And yet, she could not look away.
A thread of something flickered at the edge of her thoughts. A strange, inexplicable connection, like a memory or dream she could not quite grasp. It slipped away, vanishing, a reflection swallowed by rippling water.
Then a whisper came from behind her, soft and indistinct. Cold unrolled over the back of her neck, then pressed, pushing through cloth and skin.
The scent of damp earth and icy metal curled into her nostrils. She went rigid as the air around her grew heavy and dense, pressing against her lungs.
Words swirled through her thoughts, tangled and fragmented.
See me…I am here…
Not her words. Not her thoughts.
She clenched her jaw, ignoring it all, ignoring the way the air changed, the room changed, the way the very fabric of reality quivered around her. She refused to look, refused to let her mask slip.
The stranger still looked up at her window. He had not moved. Not an inch.
Chest heaving, Papa puffed himself up, squared his shoulders and took a step forward.
“Please, go,” she called down to the man through the open window, her voice just loud enough to carry.
“Isa!” Papa cried. His right hand clutched at his chest, knuckles white. His face was flushed, rivulets of sweat streaking his temple and brow. “Close…that…window,” he said through heavy, gasping breaths.
Isabella’s heartbeat turned sharp and frantic with worry.
“Please go,” she repeated, her tone tight and strained. “Leave now, sir.”
The stranger glanced at Papa then turned his gaze back up to her. He dipped his chin in the barest nod.
“As you wish.”
He offered a shallow bow and murmured something low, meant only for Papa’s ears. Whatever he said made Papa’s eyes narrow and his jaw tighten. The stranger turned and walked away, his measured gait marked by the almost imperceptible favoring of his left leg.
Pausing at the end of the street, he turned and looked up at her window once more. He was too far away for her to decipher his expression, but she knew he turned back for her.
Her stomach clenched. Her hands trembled. Deep inside, a feeling of apprehension and inevitability unfurled…a foreboding certainty.
She had not seen the last of him.
And when he returned, he would not be so easily sent away.
Rhys Caradoc did not look back until he reached the corner, and even then, he let himself have only a glimpse of the scene: the gold drape framing brown hair tumbling in dishevelled waves around a pale, oval face; a breath of fog; Barrett, bareheaded before the house, one hand to his chest as if to pin his heart in place.
It had not been his intent to stir the man so.
Isabella.
He had hunted her, and now he had found her.
The hum that lived at the edges of the world, the thin, maddening chorus of unquiet, had settled the moment she had opened the window. Not silent. Never silent now. But even with him standing in the street and her a storey higher, the noise had ebbed as if the wind had changed direction and taken the keening with it. A too-brief respite. A mercy that had allowed him to almost remember the sound of silence.
Madness, he had been told. And for a time, locked away behind a thick door with a wired window, he had believed it.
But what he had learned from the written notes of a dead man had suggested a different answer.
He had come today to buy what could be bought and to measure what could not, to make offers and cajole acquiescence. He had not come to frighten a scholar into apoplexy in his own street.
With a clarity that came too late, he thought of the way the man had said, “swallow her whole.” Not break. Not harm. Swallow. A word with a throat and entirely different implications. He filed it away with the others.
