Timebound(124)
“But then… you stopped coming,” he said. “And I finally realized that wherever you were, you hadn’t been protected by a key. Something had changed. The entire resistance we were trying to put together had never been started. I just, well—sort of lay low, waiting. They teamed me up with Simon to watch you—it was Pru’s idea of a little joke, I guess, to put me so close since she thought I had no memory of you and you wouldn’t know me from Adam.”
I shivered, pulling the blanket tighter, and tried to sort out all that had happened. “I’m not so sure any of this was her idea, Kiernan. Or if she was in on it at the beginning, she changed her mind.” I gave him a brief rundown of my conversation with Prudence and her belief that killing Katherine was a power play designed to get her out of the way.
Kiernan chuckled. “She finally put two and two together, I guess. I don’t know that he was planning that specifically—but Saul doesn’t tend to think that the normal rules of morality should apply to him. And she’s been pushing to run things her way for some time now. He may well have decided she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Oh, sure. Several times.” Kiernan helped me turn around to lean my back against the cabin wall and then poured a bit of water into a glass from a large jug. He shook two very modern-looking pills into his hand and gave them to me.
“Pru was always secretive about our destination—she’d lock in the coordinates on my key without giving me any idea of where or when—but Saul often summons the people he and Pru consider part of the ‘inner circle’ to meet with him. I doubt I’ll be invited again, however. He doesn’t know about this—that I helped you get away from Holmes—but he does know that I warned you that day on the subway.”
I remembered Simon’s comment about Kiernan’s interference. “They’re angry, aren’t they? They’ll be looking for you.”
He shrugged. “Probably. But I’m good at fading into the background. They’ll have some idea of when I am, but not where.”
“I’m sorry, Kiernan. You’re in all of this because you chose to help me.”
He didn’t speak for a moment and pulled in a deep breath before looking back at me. “It wasn’t a choice, Kate. There was never a choice. When I saw you on the train that first day, the day you were trying to destroy the diary?”
“I wasn’t trying to destroy it,” I said. “Just testing it to see what it was.”
He smiled, but his eyes were as sad as they’d been that day on the Metro. “I knew before we arrived on that train,” he said, a tiny break in his voice, “that you were different. I knew everything about my Kate. Hell, I knew her soul. She knew mine. No secrets. And when you looked at me and there was nothing in your eyes… you didn’t know me. That life had never happened and you weren’t my Kate—but you were still Kate. I still… loved you. I had to find a way to protect you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking again about Trey. The next time I saw him he would still be Trey, but he wouldn’t be my Trey. No matter what happened between us in the future, I would never see that Trey again. “I do understand. I’m so sorry, Kiernan.”
He sighed and shifted to sit beside me against the wall, putting his arm around me very carefully to avoid hurting me. “But here’s the real kicker,” he said. “I didn’t get the full irony until I learned about the plot against Katherine. You are also my Kate, my first Kate—the girl with the funny painted toes who gave me the medallion, who was willing to risk her life to be certain that an eight-year-old boy got out of that hotel. And I realized then that I really didn’t know what had happened that night—and that I had to find out.”
“So that’s why you were there tonight? Watching?”
Kiernan clenched his jaw. He looked exhausted—there were dark circles under his eyes and he’d clearly skipped the razor for at least a few days. Scruff looked unbelievably good on him, and I fought the urge to run my fingers along the side of his face.
“I’ve been to that hotel dozens of times, Kate. I’ve spent every possible minute in that hellhole for the past month. I’ve watched from every position, every angle, every vantage point.” His arm tightened around me. “I came so close to just killing Holmes, just strangling him there in the dark and tossing him down one of those chutes straight into the lime pit in the basement, just like he’d done with so many women. But you—my other you—were adamant that we could only change the bits of history that Saul and the Cyrists had disrupted. Holmes’s trial—that was worldwide. What kind of ripples would it cause if I killed him?