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Though it infuriated him that he should view this as a loss. When he had lost so many other things of far greater value than the innocence of a girl he should have forgotten by now.
“I think she thought you would recognize me. Or maybe she only hoped you might.” Madelyn shrugged, but he couldn’t quite believe her insouciance. Not quite. “Either way, you don’t.”
“And every time you say that, it becomes all the more clear that I should.” And he didn’t like how he felt, so he took it out on her. He didn’t pretend otherwise. He tilted his head to one side. “Tell me your name.”
The way she looked at him then was...mutinous. He saw her nostrils flare as if she was fighting an intense reaction. He watched that glittering thing in her gray gaze, deeper than any meretemper.
All he did was wait. He felt the cold wind on his face, the press of the damp. He could smell a new snowstorm coming in, this high up.
But snow wasn’t lightning. He would do well to remember that.
Like all the other things he’d forced himself to remember on this mountain. To learn. The silence here was a blaring thing. The elements were teachers, leading him out of his scandalous, wasteful past and into this dark future.
Making him into a weapon.
Making him nothing at all but vengeance.
Until now, Paris Apollo had been grateful for all of these things. He found he resented this woman for awakening all the other parts of him that he’d cast aside when he’d come here, broken and grieving and determined to fix what had happened the only way he could.
“Madelyn,” she offered. Eventually. But she didn’t sound agreeable or obedient. Her gaze darkened as she glared back at him, as if she resented him right back. As if she dared that, too. She cleared her throat. “Madelyn Jones.”
And her name in her own voice rang in him. Like a scrap of a forgotten song. A lyric, maybe, though the melody was lost. Though he told himself he was no singer, and he knew no good could come of recalling that long-ago night in a Cambridge pub, he said, “I know that name.”
“My last name is Jones.” Her tone was as suspiciously bland as her gaze was a storm cloud. “People do tend to recognize it. What with it being common as dirt and all.”
“Was that an attempt to be scathing?” he asked, and then he smiled like it was still two years ago. As if he had nothing to think about but the pursuit of his own pleasure. As if all he was or ever would be was lazy and at his ease, a wastrel through and through. “I should warn you, I’m impossible to shame.”
She shifted her weight and he got the distinct impression that he had somehow lived down to her worst expectations of him. The old Paris Apollo would have delighted in it.
Or so he told himself.
When he had a sneaking suspicion that she was the only person still alive that he had ever really wanted to impress.
Maybe a part of him still did.
That notion told him, in no uncertain terms, that it really was time to leave the Hermitage, regardless of any looming power grabs from the likes of Konos. Or the constitutional crises some ministers seemed to imagine he would ever let happen.
“I don’t require a personal connection with you to know how shameless you are,” Madelyn was saying, which he supposed wasn’t a lie. Not quite. “I live in the world, Paris Apollo. Even all the way in the darkest wilds of America, your every exploit has been foisted upon us all since you were born.”
“Some people detest their celebrity, particularly when they did not choose it themselves.” He studied her closely but still could not seem to find the Madelyn he’d known so well in her face. Only the image of her over the cool gaze of a woman he would have called a stranger. “I have never been one of them.”
Another one of her judgmental little sniffs. “I’m not sure that I would brag about that.”
“Madelyn Jones. Improbably American, when I have never set foot on that continent. Worryingly dispatched to the Hermitage by Angelique Silvestri herself. The mystery goes deeper and deeper.”
“I’m sorry you find this mysterious, though, if I’m honest, I do, too. It wasn’t my idea to hunt you down up here. Everyone grieves in their own time, after all.”
“Angelique is a master manipulator. If she sent you here, she has a reason.”
“That doesn’t mean that I know her reason.”
“And yet, Madelyn Jones, I think you do.” He wanted to reach out and touch her. He refrained. Furiously. “Why don’t you tell me what Angelique thinks your presence here will achieve?”
He thought she would fob him off again. Go round and round another circle.
His hand itched as ifnotrunning his palm over the damp cascade of blond hair before him was a kind of torture.
And watched her as she clearly weighed pros and cons he couldn’t name. He couldseethose scales in her gray eyes.
