Partick scowled. “It don’t matter,” he said. “Listen to me. We need to run.”
But I was turning on my heel. And somehow, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, Polly was still there, between the fallen card tables and buckled chairs. She was kneeling, hands raised.
Patrick laid eyes on Polly.
“Don’t shoot,” she said to him, not quite meeting his eye. Tears shook off her lower lip.
The building groaned. Plaster molding fell. But Patrick had stilled. A tick made its way into his neck, and then his jaw.
Without saying a word, he leveled his gun at her and advanced.
It was Theodore who put himself in Patrick’s path. He lifted his hands. “Pat,wait!”
Patrick halted, the back of his neck burning red. “Move out of the way.”
“No,” Theo said, and the sirens howled on. They seemed closer now. “Don’t shoot her. Youneedher.”
“Time to go, Patty!” John called. “Before the whole fuckin’ thing collapses!”
“She’s the Scribbler,” Theodore insisted, Patrick’s gun now aligned with Theo’s own chest, Polly whimpering behind him. “The one you’re looking for.”
“We gottago, Pat!” John shouted.“Now!”
Patrick inhaled once, twice. Then pushed Theodore aside easily. He took Polly by her upper arm and hoisted her to standing. She kept her chin to her chest and closed her eyes.
“Whether you live or die,” he said, ushering her forward. “Will depend on what you do next.”
We left Rickers through servant halls and stairwells, Patrick holding Polly at gunpoint, me following in a haze. We were already in a back alley when I realized Theodore had his arm around my waist and was holding me upright.
John picked me up the way one would a child and deposited me inside the coach.
Beneath dim lamplight, we escaped to the street. Police coaches careened toward the club’s entrance, the road behind us flooding with shaken Artisans, their evening wear now garish, their night turned abruptly sober and discordant.
On the air, following us down the steep decline, was the repeated murmur of my name as it was passed from person to person.
Nina Clarke was here.
The earth Charmer.
The lord’s assassin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXPATRICK
On Patrick and Polly Prescott’s first meeting, she’d been face down on a pier, her nose bent and bleeding against the sodden wood.
She’d been grateful to see him that time, and doubly grateful for the bullets in her two assailants.
As he recalled, she was conscious as he rolled their sorry bodies off the docks and into the wash. They would catch in the nets, or else curl bloated against the pylons, he told her. She didn’t need to worry.
He saw her brand then, the whorls of Idia’s hair fanning out beneath the hem of her sleeve, and he helped her to her feet.
She’d been just as rattled then as she was now: eyes wide as a deer’s, her breaths escaping in tiny gasps. Patrick had guessed she was moments from collapse. “What’s your name?”
“Polly,” she’d murmured. “Prescott.”
He’d pitied her. How could he not? Artisan or no, there was a certain place in hell for a pig who used his body against an innocent. “And what breed of swank are you, Polly Prescott?”
It was there in the paper cuts lacing her fingertips, in the mere fact that she was in Dorser, too far east of the river for any lady with a brand on her arm.
