“Leo,” he said, quieter this time and without the same panic as before.
She stared at his scar. It was just as her memory had fixed it, right down to the jagged apex of the crescent. She opened the kiss lock on her handbag and reached inside for the shard of porcelain from Miss Cynthia’s broken leg. Jasper stood stock-still as she lifted it and aligned its sharp, curved end against his scar. The end she had plunged into the shadowed figure in the attic sixteen years ago.
The shapes were one and the same.
Jasper’s chest began to rise and fall on rapid breaths. He covered her hand, flattening it and the shard of porcelain against his chest. The pounding of his heart reverberated against her skin. Leo stopped breathing as finally, she looked up into his face. His constant expression of brooding indifference slipped. Dread fired through his eyes.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” she whispered. “Tell me it wasn’t you.”
He kept her hand sealed against his chest as he took faster, shallower breaths. He didn’t ask her to explain her meaning. Because he understood perfectly. Leo tore her hand out from under his, her fist closing around the shard again.
“You…youwere the boy I stabbed.” Tears stung her eyes. “Youwere the one who put me in that trunk.”
Jasper’s lips parted, but he said nothing. Leo backed away as the floor, the whole world, felt as though it was disappearing from underneath her. He reached for her, and she slapped his arm away.
“Don’t touch me!”
Jasper held up his one hand that wasn’t gripping the sheet in compliance.
“They sent me,” he said, haltingly. “They sent me to the attic to look for you.”
Leo’s chest caved in.
He took a starting step forward, but she scuttled back, utterly repulsed, feeling as though she might be sick on the floor. He kept his arm raised in surrender.
“Who?” She shuddered. “Who sent you?”
He closed his eyes. “The people I was with. My family.”
Hisfamily? She gaped at him.
“But I heard you crying in the dark, and I couldn’t do it,” he said. Her vision went watery and hot.
“What couldn’t you do?” Though she asked, in her heart, she knew. And she was more afraid to hear him say it than she’d ever been of anything else in her life.
Jasper scrubbed his hand through his hair and down the back of his neck. He wouldn’t look at her. “Kill you.”
A whistling sound built in her ears. It scraped down her body, hollowing her out. A solid wall in her throat barricaded her lungsfrom gathering more air, and a poisonous thought sank through her.
Her voice broke. “Did you kill my family?”
Jasper’s eyes flared. “No.” He came forward, reaching for her and then blocking her battering arms as she tried to slap him away. “No, no, Leo, I didn’t kill them. I didn’t!”
She screamed, and he backed off.
“But you were there. You were with the people who did. Your…yourfamily. My God, Jasper…” She stared at him, her heart breaking. This wasn’t the Jasper she knew, the one the Inspector had known and loved.
He stalked around her toward a tall wooden wardrobe. As he pulled clothing from it, her tears dried in a snap. Leo wanted to hit him; she wanted to hit himhard. She wanted him to hurt like she was hurting.
“Why have you done this? Why have you been lying?” All this time, all these years, he’d lied. To her, to the Inspector, toeveryone. “Whoareyou?”
Jasper held still, the clothing in his hand forgotten. When he turned toward her, Leo knew his face, yet somehow, she’d never seen him before.
“You know who I am, Leo,” he whispered.
She shook her head. “I don’t know you, and Reid isn’t your name. You never did say what it was, did you?” A thought tolled through her, flattening her pulse. “My God, is Jasper even your given name?”
He scrubbed his jaw and hesitated. He wasscared. Even if he’d been fully clothed rather than draped with a bed linen, he would have still appeared exposed and vulnerable.
