I moved around him, tired of the charade, shaking now. I stepped on the feet of the onlookers, pushed through gaps until I was right over her shoulder. Close enough to see her cards, the five of hearts morphing into an ace. Close enough to see her pupils dilate in fear when she looked up at me.
“Good evening, Polly,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREENINA
Polly Prescott was unchanged.
Unless you considered the gown she wore, her red-painted lips, and the deep circles beneath her eyes.
She didn’t wear a wig like I did. Didn’t hide from her name.
The music thundered on, the dealer called for the first player, the spectators drank and fumbled for parts of one another and took no notice of the slow collapse between me and her.
Could she feel it? The depth of her knife in my back.
Her eyes told me she could, that the guilt of it had whittled her down to nearly nothing. She looked furtively over my shoulder to Theo, terror turning her ashen. “Nina,” she said simply, on a breath. “Please.”
The hole inside me expanded, swallowing me. I shook my head, displaced tears on the brim. Here she was, in all this finery, while Kenton Hill swept its ashes into piles.
I turned to take the pistol from Theo’s jacket pocket. The bodies pressed in; someone laughed raucously and dropped their champagne glass. The dealer flaunted his shuffle to a rapt audience. No one saw the glint of steel as I pressed it to Polly’s side. “Get. Up,” I said, voice shaking. “And walk.”
Polly’s eyes closed, and when she opened them, I saw surrender. She stood.
“Nina,” Theo warned, his hand at my elbow, his mouth at my ear. “Nina, put the gun away.Now.”
But my hand was cinched so tightly I thought I might fuse myself with it. It shook uncontrollably in my hand. Everything shook.
The chandeliers overhead rattled and swayed, the band stopped mid-song as the celloist toppled sideways from his stool. Dancers and cardplayers shouted and grabbed hold of banisters, of one another. The sound of breaking glass rebounded. “Union attack!” they shrieked.
“Stop, Nina!” Theo panted in my ear, his hand around mine, trying to pry my fingers from the pistol. I was barely aware of anything but the tremor in my core, finding pathways into my blood, into the earth. The balcony teetered. Polly lost her balance.
“Nina!” Theodore pleaded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURPATRICK
The coach and its nags perched by a coal bin in a muddy alley.
Patrick leaned against the coach’s exterior with his father, accepted a cigarette when he offered it.
“Got us a few provisions earlier,” John said, lighting his own with a match, then Patrick’s. He took a deep draw, as though he wished to suck the marrow from it. “Lord almighty,” he said, curls of smoke unfurling from his lips. “Even better than I remembered.”
Patrick might as well have been ten years old following his father out onto Main Street after supper. John pointing up to the night sky and saying “See, son, even the moon has its eye on me.”
Patrick looked skyward now, drew on his cigarette, tried to imagine Kenton Hill, his brothers, his mother, Nina in a pale blue dress bursting through the pub door. He exhaled, feeling a heavy bout of homesickness pervade him. He’d never been away from Kenton so long.
“There’ll be snow on the ground back home,” John said then, as though he could read Patrick’s mind, see the quarry and the hills and their snail-shell town curled up in the middle. “The water’ll start freezin’ in the tanks.”
“The Coal Works held,” Patrick grunted. Theodore sprang to mind, sending torrents of water over its rooftop. “Gunner’ll turn on the boilers to heat the tanks.”
Gunner, with a knife in his gut, blood seeping through his fingers.
Partick’s stomach twisted.
His father clapped him on the shoulder. “No tougher pelt ever seen than the one on Gunner Colson. I’m sure he’s healed already.”
But Patrick couldn’t see how, not if the infantry had raided their bluff stores and taken it all.
John sighed. “You were always the solemn one.” He threw his stub to the ground, crushing it with his boot. “So bloody serious. Take after your ma.”
