Chapter 20 Kane #2
Zaria bobbed her head, and suddenly Kane was right there with them, the pieces falling into place.
Something like exhilaration flooded his body—it was the most alive he’d felt in more than a week.
“We only stole the forgery, but nobody was supposed to know that. We certainly weren’t supposed to know it.
But then Louisa ruined everything when she confirmed it for us.
Now, not only are we on the right track when it comes to finding the Curator, but we also know they have the real primateria source, which—”
“—they’ve used to create the devices at the Exhibition,” Zaria finished for him. One side of her mouth was tilted up in an almost genuine smile.
For a brief moment, Kane almost forgot everything that had transpired between them.
Zaria appeared to remember it at the same time he did, the grin sliding off her face. It was, Kane thought, like glimpsing a constellation of stars only to watch the clouds engulf them again.
“Holy shit,” said Fletcher, who had stopped toying with his gun. “I think you might be right. So what now, then?”
“We stay the course,” Kane decided. “We just are a hell of a lot more careful about it.”
The first step in staying the course, it turned out, was getting Jules into Mansion House.
Kane was familiar with the head butler there, having delivered him a payment owed when Ward was still kingpin.
To his delight, the man had not only remembered him, but knew he had taken Ward’s place.
As a result, it hadn’t taken much convincing to secure Jules a position—on a trial basis, of course.
It was, Kane thought, rather convenient to be both respected and feared.
It was the middle of the day following their unfortunate meeting with Louisa Hoffman, and Mansion House was visible in their wake.
To say the last couple hours had been uncomfortable would be an understatement, but Kane had the sense he and Jules were both well acquainted with discomfort.
They hadn’t exchanged a word on their way here, though he had to admit Jules did a fair job plastering on a smile when it served him.
He’d charmed the head butler, presenting an honest, steadfast front in such a way that Kane wondered if perhaps it wasn’t a front at all. Not that he would ever ask.
It would’ve been preferable to have Zaria or Fletcher here—or both—but having too many people in tow would only have raised questions.
The last thing Kane wanted was for any of them to be recognized before they could begin to set their plan in motion.
With his scarred face and huge stature, Fletcher was far too memorable, and women like Zaria always drew attention. Not that she ever seemed to notice.
“Would you keep up?” Kane stopped in the middle of the road, tossing a look back at Jules. “If anyone’s watching, it’s going to look rather odd that you’re trailing behind me.”
Jules rolled his eyes. Their stagecoach waited a block away, an indistinct blob thanks to the dreary weather. When they approached, Kane discreetly handed the driver his payment before climbing inside, Jules right behind him.
The moment they were safely in the confines of the stagecoach, Kane bit back a sigh. He would have been content for their lack of communication to proceed, but he could sense that Jules was gearing up to speak. “Out with it, then, Julian.”
“Out with what?” Jules asked, narrowing his eyes. They were a fathomless dark not dissimilar to Zaria’s, Kane noticed, then wished he hadn’t.
“Whatever it is you want to say.”
A beat passed as Jules moved his lower jaw from side to side. Eventually, he said, “Why is it that you’re unable to leave her alone?”
Kane didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m talking about Zaria.”
“Well, yes, I inferred that much. What makes you think I’m unable to do anything of the sort?”
The look Jules shot him from the opposite bench was withering. “You must think I’m an idiot.”
“If I’m being honest,” Kane said dryly, “I almost never think about you at all.”
“God, you’re such an ass,” Jules spat, surprising him.
“You couldn’t leave her alone in the days leading up to the heist, and you can’t seem to leave her alone now.
In the end, you still wound up with the primateria source—or at least, what we believed was the primateria source.
You could have taken it and cut your losses.
But you couldn’t do that, could you? Because it was never about the necklace for you.
It was about the fact that you couldn’t accept being outsmarted.
