“All by your lonesome?” Rohan called as he and Brady ascended the final step up to the Musée.
“So it would appear.”
“Appearances,” Brady said, “can be deceiving.”
“And yet often enough,” Nora replied, “a spade is a spade.”
“What then,” Rohan interjected, “are you?”
“Nothing of note just yet,” Nora answered. She spoke like a person who was used to the quiet of the night, and Rohan’s thoughts went unbidden to Savannah, tohervoice, sharp as diamonds and clear as glass.
“I’m surprised,” Brady told Nora, “that you didn’t intercept Calla in the garden, once Gigi turned her down.”
“What makes you so sure that I did not?”
Rohanshouldhave been sure. He should have known beyond a shadow of a doubt if Nora was bluffing.How very disappointing, he could hear the Proprietor murmuring in his mind, an accusation and admonishment both.
“You saw her?” Brady asked Nora. “Calla?”
“One way or another,” Nora told him, “there is no Calla Thorp anymore.”
“What do you mean,one way or another?” Brady said.
“I’m not the right person to ask that question. I am not in the position to know.”
“But there’s someone who would?” Brady pressed.
Rohan opted for a different question. “The Watcher rejected you? Quite the blow, given how badly you want to be a part of this, whateverthisis.”
“What makes you think that I want to be apartof anything? Maybe…” Nora lowered the volume of her voice, beckoning them to shift toward her. “Maybe,” she said again, “I want to tear it all down.”
“Tear what down exactly?” Brady took two steps into the danger zone, far too close to a person who was far too dangerous to treat lightly. “And why?”
“There’s nothing more dangerous than true believers.”
“True believers in what?” Rohan asked.
Now it was Nora’s turn to step forward. “Look me in the eye,” she told Rohan.
There was just enough moonlight for him to obliger her.
“Are you getting anything else out of me?” Nora asked calmly. “Now or ever?”
It occurred to Rohan that if she’d already intercepted the Woman in Red in the garden, then it was probably not her for whom Nora had been waiting next to this statue in the dead of night.
She’d been waiting for him or for Brady or both, waiting to deliver this very message.
Rohan was very good at reading people. “No,” he said, answering the question she’d asked. Nora would not be giving him anything else he could use, and Rohan’s instincts said that every last piece of information they’d gotten out of her, she’d wanted them to have.
“Am I a threat,” Nora asked Rohan evenly, “to you or yours?”
The Mercy was the only thing Rohan had ever consideredhis, ever wanted to behis, but his fiendish mind went once again to the image of the Grayson sisters lying prone on the garden path.
Rohan forced the image down and answered Nora’s question about whether she was a threat to those he considered his. “No.”
“Are there others,” Nora prompted, “from whom you could seek the answers you desire? People who are not me?”
This time, Brady was the one who replied. “Yes.”
