Chapter 15
MARIETTA
Slam. The ceiling of Gabriel’s room shot into view. Footsteps pounded through the downstairs hallway. An empty pillow next to mine. Loud voices. A crash. I pulled on my robe and ran down the stairs.
“This is serious, Gabriel.” Lucian and Alcroft paced the kitchen. Even with their movement, Gabriel, seated, appeared the one on the prowl.
“I know that, John,” he snapped.
“What is going on?”
Alcroft and Lucian immediately turned my way.
“We woke you.” Alcroft looked apologetic. “There’s been another murder.”
“John.”
Alcroft shut his eyes. “She needs to know. Gildon is in an uproar.” Opened eyes pinned me. “The gilded squares are calling for your brothers’ heads. The trial is being moved forward again.”
“Spirits be damned, John!” His voice was harsh.
“She has to know, Gabriel.”
An uproar and the gilded squares caring meant one thing. “Who was murdered?” I walked farther into the room, the cold floor seeping into my feet.
“Anastasia Rasen.”
A pink fluttering bird flew across my mind. I knew her. Not well, but I knew her. And a pair of eyes from Worley’s wall would fit her face.
“They are blaming Ferris? What about Thorne Worley? The drawings on his wall?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that.” Alcroft grimaced. “I can only imagine from what Gabriel described.”
If Anastasia was the fifth woman on his wall, that only left the lady in the veil, the central figure of the altar.
“We need to appeal to the papers. Whisper in the right ears. Reinvigorate the watch, put Dresden further on Worley’s trail. There is still a chance.”
I wanted to hug Alcroft.
Lucian’s eyes were focused on the floor, but his gaze was vacant. Gabriel was staring at his brother’s bent head.
“Why Anastasia Rasen?” My hands knotted in my robe. “And what about the sixth woman—the lady in the veil?”
Lucian’s mouth opened, but Gabriel cut over him. “We don’t know. Get dressed.”
Closed and unapproachable, not how I’d thought the morning would go.
His eyes closed briefly, then reopened pained. “Please. We need to hurry.”
Alcroft and Lucian’s faces lit with surprise. I nodded and hurried back upstairs.
~*~
GAbrIEL
John whistled. “You are enamored.”
Lucian nodded in agreement, eyes narrowed.
“I don’t have time to deal with that,” I said, pushing aside their curiosity. “Tell me, what is happening? What do we need to contain?”
“The gilded are beside themselves, as can be expected, knowing the identity of the victim,” John said. “It will be even worse if they figure out the rest. Time is limited. You only need to know one to unravel the set. You need to catch the man responsible.”
I didn’t look at my brother. “Lucian, fetch the carriage.”
Lucian stalked from the room without a backward glance.
John watched him leave, then looked back to me. “Catch Worley,” he said, eyes serious.
“And find answers?” Knives scraped across my skin, saying it aloud. “Or condemn a crazy but innocent man?”
“Innocent? Are you sure?” John asked, his gaze penetrating.
Worley couldn’t have gotten by my men. But someone who knew them...
“Is he innocent, Gabriel?”
I stared at the scattered papers. “A net and noose, tighter they grow.”
“Gabriel—”
“There is one place left to search for answers.” Two places. Vomit lifted. “Rasen also kept notes.”
John’s eyes shut. “You are going to have to make a decision. Will justice, protection, or revenge be your guide?”
“Justice has always been my guide.” I could barely get the words out. I could have done more than set a watch rotation on Anastasia Rasen’s house. Especially if the killer knew me, knew my men.
“I’ve never seen you sacrifice the nobility you’ve always prized. But sometimes revenge is justice, Gabriel.”
“I’ve taken my revenge. I did it without bloodshed.”
“But another choice is upon you now. One thing you value will need to be sacrificed. If you could just let go of your damn nobility—”
I smacked the table. “It is all I have. All I’ve ever had.” And yet nobility was a comfortable excuse. I had known she was next and hadn’t told Dresden or anyone else. I had put some men on it, and let dark nature take its course.
I hadn’t saved the devil’s apprentice. I had let her get murdered.
John leaned closer. “You have justice. This doesn’t have to end the way you think.”
I stared at him. John was sympathetic—he knew what was happening—but he had led an easy life of privilege and respect. He would never be able to understand.
Lucian too had lived a life of privilege after those first years in hiding. I’d given him everything, tried to keep him innocent—to protect him as no one had protected me.
“It doesn’t have to end the way you are thinking,” John repeated.
