Written on Your Skin (35 page)

In their conversations, he sought to catalog her as well. He was trying to understand her fully, but as the days passed, she grew cautious about whether he would put the knowledge to proper use. The more he understood how much she loathed this situation, the more determined he seemed to make her predicament comfortable. He wanted to know what sort of frame or case or cage would suit her best, although his own darkening moods suggested he’d already discovered the right answer: none of them would content her.

She slept alone, although she preferred not to—that was the one matter on which she refused to yield. If a man showed an interest in traps, there was no need to offer him the most obvious method. But it was a double-edged mutiny, as unpleasant to her as to him, and her refusal, too, became something of a game to keep her occupied.

Teaching her one night to play skittles, Phin found numerous opportunities to touch her, and she let him do so, curious, in a manner made more piquant by fear, about how strong she would prove in resisting him. When his long body pressed behind hers, bending her over the table to line up a shot, she felt the urge to set her forehead to the felt, to bare her nape to him like a submissive animal. It angered her. “You could touch me anywhere,” she said, “if I knew I was free to make my own choices, take my own risks.”

The abrupt introduction of this argument did not give him a moment’s pause. It sat between them always, speaking even through their silences. “Not if you were dead.” His eyes were shadowed by exhaustion; he was leaving the house now in the late hours of the night, trawling back alleys to chase rumors of Bonham. “In a coffin, I couldn’t touch you at all.”

The second week, she discovered that he’d intercepted a letter to her from Bonham, proposing a place and time for a trade: her information in exchange for the whereabouts of her mother. “Take his offer,” she said over dinner. “We’ll give him everything.”

A muscle ticking in his jaw, he set down his glass and said, “We tried it.”

She absorbed this in silence. “When?”

“Two nights ago. He never appeared.”

“Because I wasn’t there,” she said fiercely. “He requires my presence. You botched it!”

“Listen,” he said. “There is something more to this than we know. There’s no cipher or key in those documents. Nor could any paper prove his innocence after his actions in Providence. He wants something else from you, and if you cannot come up with a theory, the only option is to wait.” When she would have argued, he said more curtly, “He’s been spotted in London, and with the number of men looking for him, it’s only a matter of time—”

“And meanwhile, my mother remains missing,” she said coldly.

“I’m sure she likes you better alive,” he retorted.

“At least return Tarbury to me.” With Tarbury to hand, she would not feel so helpless.

“You may write to him,” he said. “He’s quite comfortable in a hotel across town. But as for your care, forgive me if I prefer the men in my employ.”

She grew deliberately colder after that. She began to call him Ashmore again; she remarked on Collins regularly. “You call him to mind,” she said. “Forgive me.” His charm wore thin now; he did not like the comparison. When he touched her, her desire made her furious. Bonham showed no sign of emerging from his lair, and her thoughts dwelt on her mother with a blackening intensity.

They might have continued like this, growing increasingly bitter, had Mina not woken one night to find a stranger in her bedchamber.

It was the sound of her jewelry box spilling that first penetrated her awareness. At first, it did not even occur to her to scream. She had been dreaming of Hong Kong. The cold pressure of the gun, the hot points of pain where fingers dug across her neck and clamped down on her shoulder, wove seamlessly into her nightmare.

Her eyes opened beneath the hot, sour breath of the man standing over her. “Up,” he whispered. She stumbled onto her feet, reality separating and solidifying out of the watery remains of sleep. “Walk,” he said.

The blunt nudge of the gun pushed her into the anteroom. Beneath her bare feet, the carpet turned hot and wet. Gompers’s robust form lay slumped on one side, blood pooling around his head. A shadow detached itself from the corner. Two men, then.

Her head seemed to grow lighter, like a balloon straining at the leash. She had learned four years ago the difference between panic and fear. Panic was the anticipation of catastrophe; fear announced its arrival. It was fear that steadied her footsteps and shoved blood through her veins as the gun guided her into the corridor. Her senses seemed to expand. Old candle smoke clung to her captor’s clothes, and stale traces of moldy hay.

