine how thoroughly she’s been manipulating people her entire life. Has she done it to you?”
Chris lowered his gaze. A knot tied in his belly. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I’ve never–I’m not sure she can, after what happened when I tried to–and then, I think she was blocking me somehow, with Albany—it’s….”
“Christopher.”
He hung his head.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Christopher?”
He swallowed hard. And searched deeply for an answer. And came up empty. “I don’t know,” he said.
“How long have you been able to do it?”
“Actually control it? Since… since the day we arrested Elisa Kingsley for the serial killings in the Church. That was the first time I really understood what it was… how it could be used. But—do you remember Grapevine?”
Olivia smiled faintly. “My shin still aches when a storm rolls through, so, yes. I doubt I’ll be forgetting the events of that day any time soon.”
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