CHAPTER 24 ROHAN
ROHAN
Rohan was quite sure that Nora, if that was indeed her name, knew more than any of them would be able to get out of her.
He’d been sure of that since the conclusion of Gigi’s interrogation hours earlier.
In the intervening time, their guest had retreated inward, her silence absolute, her sharp features impassive, like she’d fallen into some kind of trance.
For Rohan, Nora’s ability to go that still, that chillingly blank was its own kind of tell.
Gigi had not been able to break through again.
Neither Savannah nor Knox had had any more luck.
Brady was currently taking his turn with her.
The scholar had been sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite Nora, just as silent and still as she was, for nearly an hour, as the rest of them waited out on the platform, listening.
“We should be halfway to England by now.” Savannah addressed those words to Rohan like it was his fault and only his fault that they weren’t.
“Patience, love.”
“Patience is for people who stand to gain something by waiting,” Savannah retorted.
“Don’t you want to know,” Rohan parried back, “why someone sent a young woman with a fondness for knives after your sister?”
Rohan already had a theory on that. Still, pressure points were meant to be pushed, and Gigi was Savannah’s greatest weakness.
“I want to get my sister out of here,” Savannah replied, her tone arctic.
Gigi raised her hand. “I want to stay!”
“Of course you do,” Knox muttered.
Rohan tuned out the lot of them and listened. There was still only silence on the other side of the door and the ambient sounds of the bayou all around them—no indication whatsoever that their guest had attracted anyone else’s attention.
Rohan was on the verge of displacing Brady to try his own hand at an interrogation when the phone that Alisa Ortega had given him rang.
Rohan made a split-second decision and took his leave of the others, vaulting the railing once more.
Savannah followed him—over the railing, down, and out into the bayou.
As Rohan put more and more distance between himself and the others, Savannah stalked after him. Clearly, she had no intention of letting him out of her sight.
Clever girl. Clever, prudent, farthest-thing-from-naive winter girl.
Rohan’s phone, which had gone momentarily silent, started ringing again. This time, certain he was out of the range of Knox’s and Gigi’s hearing, Rohan answered. “Yes?”
“Rohan.” Jameson Hawthorne’s voice was imminently recognizable—for Rohan, at least.
He leaned back against the trunk of an ancient, twisted tree. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hawthorne?”
Savannah’s eyes narrowed at Hawthorne, the way Rohan had known they would.
“The Devil’s Mercy.” There was an unholy, frenetic energy in Jameson’s voice. “I want back in.”
“A tall order, considering I’m forbidden from stepping foot in London or so much as approaching any member.” Rohan weighed mentioning their guest to Jameson and decided to keep that card in reserve. “Unless you’d care to transfer ten million pounds my way right now?”
“You get nothing, Rohan, until I find Avery.”
Frenetic, Rohan decided, was not an adequate description of Jameson Hawthorne’s tone. His voice was electric. Charged—and dangerously so, like the air the instant before lightning tore the world apart.
“The symbol the Mercy uses,” Jameson continued. “A triangle inside a circle inside a square—”
“Inside yet another triangle.” Rohan could feel Savannah’s eyes on him. It was not, all things considered, an unpleasant feeling. “Inside another circle inside another square,” he murmured, “and so on and so forth, etcetera, repeating. I take it this isn’t small talk?”
“Where did the symbol come from?” Jameson’s question straddled the line between demand and plea. “What does it mean?”
Rohan pushed off the tree and began winding his way farther from their starting point. Savannah moved in tandem with him, leaving so little space between them that Rohan could feel her body heat.
Trying to hear both sides of the conversation, love?
Rohan kicked up his pace a notch, but he gave Savannah something to listen to on his side of the conversation, at least. “I’ve always thought that symbol to signify a great truth, that if you play any game long enough, certain patterns will always repeat.
Across years and decades, across centuries and dynasties and men, some things never stop repeating. ”
“But why those shapes?” Desperation did not suit Jameson Hawthorne. Not at all.
“Isolate a subset of the repeating pattern, and it can be read as an alchemical symbol as well.” Rohan shot a look in Savannah’s direction that challenged her to come as close as she dared.
“The alchemical symbol for what?” Jameson clearly had about as much patience as Rohan had shame, which was to say none.
“Alchemy,” Rohan replied.
“Don’t play with me, Rohan.”
“I wouldn’t dare. A circle inside a square inside a triangle inside yet another circle is indeed the alchemical symbol for alchemy.
Add another triangle in the center and continue the pattern on and on, and voilà.
Personally, I like to consider it all a reminder that those who seek power are always ultimately after two and only two things: immortality and gold. ”
Clearly, Jameson had uncovered something.
“Did my grandfather ever visit the Devil’s Mercy?” he demanded.
Fascinating question. “To my knowledge?” Rohan replied. “No. What precisely have you found, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“If you can’t get me into the Mercy, who can?”
Rohan came to a stop again, and Savannah did the same, standing so close to him their shoulders brushed.
“Rule breaker,” Rohan mouthed, and then he turned his attention back to Jameson, well aware that Savannah could hear both sides of the conversation now.
