Shadowdance(87)

Two dents formed beneath his fists, and the thick iron creaked ominously. But still she did not come. Jack shoved off and paced, raking his fingers against his skull. His vision blurred, and on a curse, he slumped against the wall. “I don’t know what to do to make it better,” he said to no one in particular. God knew Mary didn’t seem to be listening. “I don’t know what to do, all right?” It was a shout now, directed to the implacable door. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he looked up at the sooty hall lamp. “I’ve never known. I tried to stay away and make you hate me. Because it seemed better.” A short, bitter laugh left him. “It’s not. God, it’s not.”

He blinked down at his battered knuckles. “It’s tearing me apart,” he said quietly. “Every day, for four years, I’ve felt like half a man. Small. Unfinished.” He sighed. “No, that’s not right.” His fingers curled, digging into his knees. “The night I left you on those wet cobbles, I lost my soul. I left it with you, tarnished thing that it is.” His head was unbearably heavy, and he rested it against his forearms, drawing himself up tight. “Every time I looked at you, I knew it. That I had become what they accused me of being. Soulless.”

He ought to go. She wasn’t going to come out. Yet he had no place to go. He knew that now. There was no longer any place to hide from himself. Or the knowledge that she was his happiness, his purpose. She had cracked him open, rent him in two. And the exposure was an agony he could not live with.

“I don’t know what to do.” He wasn’t sure if he actually spoke the words that clattered about in his head. His blood and uneven breathing roared in his ears, drowning everything else out. He didn’t know how long he sat there, but a sense of emptiness eventually stole upon him, and he realized that she was no longer in her flat. She’d slipped out some other way, leaving him behind.

The tiny ticking of Director Wilde’s pocket watch filled the silence. Mary sat with her back so straight she feared it might crack and stared at the rough surface of the meeting room wall. Someone, at some point in time, had covered the hewn stone with a thick layer of pale yellow paint. Combined with the lumpy texture of the wall, it called to mind bile.

Her hands rested, unnaturally heavy upon the folds of her drab wool skirt. She did not shake. She did not feel. It was better that way.

The chair beneath Wilde’s frame creaked as he sat up. “Where the devil is Master Talent?” he burst out.

She swallowed once. “I do not know.” Nor did she want to. The idea of facing him, hearing his voice, had her fingers going cold and her chest constricting. She was a coward, slipping out of her back exit, leaving Jack behind. His pain, so raw and exposed, had nearly destroyed her. But she hadn’t been able to face him. He’d opened up an old wound, and his secrets had torn into ones that she’d kept too. Ones she did not want to speak.

“He’s twenty minutes late,” Wilde groused before pinning a hard stare on her. “Have you any progress to report, Mistress Chase?”

“No.” Her pulse thrummed an insistent tell him, tell him, tell him against her throat. And what would she even say? Jack Talent is the Bishop. He’s a killer, and a liar, and it is all I can do not to rise from this chair and go to him.

Cold sweat trickled down her spine as Wilde’s eyes bored into her and his mouth turned down at the corners. He broke their stare off with a harrumph. “You are a fount of information this morning, Mistress Chase.”

A surge of irritation and discomfort had her back trembling, but she didn’t cower.

Wilde’s chair creaked as he leaned forward. “This case is charging downhill. I’ve been informed that Lord Darby has gone missing, which means yet another shifter may be dead.”

“I—”

“The bodies of the regulators assigned to watch over him were found in the mews behind his home,” he went on in heated fervor. “Mistress Evernight is still missing. The Archbishop of bloody Canterbury has sent a complaint to the Queen, stating that Jack Talent attacked him.” At this he paused to expel a hard breath. “And I have to wonder… what the bloody hell is going on?”

Before Mary had the chance to reply, the door opened. Her entire body lurched within her skin. But it was merely Director James, who poked her head in and took a look around. The woman’s thin face grew pinched, and her words came out clipped and cold. “A word, if you please, Wilde.”

“I am conducting a meeting, James.”

“I realize, and if it weren’t urgent, I would not have interrupted.” Her dark brows rose as if to add, “now would I?”