Chapter Twenty-Seven
Fie. Fie. Fie.
Only a few hours had passed but already Calliope wanted to abandon the shop and hurry back to the tavern. That, however, wouldn’t do. So she changed into her plainest dress and scrubbed at the shelf in brisk circles. First the shelves. Then she could entertain thoughts of Maxen Fury.
Hah. An impossible feat, that.
Cleaning was always accompanied by thinking. And all her thoughts circled back to him. His bed. His heat upon her skin. Her lips still swollen from those persistent kisses. Marked. Thoroughly claimed.
And the promise.
Oh, the promise!
Had that been wise?
At the time, it had seemed simple enough. She wasn’t planning on leaving Brighton. She might have entertained the thought after she’d met him and the first time she’d slipped away, but not anymore. However, what if the choice was stripped from her? What if Duvessa found her?
Should her stepmother even still matter at this point?
A grin stretched her lips. Last night, she’d been thoroughly ruined. She would be of no more use to Duvessa.
That’s right!
She was of no more use. How absolutely freeing. Still, a pinch of guilt entered her heart. Should she tell Maxen her true identity? Would he cast her aside if she did? Was there anything to cast aside? She’d like to believe there wasn’t, but her landlord-man was different.
He saw the world differently.
What if, when her lease ended in six months, he refused to renew?
Urgh!
She pressed harder at the shelf, scrubbing as if she could rub away the discomfort in herself.
She didn’t believe Maxen to be that way, but apparently he loathed the aristocracy.
Enough to regard her with contempt if he discovered she was born into the very world he despised?
She couldn’t say. She could only hope not.
She was still at a loss as to how to broach this.
He deserved the truth. The promise she had made—was it not already broken, keeping this part of herself hidden? Well, if she were being philosophical and all that.
She paused mid-scrub, the look on his face that morning flashing across her mind. Past, future, everything except every moment with you.
Her throat thickened.
She wanted to believe him. Wanted to believe he could see her, not the origin of her name. That he might understand the years she had spent surviving, enduring, hiding. But to confess was to risk everything. Her freedom. Her heart. Him.
“Stars, help me,” she whispered, leaning her forehead briefly against the shelf. She straightened almost just as fast, smoothing her skirts. Not today. Not yet. She needed one more hour, one more day of this happiness before facing whatever the truth might bring.
Tomorrow perhaps she would tell him. Tomorrow she would be brave.
Or perhaps the day after that.
Or perhaps after she extended her lease.
For now, she had shelves to wipe. And a heart that refused, no matter how she lectured the thing, to stop missing him.
The bell above the shop door chimed.
Calliope’s brow furrowed. It was late afternoon, and her shop was closed, so she must have forgotten to lock the door. She turned, her smiling freezing when she came face to face with three large men.
Prince started growling.
Stars, preserve her.
Just by one look she could tell these weren’t Maxen’s men.
“Easy,” she murmured, putting a smile on her face. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m closed for the day.”
No one moved.
Prince padded forward, hackles bristling. He planted himself between her and the men, his growl deepening.
“Fine beast you’ve got there,” the one to the right drawled. “Shame if something were to happen to him.”
Calliope’s hand clenched tighter around the rag. “What do you want?”
“For you to come with us willingly,” the one in the center said.
“Who sent you?” It couldn’t be Mr. Peregrine.
The Fury brothers had him. She doubted these men worked for him either.
A cold suspicion formed in her heart. Could it be Duvessa?
No, Calliope refused to believe it until she saw it with her own eyes.
“If you think I’m coming with you, you are sadly mistaken, sirs. ”
“Don’t know who, missy. Just paid us a nice penny to deliver you to them,” the one to the left said. He also pulled out a pistol. “Unharmed.”
Her whole body went cold.
He pointed the pistol at Prince. “They didn’t say anything about a dog.”
“No!” Calliope cried out. She threw her arm out as if she could shield him from an oncoming shot. “Don’t you dare!”
“Then will you come with us willingly?” the man in the center asked, lifting a brow.
