And Bryony Downs didn’t know.
It would have been difficult for her to accompany him in his new life, but had he really loved her, he would have found a way, I thought. He was a brilliant man. Too brilliant, maybe, not to see the hint of fanatical darkness in his fiancée. The obsession, the wild selfishness. The willingness to do anything to achieve her own ends.
Maybe August Moriarty saw this as his opportunity to escape her. An understandable decision. Despite it leading to where Holmes and I found ourselves now.
“You,” Bryony said, edging still closer to Holmes, who regarded her coolly. “You have his death on your hands. So you’ll do time for a death. I’m just the middleman.”
And Lee Dobson and Elizabeth Hartwell the sacrificial lambs.
Though she hadn’t mentioned Elizabeth at all.
“Who were you working with?” Holmes asked.
Bryony flicked her hair. “Who said I was working with anyone?”
Holmes stared her down until, shifting uncomfortably, Bryony spoke.
“The man who convinced the judge that he’d no idea of the contents of his car’s boot and served a minimum sentence. You didn’t forget who drove the car to your house to get you your fix, did you? Lucien Moriarty, you stupid child. God, the best part of all of this has been feeding you from my hand. I offered you warnings. Touched them with ungloved hands, in case you’d manage to lift my fingerprints. Printed them in the font that I write all my medical reports in. Made the spellings English, instead of American. It was a paint-by-numbers murder, and you were too dumb to learn to pick up the paintbrush. I did everything but hand myself over to you. Knowing, of course, that the moment you found me out, Lucien would close the bear trap. You do know what Lucien does for a living, yes?”
“He’s a fixer,” Milo murmured.
“Precisely,” Bryony said. “Gold star, you. Except for the part where he’s a Moriarty first. They have connections you can only dream of. Tell Lucien you want a rattlesnake as window dressing for your little scene, and he’ll make an untraceable one appear. Tell him you want a beautiful little suitcase bomb, and he’ll hire a professional to make you one. Tell him you want a plastic jewel shoved down a girl’s throat, and she’ll choke on it. Tell him you want a new identity, a passport, a job at Charlotte Holmes’s boarding school, and he’ll give it to you wrapped in a bow. God, the very lack of evidence should have been a clue. I gave up my dreams of being a doctor for this. Do you hear that? I gave up my dreams to make you serve the sentence you deserved. I’d nearly all the credits necessary for a nursing degree, and if that could get me here and to you faster—well. For once, sweetie, you were the hottest ticket in town.”
She knelt down before the ottoman, put her hands on Holmes’s knees, leaned right into her face. “This is why I’m a better person than you. Are you ready? I could kill you right now. No”—she held a finger up to Holmes’s lips—“that suitcase bomb was never intended to kill you, don’t be stupid. I was just disgusted by the thought of you and the Watson boy playing house in there. Acting out your roles. Do you want to know why I set up Dobson’s murder as a remake of ‘The Speckled Band’? It’s a reminder. They’re stories. They’re stories, and this is real life. You are not Sherlock Holmes, and you won’t ever be.”
Holmes stared straight down her nose at Bryony’s sneering face. And then she turned her head to me and, slowly, unmistakably, blinked her eyes twice.
Play your last card, she’d said. What card could I possibly play? Only sheer force of will kept my eyes open now. I could barely speak, much less get to my feet and make a stand. If I was supposed to be the muscle in this operation, I was totally out of commission.
But she knew that. So what could she mean?
Last night—a hand on my forehead, a deliberate, closed-mouth kiss. Roses. And her smile as she walked out the door, telling me not to die before I could use it as a bargaining chip.
Oh.
I let my eyes fall closed. I willed my breathing to slow. And I fell, heavily, out of the chair onto the thick pink carpet.
“Watson!” Holmes cried, a perfect parody of the last time she’d thought I was dead.
Stumbling. Footsteps. Bryony saying, “Oh, damn,” as she crouched above me. I could smell the Forever Ever Cotton Candy. A man’s cold fingers on my cheek, then moving to my neck to take a pulse.
“He’s alive,” Milo announced. “He’s alive, but barely.”
“Don’t move him,” Holmes said. “I’ll get the blanket from the bed.”