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John asked, very softly, “Did you like that?”
“Does it matter? If there’s something you want from me, you can take it. I owe you that. More.”
“No. No, no—Sam, that’s not what I meant to—” John took a step back, collided with a bookcase, lost feline poise for a second. “If you didn’t want—then I just—”
“I did,” Sam said, because, again, precision. Necessary. “I wanted it. You. Like that. I’d reciprocate, but you wouldn’t let me.”
John swore again, under his breath. His face was pale. “I’m sorry, too.”
“For reminding me I’m not a hero? I know I’m not.”
“No, but—” John glanced around the room, as if seeking assistance; Sam saw him take in rigid bookshelves, clean desk, blank walls. “You don’t believe in comfort? In decoration? In color?”
“I don’t need any of that.”
“You mean you think you don’t deserve it.”
“I mean I don’t need it.” Maybe sitting down would help. His chair was large. Familiar. Leather. The leather did not in fact help. “You should leave. Take Torie’s last painting. Put it wherever you’ve got the other two—I don’t want to know. I won’t look for them. Kit—Constable Thompson—and Viscount Sommersby won’t say anything.” Kit and Harry were friends. And they owed him, for sending Kit on the case that’d introduced the two of them.
John hadn’t moved. “I was going to give it to you. The last one. As a present.”
“Kind of you, but I can’t keep stolen art.”
“No. Chief Magistrate of the Preternatural Division. I nearly forgot.” But John’s expression couldn’t manage to be as sarcastic as his voice. More incredulous. “You’d lie about a case for me.”
“I’ve already done worse, tonight.”
John shut his eyes as if that’d hurt. “Sam—”
“It’s not as if you’ve killed anyone—no, don’t tell me if you have, I can’t know—”
“I haven’t killed anyone!”
“Thank you for that. It’s only art. Three paintings. I can…do something. I don’t know yet. And it’s family.”
“Family.” John took a hesitant step back toward the desk, then another. Then leaned a hip against Sam’s desk, right next to the chair, so close he’d be touchable. If Sam reached out. Put a hand on his waist. Pulled him closer. If, if.
John said, “You haven’t heard anything from Edmund, have you?”
“Why would I?” Their only other surviving half-sibling, the son of Viscount Phineas Rookwood and his first wife Matilda, had, the last time they’d spoken, informed Sam that he was a disgrace to the family and disloyal to boot. Sam hadn’t argued, though not for the reasons Edmund thought. “He doesn’t think either of us should exist.”
“No, he pretends I don’t exist. You’re entirely respectable. Powerful. Successful. He should want to have you on his side.”
“I work for a living, and I spent years and money trying to find you.”
“So you’re a traitor to the family.”
“Aren’t I?”
“How can you say that, when you—oh, gods.” John reached out, not stopping himself this time. Hand on Sam’s shoulder. With force. “You were the only one trying to help. To do anything for anyone else, in that house. Me, my mother, our sister. And you were here, when I wasn’t—when Torie died, and—”
“Don’t.”
“I wanted to be angry with you. And then I wanted to forgive you. And then I wanted to be angry again, because you had everything so under control, your position, your constables, your life—you’d been fine without me, going on without me, when I—” John’s hand tightened. Pressing into Sam’s shoulder. “I wanted you to see me. To care. To feel as—as unmoored as I did. Do. I don’t know.”
“I only ever wanted you to be happy.” He meant it, looking up. Oh, he meant it. That beauty, music, art, joy; everything Sam himself had not had, in his father’s cold bruise-colored house, until John had appeared in his life. He’d never known his own mother, the viscount’s second wife; he’d been told, when he’d asked, that her name had been Miranda, she’d been fragile and wealthy, she’d died at his birth. No one had ever told him more; he’d only ever seen one portrait, done for the wedding, in which her anxious brown eyes gazed out from a thin pale face amid overwhelming shrouds and swathes of expensive silk and lace.
Sam had wondered on occasion, looking at that portrait, what she must have thought, have felt. He could never know, of course. When he’d been younger he’d thought that perhaps she would’ve been on his side, a friend, a protector. He would have tried to be that for her in turn: the two of them, allies in the house of storms and hurt.