“Yes,” she said quickly, “if you promise you will not harm him. I’ll go quietly. Willingly. But not a single hair on his body must be harmed.” Prince barked once, sharp, savage. “Don’t worry,” she murmured to try to ease him. “Boy, we will be fine.”
“Agreed,” the center one said, clearly the leader of the trio.
She forced herself to stand straighter, though her knees had started to tremble a bit.
“You came for me, not him. Hurt him, and I swear you’ll have trouble worse than me on your hands.
He also belongs to . . .” she bit her tongue before Maxen’s name could slip out.
Stars, she couldn’t drag him into this. Not if these men weren’t already his enemies.
But she wanted to reaffirm her stance in some way, “. . . to a man you do not want to cross here in Brighton.”
“Put it down,” the leader ordered his man.
Relief nearly staggered her as the man tucked his pistol away. Even Prince settled, sensing part of the nightmare had been averted.
He came to her side and sank to the floor.
“Now then,” the leader said, “shall we go?”
Her stomach lurched, but she nodded, and Prince, senses sharp, rose to his feet again.
“The dog stays here,” the one who’d brandished the pistol said.
“Fine.” She’d rather him be safe here anyway.
“Prince,” she whispered low, careful. “Stay. Guard the shop for me.” The dog whined, pressed against her thigh. Her heart nearly split. She bent quickly, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his fur. “Good boy,” she breathed. “Wait for me.”
She rose, lifting her chin. Be brave, Calliope. “Let’s go.”
The man on the right stepped forward and seized her arm, rough fingers clamping around her elbow.
His grip was iron, and she had to force herself not to resist, not to fight.
She glanced back as they escorted her out.
Prince stood in the middle of the shop, ears pricked, body rigid.
She pressed her lips together, swallowing the lump in her throat.
Her gaze darted to the empty shop next door.
Afternoon shadows stretched long, and for a wild moment she imagined Maxen striding from one of them, dark coat flaring, eyes blazing, come to sweep her out of these men’s clutches. But the lane was empty save for three horses.
She thought of her promise.
Maxen wouldn’t believe she’d abandon him, would he? Not with Prince still here. Knowing him, he would suspect something amiss. The man’s senses were sharper than a hawk’s. She would bide her time, keep her wits, and pray her beast discovered her absence quickly.
Rough hands lifted her onto a horse. She shot a glare at the man swinging into the saddle behind her, but he didn’t so much as spare her a glance.
The leader of the three tossed a cloak at her. “Cover yourself.”
She dragged the coarse thing over her shoulders and head, stealing one last look at her shop. Her heart plummeted.
No! Prince!
These villains hadn’t even shut the door.
Horror numbed her as Prince padded out, those loyal eyes fixed on her. The man spurred the horse into a trot, and she swallowed her protest in fear that they might go back on their word and kill Prince.
Pure hopelessness enveloped her.
Bad people, it seemed, had a way of finding her, no matter how fiercely she tried to avoid it. And danger, it seemed, was an ever-present shadow, no matter how meticulously she safeguarded herself.
*
Maxen stood in the middle of Calliope’s lodgings, clenching and unclenching his fists.
She was gone.
So was her hound.
Other than that, nothing had changed much since the last time he’d been here.
She hadn’t cleared all her belongings. Hadn’t cleared her candles or the stock at the back.
It was as if she’d left in a hurry like the last time she’d tricked his brother.
The door had not even been locked. It was so bloody similar he wanted to punch a hole in the wall.
But instead of his brother being duped, this time it had been him.
She’d left.
Again.
She’d promised . . .
And? Who are you to have asked that of her in the first place?
He was nobody.
Just some beast.
Maxen cursed.
He hadn’t inherited his place in the world.
Every scrap of authority had been purchased with cracked bones.
Whatever authority he possessed did not extend to her.
He had no right to her at all. Except the rent of her shop.
And he wanted all the rights. That made him greedy.
impatient, and impulsive. All the things that got men like him killed.
His gaze swept the room once more, inventorying what was there and everything that wasn’t.