She caught Phin’s scent a second before he came hurtling through the darkness.

The collision of his body struck her forward into the opposite wall, and she went down hard on her knees. A gunshot rang out; now came a series of short, sharp thuds. A muffled curse, and a cry. A thick, crunching sound turned her stomach before her brain made sense of it. Hair brushed over her ankle. She recoiled from the fallen body, then scrambled around on all fours.

Two men struggled against the opposite wall. Difficult in the darkness to discern any subtleties, but their forms strained against each other. Now she made out the silhouette of arms outstretched, grappling for control of a gun.

A deafening explosion, a whining shiver past her ear. She threw herself aside as the wall behind her burst, disgorging chunks of plaster onto her head. Her eyes locked on Phin’s taller form, her breath, her mind suspended. No question of helping. The other man was pinned beneath him, out of her reach.

Phin made a sudden sharp move, and the other man seemed to lunge away from the wall, only to stagger suddenly back. Phin whipped him around so his back slammed into the wall. The gun clattered to the floor.

She realized how foolish she was. There was no need for her help.

Still, the gun lured her. She inched forward as Phin lifted his elbow and smashed the man across the face. The nauseating crack did not satisfy him; he brought up his knee, and the man curled over it like a rag doll.

Her palm closed over the butt of the pistol. “I have it,” she gasped.

Phin gave no sign of hearing her. He snapped the man’s body flush against his, into a mockery of a lover’s embrace. A wheezing noise filled the air. He was crushing the man’s throat.

“I have it!” Why was she speaking? Her voice sounded grotesque, too clumsy and jagged for the delicacy of this operation. Killing a man without a word.

He grabbed hold of the man’s hair and, with one sharp move, snapped his neck.

Her fingers around the gun hilt went abruptly slack.

Silence.

Her knees gave way. She sank into the plush silk of the carpet.

He must have looked at her, for she caught the glint of his eyes in the darkness. He still held the body clutched to him. Not even his breath made noise.

Her own rasped heavily in her ears. “I have it,” she whispered.

He relinquished the body, his hands subsiding somehow elegantly, like a gesture to accentuate some ongoing conversation. The corpse folded to the floor.

“Are you hurt?”

His voice sounded strange. Colorless.

“Mina.” His voice sharpened to a command. “Speak. Are you hurt?”

“No.” But her joints seemed to have dissolved. Ice was sprouting in her stomach. The cold bloomed outward; it was going to make her shake.

He stepped over the body, toward her. It was not in her to flinch from him, but she would not have blamed some other woman for doing so. The hands that now reached for her shoulders had killed two men with soundless efficiency. The men had cursed and cried out, and he had never made a noise. Their silent, faceless executioner, this man who had touched her so gently.

He pulled her up, guiding her face into his chest. She was indeed trembling, and he gripped her harder and harder yet, as though to hold her together. “It’s all right,” he murmured.

She wasn’t going to lapse into hysterics. It occurred to her to tell him so, but her mind was skipping between other curiosities: that she could feel so safe in his arms, even now. Safer, even. It seemed strange, unhealthy, that he did not shake as well. Every muscle pressed against her was hard, braced for more. I have some practice with such things.

A deep unease awakened in her. She put her arms around him, the butt of the gun lodging by his spine. Her intuition was stirring, suggesting the cost that such practice might exact from a man. He did not shake, but that seemed a worse thing to her by far than trembling. “You’re all right,” she said into his shirt. He was solid, large, whole, and hale. His heart beat steadily beneath her cheek; it actually seemed to be picking up speed now, as though safety were more alarming to him than the threat of death.

The acrid bite of gunpowder scorched the air. Down the corridor, doors were slamming, voices lifting. The servants would be upon them soon.

