“It’s just business between us now, then?”
He sighed, flicked ash onto Tamir’s carpet. “Yes.”
I nodded, trying desperately to hold on to whatever pieces in my chest remained intact. It was no more than I’d expected, but twice as painful.
“You don’t have to say yes to this,” Patrick said slowly, as though it wereonly us two now. He stepped away from the window toward me but halted in his tracks. Lord, his face was handsome—salt in the wound. “You’ve got choices. If you don’t want a part in it, you can leave.”
“Leave?” John stood abruptly from the bed. “Wait a minute, miss. ’Fraid we can’t let you do tha—”
“She’ll go where she pleases,” Patrick said with a threatening finality. “And you’ll not be doin’ a fuckin’ thing to stop her.”
Something passed between the two men. “Tell me, Patty,” John said, his voice turning low, dangerous. “Who’s the chairman of the Union now? Did you usurp me in my absence, son?”
Patrick’s expression flattened, and I thought of all the times he’d refused the title of chairman, as though he’d been forced to the summit of his father’s venture and found he disliked the height.
He’d been willing to do many things, hadn’t he? To get his father back.
“You’ve been gone too long, Dad,” Patrick said. “Too fuckin’ long. And now things have changed.”
I swallowed.
John inhaled and jutted his jaw as Gunner had. “We need her, son.”
“Only if she wants to help,” Patrick repeated. “But, she’s free to leave. I’ll insist upon it.”
“Will you now?” John said, chuckling mirthlessly. “Lord, boy. How deep are you?”
Patrick didn’t answer. His expression was unreadable, John’s veneered in dark amusement.
Patrick returned his attention to me. “What is it you want, then?”
WhatdidI want?
I wanted to turn back the hand of the clock. To be a simple person with simple troubles, who had taken only bluff and left the National House with Patrick that day when we were twelve. I wanted to see Kenton Hill restored and revive the dead. I wanted to rip the ache from within me. Tanner, Shop, the House, their soldiers with their bayonets—they’d taken everything.
This itch for idium was never quiet, never satisfied. In truth, though, itwasn’t idium that I cared for. How often had my medium become a gun to my head? Perhaps I should want to run. I felt the coil in my muscles now, willing me to seek safety in solitude. Loving someone was dangerous, and it would hurt to stay, to see Patrick every day and know he’d loved me once. I could escape back into the folds of Belavere and learn to live with an empty chest.
But I didn’t want that.
I didn’t want to take on a new name and new lies and let the idium ebb until I was none of the things I’d ever been.
I wanted someone to hurt.
I felt it burgeoning in me: a yearning for blood. Shop’s perhaps, or the man who’d pulled the lever on my mother, or the coppers at the docks. I wanted to feel as I had when the earth clogged Tanner’s ears and mouth and jammed his airways—like no one could touch me.
And here was Patrick, offering me a way. Generations of idium, he’d said. A fair fight. If Iwasa knife, then I could rip and slash and gouge until the aching ebbed. It wasn’t idium I wanted. It was revenge.
“If we succeed,” I said, “I want to bury those lords myself.”
A shadow rippled across Patrick’s face. He nodded and stepped away.
“Then we’ll find ourselves that Scribbler,” he said. “We begin tomorrow.”
CHAPTER NINETEENNINA
I welcomed sleep, yet the first evening spent in The Mistress was restless.
The stairwell was irregularly filled with frantic footsteps, drunken murmurs, and once, howling laughter. The walls of the building seemed to hold the echoes of bedsprings and headboards, and I heard the knocking well into the night.