I had blamed our father for his blindness—for not seeing what was taking place beneath his nose.
To his own son. Father had never argued the blame—his passive, upright control keeping him still as I railed.
Our relationship, always formal and somewhat strained, had never recovered.
But Lucian didn’t have that same strain.
They visited often. He could have discovered any number of things during those visits.
“It is going to end just as I think. Unpleasantly.”
~*~
The house on Wisteria Lane was just as expected. Frilly, pink, and gilded—like a dying bird fluttering in a cage. I hated anything frilly and pink because of Anastasia Rasen, and here I stood in the middle of her dollish kingdom.
The servants had been called to present themselves to their new master to see whether they would stay or go, but their absence wouldn’t last long. Curious callers were already a problem. There had been two knocks on the door since we’d arrived. We had to hurry.
“Why didn’t Alcroft and Lucian come?” Marietta asked, poking through a drawer.
“I sent them on another task. We’ll meet with them later.”
I could barely look at Lucian. I had never felt more of a coward. All it would take was one question—did he do it? I would know the answer by the look on his face.
I’d never wanted to know an answer less. Lucian’s whereabouts were unaccounted for during the last two murders. I had declined to check the rest. The taste of real fear had been absent from my tongue for years, and yet here it was like an old friend come to call and bringing a suitcase.
My brother had kept me going. He had always been the one I was trying to save. To lose him now was unacceptable.
“She always wore pink, but I didn’t realize it was quite this level of obsession,” Marietta said as she sorted through Anastasia’s things.
“What are you doing?”
Marietta shrugged. “Looking through her undergarments.”
Women were strange.
“Why?”
“Some women hide things where they think men won’t look. What are we looking for, anyway?”
“Something connecting her to Thorne Worley. Anything unusual. Other than her overabundance of pink.”
It was another ten minutes searching before Marietta lifted a book in triumph. “I found a journal!”
The cold agony of certainty gripped me. “Let me see.”
She clutched it to her chest. “We can look together.”
I didn’t want to look at all. I watched her flip the first page. “The first date was written three years before Octavia’s. It has come to my attention that it would be to my advantage to join a group of women led by Celeste—”
A loud bang. The crash of glass and a spell. Servant’s magic, used to lift and dust. Worley.
“Stay here,” I said. I would make this nightmare end.
~*~
MARIETTA
How Gabriel was going to explain our presence to the servant who had returned and broken the glass, I didn’t know. But if anyone could get someone to do what he wanted, it was Gabriel Noble.
I gripped the book in my hands. A group of women forming a club. I flipped to a random page toward the end.
Estelle and I don’t hold with this new addition.
Lord Moreton discusses politics with the boy, for spirits’ sake.
Should he say anything we will all be in dire straits.
There are too many ties there. Dangerous ties.
I wonder if we’ve become too arrogant, too complacent.
But it titillates Iris—the thoughts of what we could do. To see him with our avenger.
Estelle Moreton. E.M. Iris. The connections, right there.
To see our avenger’s extraordinary eyes darken to—
A hand covered my mouth and I was pulled against a tall, hard body. “Hand the book to me, nice and slowly,” a voice whispered against my ear.
Everything in front of me turned crystal and cold.
Frost crept across the mirror, framing the reflection of a man with a scar under his chin and a knife in his hand.
Brisk fingers pried the journal from my fingers.
“Thank you, Lady Winters. Couldn’t find this for the life of me, short as it will be. Need the evidence, you see.”
I could make myself invisible all I wanted, but Worley would still have me in his grip.
“Did you kill them for making you a victim?” I pulled the cold up around me.
The hand around my mouth pulled my face to the side.
“Never. I am a loyalist. Loyal to any end in service of them. But I wasn’t ever good enough.
” He panted for a few long moments and I hardened the magic.
“Kill them? Only if they’d asked. But the one who killed them wasn’t asked. And Noble knows it. You need to—”
“Marietta!”
Worley swore and shoved me. I fell face first on the bed. Pitching forward, I threw my body over the other side, cracking my shoulder against the floor. I scrambled to my knees to defend myself, ice sweeping up my skin.
The dark edge of a trouser leg disappeared through the connecting door. Footsteps retreated down the back stairs. I clutched the horrid pink coverlet, twisting it in my hands, shaking from the cold.
“Marietta!” I whipped around to see Gabriel in the bedroom doorway.
“Worley. He grabbed me. Took the journal. Said—”