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“Darling.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
HENRY
It was stupid to think that if she wasn’t conscious, it would be easier to kill her. It’s not. The last forty-five minutes have dragged by as I’ve watched her sleep in the bed where I first fucked her. There’s something poetic that she should die on the same bed she bled for me.
“Henry, you’re not listening to me,” Percival says as he steps in front of me, wrapping his hand around the blade in my hand. “You don’t want to do this.”
“She betrayed me.” I glimpse around him to the bed. “And traitors don’t get to live.”
The words choke me. I can’t breathe around them. Can’t swallow down the bile that burns up my throat at the thought of killing her. I could’ve and should’ve done it out there. But even now, with all the shit that’s been brought to me, I know that she deserves better. She deserves more than to die on the cobbles like the others I’ve killed.
“We both know she would never have whispered a word to a soul.”
Percival’s too soft—this is why we keep most of the plotting from him. He knows the essentials so that he can keep the right people happy, but aside from that, he’s left ignorant. His job is to keep this place running and bring the right whispers to my ears as he did for my father.
“It’s her,” I tell him. “Your mole is her.”
A long laugh rumbles from him with a shake of his head. “James would have slapped you by now. Probably thrown you in the fire until you woke up to the smell of your own arse burning.”
“My arse is burning, Percival. All our arses are on fucking fire.” Twisting his wrist brusquely, I remove his hand from the blade. “The King isn’t going to last much longer, Arthur keeps fucking up with the wrong fucking people, and on top of that, we have Gangs of London on our doorstep while the Republicans feed off their chaos.”
“And at what point did you conclude that Eve is the one feeding your enemy?”
“Our enemy. If I go down, this entire place goes down in blazing glory.”
I push him out of the way so that I have a clear view of Eve. Like the first time I saw her, my blood boils with the need to destroy her, and at the same time, every memory we’ve made together makes me want to venerate her. Because, like this, she’s still a goddess. The rise and fall of her chest still remind my lungs to breathe.
“Andrew.” I blow out a long breath.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I hand it to him with the email with all the information Andrew got on her open. There’s something unsettling about the nonchalant way he’s nodding along while he reads and zooms into the photos.
“Why aren’t you surprised?” I ask, flicking the knife closed and pushing it into the damp pocket of my hoodie.
“I’ve always had a special admiration for your mother. She was always one step ahead of everything. But once in a while, she always takes it too far.”
“Why are we talking about my mother?”
“Because she played us good and proper, Henry.” He lets out a long, exasperated sigh while he rolls his neck back and forth, pacing alongside the bed while he watches Eve with pity and regret. “Has it ever crossed your mind how odd it is that someone with such a rare blood condition would wind up here in our midst?”
“Not particularly. If anything, I begrudge the fact that she came to me after he died. He would’ve known how to help her.”
“There’s hope for you yet,” he chuckles lightly with a shake of his head.
The way he’s acting is odd, and I don’t like that he seems to know a lot more than he’s letting on. I’ve trusted Percival because my father trusted him too. He was his confidant and a true friend. I thought that maybe he would be to me what he was to him once he’d had the chance to mourn his loss. But maybe I was wrong on this front too.
“You have the right information about Eve, your father, and Alastair, but not the context. Nor do you have all the facts, Henry.”
Standing, I gesture for him to sit on the chair I vacated. I know I’m grasping onto every straw I can, looking for anything I can to absolve her so I can keep her. But after all of this, I don’t know whether she would want me still.
“Enlighten me,” I say when he sits and flicks over the information in the email again.
“One in a million,” he states, narrowing his gaze on Eve.
“Pardon?”
“Your father used to call her a phenomenon. Less than eight thousand people in this world have her condition, but your father found her. It was like finding a needle in a haystack.” Turning my phone towards me, he points out all the dates that Andrew found footage of Eve visiting my father’s office at the hospital. “All these dates correlate with blood samples that your father sent off to a lab in Scotland where they were studying the clotting habits to figure out a way of slowing down the King’s cancer.”