He pulled away. “Come,” he said quietly. He took her wrists in one hand and bent to retrieve the other pistol.

“Your man is hurt,” she said, remembering.

He stepped inside and hit the button to call the electricity. Gompers’s eyelashes fluttered in the glare. His face looked pale against the dark corona of blood soaking the carpet. She thought Phin would go to him, but he pulled her onward, keeping her directly behind him as he surveyed the corners and alcoves in the room.

“There’s no one else,” she murmured.

His grip tightened until it was a hair short of painful. The open window had caught his attention. When he turned to face her, his tanned skin looked abnormally pale and his expression was flat and lifeless, clay yet to be animated by the breath of life. “You see the use of windows,” he said.

She opened her mouth, but found no reply at the ready.

His glance switched to the doorway. The footman was now awake and groaning, struggling to push himself upright. “I need to deal with this.” When he looked back at her, there was nothing in his face that she felt able to speak to. “You will not argue,” he said. “Come with me.”

He deposited her in his inner sanctum, a dark, sparsely furnished room that indeed had no windows. She might have found it intolerable, had every appointment not spoken so intimately of him. The maps, the opened books on the table, the carefully sketched drawings of mountains and deep valleys, they were his, and she felt enfolded by him.

All the same, she would have preferred his embrace.

Curled up on a sofa, she listened to the dim, distant sounds that managed to penetrate the walls. Doors opening, closing. The comings and goings of men, debating on matters, drawing up plans. The sun must have risen, but she would not have known it save for the ticking of the clock on the mantel.

As the shock wore off, she found herself wondering at her compliance. Waiting never worked. Tonight had proved it. If Bonham wanted her so badly, he would come for her anywhere.

And if Phin needed her, she half thought that he would never come. The shadows in his face tonight were not all owed to rage. Some of them had looked like resignation.

She stepped out through the antechamber, into the hall. Two new guards stood there, men she thought she recognized from her brief time at Ridland’s. “Take me to Ashmore,” she said.

“He is not to be disturbed.” This from a young blonde with a lantern jaw and something of Ridland’s cold humor in his eyes.

She still had the purloined pistol. She lifted it and watched him recoil. “Take me to him,” she repeated.

On the threshold of the study, she stopped. Phin sat in an armchair, staring into a fire that smoked low in the hearth. The disarranged chairs, the uncapped decanter and emptied glasses testified to a meeting recently adjourned. But it was not the uncharacteristic disorder, or even the darkness of his expression, that gave her pause.

A long pipe sat in front of him.

Of course it did. How had it escaped her? That night when he had caught her in here, the air had been dirtied with it. She had spent too much time in Hong Kong not to recognize the odor. But its apparent mismatch to the circumstances—and to the man himself—had blinded her.

“Opium,” she said on a breath. “How intriguing.”

His eyes remained on the fire. “Only for a woman raised among wolves.”

The air smelled pure. He had not smoked it yet. “True enough.” She stepped inside, pulling the door shut. “I wasn’t raised in the woods to be scared by an owl.”

Now his head turned. His lashes were not thick enough to veil the unnatural flatness of his regard. “Your woods were not dark enough,” he said. “You have no idea what I am.”

She hesitated, her fingers moving nervously over the pistol in her palm. She weighed her next words carefully. “I saw you earlier. It was not so dark that I couldn’t see you, Phin.”

His laughter was short and dull. “Yes, that’s right. Were you impressed?”

She considered him, her eyes lingering on his languid posture in the chair, the loose drape of his legs stretched out before him. “Yes,” she said, and was only a little surprised to realize that she meant it. “I’ve told you before, if I could master such skills, I would. There’s no virtue in becoming a victim.”

For a long moment, it seemed he would not respond. Then a bitter smile curved his lips. “How generously you render it. A funny thing, Mina. I have never been glad of my skill at killing. I told myself I had no choice. But tonight…perhaps it would disarrange your admiration if you knew that I almost enjoyed it.”