“If you want to barter for entrance to the Mercy, you’d have to see the current Factotum. ”
“Don’t tell me it’s—”
“Indeed.” While Rohan sought to make his fortune and win the throne, the duchess was acting as the Proprietor’s second-in-command.
“And where the hell are you?” Jameson demanded. “You’re supposed to be tracking Zella down for me.”
“I’m in Louisiana,” Rohan replied. “More specifically, I’ve paying a visit to St. Adelaide Parish, once home to Calla Thorp.”
“Don’t.” Jameson’s voice went guttural. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing there, Rohan—don’t.”
Rohan once again considered telling Jameson about Nora.
I’ve made a new friend here, he would say.
Fond of knives. Quite formidable. Northern European—Norwegian, perhaps, or possibly Icelandic.
She’s working for or with someone, and that person sent her here, almost certainly because the Watcher has an interest of some sort in Gigi Grayson.
But Jameson clearly wasn’t going to be parting easily with the money Rohan needed, and tipping the Hawthorne off to a potential lead before that lead had born fruit was not in Rohan’s best interest.
So he simply hung up.
Jameson called back. Rohan ignored the ringing of the phone and gave into the urge to capitalize on Savannah’s proximity. He lifted his hand to her face in direct violation of Rule Two, brushing her roughly shorn platinum hair off her cheek.
Savannah pretended she couldn’t even feel it. “Immortality and gold,” she said.
Rohan trailed his hand down from her face to her neck to Calla’s necklace. “And what do you make,” he murmured, tracing the path of the chain down to the fleur-de-lis charm on the end, “of all of this?”
The necklace. The inscription. The calla lily Gigi had found. Their new and very dangerous friend.
“It doesn’t matter.” Savannah shut him down. “None of it matters to me. Not Calla. Not Nora. Not this place. Not any of it, except keeping Gigi safe and getting Brady on a plane to England so I can get what I need from the duchess.”
“Still focused on revenge, love?”
“What else would I be focused on?”
Power. That was the first thought that came to Rohan, but the next was more insistent, more insidious. This. Me. Us.
“We should get back.” Savannah pointedly changed the subject. “I don’t like letting Gigi and Brady out of our sight.”
Our. Rohan relished her word choice more than he should have. “Are you under the impression that you’re the one calling the shots here, love?”
“You need me.” Savannah’s smile was slow, haughty, and oh-so-tempting. “After all, you can’t step foot in London.”
And there it was: the information she’d gleaned from her eavesdropping.
I need an accomplice. It doesn’t have to be you. At this point, Rohan could not be entirely sure whether he believed that or not. He allowed his gaze to settle on the fleur-de-lis just above the swell of her chest. “Tell me, Savannah, what’s your favorite flower?”
“I don’t have one.” Savannah cast a neutral gaze at the vegetation around them, thoroughly unaffected by the beauty of the natural world.
“My father used to buy my mother flowers. Two dozen red roses, every Mother’s Day, every birthday, every anniversary.
Sometimes even just because. When I was young, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. ”
“And then you found out that romance is a trick of light.” Rohan made a study of her eyes—those pale, silvery, betray-nothing eyes.
“An illusion. A sleight not of hand but of heart. Your father had an affair and a child with Skye Hawthorne. The man lied to your mother every day, and once you discovered that, discovered the existence of your secret half brother, roses didn’t seem so romantic. ”
“She doesn’t even like flowers.” Savannah lifted her chin. “The kind you plant, the kind you can help grow—my mother would have loved something like that. But bouquets? Cut roses? Flowers that die no matter how fondly you tend them? I realized one day that my mother hates them. She always has.”
Every Mother’s Day, Rohan thought. Every birthday.
Every anniversary. Against all odds, Savannah Grayson had just showed Rohan something human, something raw.
A humming sound rose in the back of his mind, a warning to never let himself get close enough to anyone that he could be used against them or they against him.
Rohan shut out the memory and reverted once more to listening to his surroundings instead.
“Do you hear that?” Rohan asked. He moved like lightning toward the sound, toward thick brush.
He listened again, then crouched, and there, hiding behind a tangle of vines and wild grass, was a small ball of calico fur.
The kitten was clearly feral, half starved, barely old enough to be away from its mother, and alone.
“How did you come to be by yourself all the way out here, little one?” Rohan held out a hand, which the little thing promptly attacked.
“No biting,” Rohan chided. “Unless the person truly deserves it.” He swooped the kitten up, cradling it against his chest and running a firm, calming hand over her head, meeting Savannah’s gaze as he did. “There’s a love.”
“You had better,” Savannah told him, “be talking to the cat.”
Rohan’s phone chose that moment to ring again. He transferred the kitten to Savannah, who seemed startled to be holding anything so warm and small. With a crooked smile, Rohan answered the phone, assuming it was Jameson. Persistent bugger.
“This had better,” Rohan said into the phone, borrowing the turn of phrase from Savannah, “be good.”
“You said to make you an offer.” The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakably female. “I thought you should know: We already have.”