Chapter 19 #2
“Do ye remember the man in Bruges?” he asked quietly. “The one George wanted me to have imprisoned?”
Peter’s face tightened. He remembered.
“I went to his house. I was going to take him. George said he was dangerous. A threat to the Crown. I had the warrant. I had the authority. But then I looked through the window and saw him.” Edward paused.
His voice was steady, but his hands were not.
“He was sitting on the floor with his two boys, building something with wooden blocks. The youngest kept knocking down the tower, and the man would laugh and build it again. Every time. Patient. Happy. And I knew. I knew George had lied to me. The man was not a threat. George was having an affair with his wife, and they had convinced me that he was dangerous so I would remove him.”
Peter went very still.
“I let him be,” Edward continued. “Went to the orphanage instead. The next morning, I asked the Queen to let me come home.” He looked down at his hands.
“That is why I am here, Peter. Not for the title. Not for the money. But because I looked through a window and saw a man being a father, and I realized I had been a weapon long enough.”
George stared at him. For a moment, the mask slipped.
Not much. A crack. Underneath it, Edward saw something he had not expected.
Not anger. Not calculation. But loss. George was losing him, and he knew it.
The knowledge sat on his face like a bruise before he covered it again with the smooth, polished mask he showed the world.
“Ye are welcome to the wedding,” Edward added, his voice a touch less hard. “Both of ye. But yer identities would not be safe, with all of the ton there. Ye can come to my bride’s masquerade ball instead.”
“A masquerade ball.” Peter brightened. “I do enjoy a good mask.”
“You enjoy anything that involves free food and music,” George scoffed.
“I also enjoy not being stabbed, which is why I left the Crown’s service.” Peter looked at Edward. “Are you sure you’re ready to give all of this up? To settle down?”
“I’ve already done so, friend.”
“And children?” Peter probed. “Are you ready to have children and become as civilized as possible?”
Edward fell quiet for a moment. The fire popped. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed.
He thought about William, Thomas, Samuel, and Ruth with her borrowed books. He thought about the boy he had been, sleeping under bridges. He thought about the men he had killed, the rooms he had left, and the years he could not take back.
“No,” he uttered. “After what we’ve seen, I don’t care to be a father.”
“Then why stay here?” George asked, his voice stripped down now. No performance. No polish. “This was your whole life, Edward. Everything you are.”
“And I’m grateful I had a life after my parents died. But I don’t know if it’s the life I’d have chosen for myself.” Edward looked at his scarred knuckles. A lifetime of scar tissue. “I’ve seen enough. I’d like to be oblivious for once.”
“You can’t say that,” George protested. “It was your whole life.”
“And I’m grateful for it. But it’s over.”
Silence.
George drained his brandy.
Peter watched them both with the careful attention of a man who could feel the ground shifting between two people he cared about and could not stop it.
“Well,” George said, setting his glass down. His smile was back. The crack sealed over. “I suppose congratulations are in order. To the Duke and his Duchess. May they bore each other senseless.”
“George,” Peter warned.
“It’s a jest. Nothing more.” George stood up and buttoned his coat. “I will attend your masquerade, Edward. I would not miss it for the world.”
He said it lightly, but Edward heard the edge underneath. The promise of something that was not quite a threat. He had heard that tone before, in rooms where polite men did impolite things.
George left first. The door closed, and the room felt lighter, the way a room did when a storm passed.
Peter waited until his footsteps faded.
“He’s not taking this well,” he said.
“I noticed.”
“He’s gotten worse since you left. Drinking more. Taking risks. He went after a target in Marseille last month without backup. Nearly got himself killed.” He paused. “He misses you. You are the only person who knows him well.”
Edward thought about the last mission they had gone on together. Two years ago. A warehouse in Calais. George had talked a customs official into opening a locked door using nothing but his smile and a bottle of burgundy, and Edward had been so impressed he had said so aloud.
They had been good together. George knew people. Edward knew threats. George opened doors. Edward walked through them. The combination had served the Crown for a decade.
But somewhere in those twelve years, George had started to enjoy their work for the wrong reasons. Not the service. Not the safety of the realm. But the thrill. The power. The way people looked at him when they knew what he was capable of.
Edward had watched it happen the way one watched a crack spread across a ceiling—slowly, then all at once.
“The real him tried to have an innocent man imprisoned so he could bed his wife,” Edward said flatly. “That is the real him, Peter. I wish it were not.”
Peter said nothing. He looked out the window. London in late afternoon, grey and damp and full of people who did not know that three men in a private room had just drawn lines that could not be undrawn.
“Watch him at the masquerade,” Edward requested. “I don’t trust him near Valeria.”
The sound of her name changed the air. It became softer.
Peter noticed. Edward did not care.
“Watch him, Peter. For me.”
“I will.”
Edward rose from his seat. He needed to get back tonight. No more delays. No more excuses. He had let George hold him here for four days, and every one of those days was a day Valeria spent alone.
“I’ll see ye at the masquerade.”
Peter paused at the door. “Edward, she sounds like a good woman.”
“She is the best woman I have ever known.” Edward was surprised to find that he meant it.
Peter left.
Edward stood alone. George’s empty glass sat on the table, a ring of brandy catching the last of the light.
He will try something at the masquerade. Because losing is the one thing George Turner has never learned to do.
He pulled on his coat. Checked his pistol. Four hours back to Thornhill. Four hours of dark road and the knowledge that the woman he was riding toward had been alone for four days because he had let an old friend convince him to stay.
He would not make that mistake again.
He kicked his horse into a gallop. The London streets gave way to the open road. The air changed. Cleaner. Colder. The smell of coal smoke faded.
He rode through villages closing up for the night, past churches and taverns and houses where candles burned in windows and families sat together at tables and did the ordinary, impossible things he was riding toward.
His father had been one of the Queen’s most trusted councilors.
When he and his mother died, Edward was eight, and Nathaniel was twelve.
Nathaniel was taken in by a family friend.
Edward was not. He had spent two years on the streets of Edinburgh, before the Queen’s men found him and brought him to Court. Nathaniel followed a year later.
The Crown had raised them both, but differently. Nathaniel received an education, a seat in Parliament, and a respectable life. Edward received a pistol, a list of names, and twelve years of rooms he could not talk about.
He rode hard, all the while thinking about Valeria.
About the way she looked at him when she thought he was not watching.
The careful, assessing look of a woman who was learning a man the way she had learned to survive.
Reading him. Cataloging him. Deciding whether to trust him with the parts of herself she had kept hidden for three years.
She was deciding, he could feel it. She had not decided yet. And every day he spent in a room with George instead of at her side was a day she spent alone deciding, without him there to show her that the decision was worth making.