You couldn’t accept that Zaria betrayed you. ”
Kane swallowed the acidic taste in his throat. He didn’t particularly want to have it out with Jules right as they were starting to work together again, but logic wasn’t his presiding virtue at present.
“You’re right,” he said, trapping the other boy with a cool gaze. “It was about the fact that she betrayed me. You may not know this, seeing as you were only a member of my crew for one day, but in my world, we always even the score. When someone wrongs you, you make them pay for it.”
Jules scoffed. “I know how people like you behave, Durante. I know this was no simple matter of evening the score. When Zaria double-crossed you, you took it personally. I could tell it was eating at you from the moment you showed up to take me from my own goddamned house.”
“It was Petrov’s house.” Kane fought to keep his voice even. “And you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Then why did you give her the necklace?”
That question, too, knocked him off-balance. For some reason, he hadn’t expected Jules to ask so directly. He steeled himself before responding. “If you’ll recall, I didn’t know it was anything more than a necklace.”
“You did by the time you gave it to Zaria,” Jules said, too smugly. “So why did you do it?”
“It was nothing to me, save a reminder I didn’t want. I didn’t have an alchemologist, and I certainly don’t expect to master the study anytime soon.”
“Ah, don’t sell me a dog. Assuming you’d always planned to replace Ward, you could have hired an alchemologist easily enough.
Who wouldn’t want an item that powerful, whether they could use it themselves or not?
So tell me, Durante.” The other boy leaned forward in his seat. “What’s the real reason?”
Kane pulled his lips back from his teeth. “I already answered the question.”
Jules was undeterred, a note of outright goading in his voice now.
“Do you think other people can’t see how you look at her?
Do you think I don’t notice the way your expression changes when she shows me affection?
Were it anyone else, I might call it love, but for you it’s an obsession.
A sickness. You look at her like you’re hungry.
Like she’s your last meal before the gallows and you sure as hell don’t want to share. ”
Kane’s pulse echoed in his ears. He wanted nothing more than to toss the other boy from the moving stagecoach, but Jules would take any overreaction as confirmation that he had struck a nerve. Kane needed to put an end to this—now—before any part of the conversation made it back to Zaria.
Lifting a brow, he feigned an expression of utter bewilderment, and then he began to laugh. Loudly and with enough abandon that Jules looked a bit uneasy.
“God, you thought you had me all figured out, didn’t you?
” Kane said, punctuating the words with a final chuckle.
“Is that truly what you believed? That I gave Zaria the necklace because I wanted to help her? Because I cared?” His mouth tasted bitter, bitter, bitter.
“Well, I don’t. Besides,” he added, splaying his fingers out in front of him, “I’m not without honor.
Zaria outsmarted me. She stole the necklace, and therefore it was rightfully hers.
That’s the first rule of being a criminal. ”
Jules’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in a breath. “Criminals don’t abide by rules. That’s kind of the point.”
“Sure they do. The rules are just different.”
“Right,” Jules said tersely. “Well, my mistake. Far be it from me to forget your inability to care about anyone but yourself.”
Kane made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat, effectively ending the conversation. He let his gaze slide to the window. The effort to look unconcerned had his vision blurring, and he didn’t process a single sight as he fought to keep his composure.
Truthfully, he couldn’t put words to why he’d slipped the necklace into Zaria’s pocket that night, taking advantage of her distraction as an inferno rose around them.
It had been a split second of weakness. A fracturing of his resolve, a lapse in his judgment.
He’d comforted himself afterward by imagining her reaction.
Perhaps she would think it a threat—an attempt to prove just how close he could get without her noticing.
Maybe she would see it as a show of confidence.
A boast. A way of saying he didn’t need a primateria source to carry out whatever he had planned next.
But there was a very, very small part of Kane that had hoped Zaria would interpret the gesture as something else entirely. A part of him that was prone to irrationality. It had been a mistake, and it was why he’d taken this opportunity to put an end to any speculation.
He spent the rest of the ride feeling sick to his very core.