Had she thought him comical when she’d said yes, she promised to tell him before she ever left?
Had she smiled into the dark and let him have his pretty fancy because it cost her nothing in that moment?
Or had she regretted it the instant light returned, when she saw him as he was in daylight—too large, too rough, too much of the wrong world?
Don’t bloody spiral, you fool.
Too bloody late, he returned to himself.
Maxen’s fists curled tighter, the phantom pinch of old violence burning in his knuckles.
He could see it—hell, he could taste it—the urge to tear the whole place down.
Smash her candles into wax-splattered shards.
Shove the shelves until they split in pieces.
Grind every shard of broken wax further into paste beneath his boots.
Reduce her pretty little shop to rubble.
Like she had reduced him to wreckage.
He saw another room then, his mother’s, all those years ago.
He had wrecked that place, too. After her body went slack beneath his hands.
His fingers remembered the tremor of death, the convulsion, the desperate clutch at his wrists as she fought for breath.
He remembered the madness that told him the ending was a mercy, an to end her suffering.
And when it was done—when the last breath left her broken body—he had laid waste to everything within reach.
Tables overturned. Chairs splintered. Curtains ripped from their rods.
He’d smashed his head into a wall until blood ran hot into his eyes.
Because he couldn’t bear the silence that followed. Couldn’t bear what he had done.
That same madness whispered now. Slaughter this place. Tear it apart so there’s nothing left to remind you she was here. If he destroyed it all, maybe he could purge the hollow she’d left behind.
His hand twitched toward the nearest shelf. He could already hear the satisfying crash of wood and glass, smell the explosion of scent, and all the bloody things she’d bottled and created with her own hands. He wanted to ruin it. To prove she hadn’t mattered. That none of it had mattered.
But there was no mistaking the truth.
The image of her face, eyes bright, lips curved in that stubborn little half-smile, rose unbidden.
He’d cupped her cheeks more times he could count, carefully, as if she might vanish beneath his touch.
That same hand now curled into a fist, because the beast inside him only knew two hungers: to cradle or to crush.
And God help him, he didn’t trust himself to know the difference at the moment.
He wrenched back from the shelf with a growl, shame searing his chest. He would not destroy her place. Not as he had destroyed hers. Not as he had destroyed his own mother. He could not destroy that. He would not.
Because if he did, he would prove every fear true. That he was nothing more than a monster in a man’s skin, doomed to strangle out anything good the moment it came within reach.
He felt the surge of anger rise—fast, hot, riddled with those old contempts.
But a quieter, stubborn truth tugged at him.
Calliope was not like them. She was . . .
sunlight dressed in boy’s clothes who did not back down from a challenge.
So he would not wreck this place. He would not wreck her memory.
Not yet.
He shut his eyes against this last thought and opened them at once, angry with himself for the weakness.
His world had room for facts, not fancies.
Fact: she was not here. Prince was not here.
And he might have believed she’d run out for an errand had he not been standing in this very position for three hours.
Three hours of thinking. Of cursing. Of intolerable numbness.
She wasn’t coming back. Fact.
His jaw locked until something threatened to crack. “Damn you,” he cursed into the quiet.
The instinct was immediate, bone-deep: hunt. Track her as he would any debtor, any enemy who thought to cross him. He could follow the smallest trace. Brighton bent when he wanted it to. She could not vanish from him, not if he didn’t allow it. Not without any trace.
His fists flexed.
A part of him already saw the path, already planned the questions, the threats, the coin to loosen tongues.
But damnation. What then? Would he drag her back if he found her? A woman who had already chosen to walk away. A noble, bred for another world, who had humored him with promises she could never mean. He’d be chasing nothing more than an angel he could never truly catch. Never truly hold onto.
The thought lodged bitter in his mouth.
He had chased enough illusions in his life. He would not chase another.
Maxen slowly forced the tension from his jaw.
No.
He would not hunt her. He wouldn’t chase what didn’t want to be kept. He turned on his heel and left the shop without a backward glance.
Calliope Turner belonged to the past now. And he would leave her there.