Prologue #2
She gave a wry little quirk of her lips, realizing in that moment and putting words to the strangeness of the encounter. “I’ve only just realized,” she said. “We’ve never actually spoken, have we?”
“No,” he said, startled by the sound of his own voice.
Still, having spoken broke some of the spell that had put him into such squirming discomfort. He was able, at the very least, to straighten his spine and receive her with a respectful posture. He folded his hands in front of him.
She blinked, her crystalline blue eyes gleaming in the low afternoon light. “I only wanted to thank you before you left,” she said, inching closer still, as though his full height had not deterred her but rather invited her closer.
An odd reaction, and an unusual one in Beck’s experience, especially from a woman. Especially from someone accustomed to fine manners and finer comport.
She swallowed, the delicate muscles of her throat flexing. “I needed to thank you.”
“Thank me?” he repeated, baffled and trying not to stare at her throat. Determined not to. “For what?”
Her gaze searched his face for a moment, uncertainty reflected in her features.
Those eyes of hers flicked down to his damaged hand, her lips pressing together.
“Perhaps I am mistaken,” she said, careful and measured in the way only well-bred girls were, “but I suspect your injury came about on my behalf.”
There was a pause during which he considered lying. Later, he’d wonder if he was simply too exhausted for any further playacting in that moment, that his mask was already too far gone, and so the matter of polite falsehood was already precluded.
“You are not mistaken,” he said, letting his hands fall apart and sighing. “But you do not owe me thanks, either. What I did was unworthy, Miss Lazarus. Your father had already defended you perfectly well.”
She hesitated, something that looked like a smile threatening to emerge on her face. “Oh,” she said softly, giving her head a little shake. “You do know my name.”
He gaped at her. “I … yes?”
She did smile then, pearly teeth glinting in the dusk. “I wasn’t certain. Hannah is my first name. Did you know that?”
He tried to swallow and failed. He nodded again, fascinated by the way her smile deepened, by the flush of pink in her cheeks.
What was this, exactly? What was happening here?
She took a bracing breath and rolled her shoulders, some of that glorious hair falling forward over her collarbone.
“My father is a good man, Mr. Beck,” she said with a wryness that should not have had to exist in a woman like this, that should have been armored against by the protection she deserved.
“He is. But he would never punch anyone for me. No one would. Only you. I don’t know what I did to deserve such regard, but I must tell you that I am …
well, I am very touched by it. It warms me. ”
“It,” he repeated, his vision starting to swim with the effort it took to keep standing there and try to comprehend this exchange, “it warms you?”
“Yes, I …” She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth like she was bracing herself and then crossed the remainder of the hallway runner between them, reaching out to take his injured hand into hers. “I cannot stop thinking about it. I wish you were not leaving.”
Part of him wanted to jerk his hand away and flee down the hallway.
He couldn’t quite believe she was speaking to him, much less coming closer.
He couldn’t accept that she was touching him, looking down at the palm of his hand like she’d just captured something she wanted very much.
And the things she was saying all the while? Impossible.
“I know you have many important things to attend to,” she said softly, turning his huge, scarred-up hand in her soft, pale ones, pulling those pretty blue eyes over the cuts and bruises on his knuckles. “I suppose I am grateful I at least got to say goodbye.”
He could not move. He could barely breathe, so he didn’t try.
He held what oxygen he had already claimed in his lungs and did his best not to allow even the slightest flicker to pass through his body.
It was a sickening sort of fascination that was rooting him in place, even as his blood was hot and roaring in his ears.
She sighed, as though resigned. “Perhaps we will see each other again someday, in London,” she said, in a voice that belied her doubt that it would ever come to pass.
“Yes,” he agreed thinly. “Perhaps.”
She nodded. “Well, until then,” she said, tilting those blue eyes up to his and bending at the waist, dragging his split knuckles up to her lips.
She kissed them softly, right on the worst of the damage, as though it did not disgust her at all.
Her eyelids flickered, her warm breath ghosting over his skin.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever move from this spot in this hallway ever again.
She withdrew in stages. She straightened her posture carefully, slowly.
Regretfully?
She gave him a sad little smile and finally released his hand, the soft pads of her fingers slipping away like morning dew.
“Goodbye, Mr. Beck,” she said. “Safe travels.”
She turned and fled down the hall and past his line of vision. She left him there in the hallway with a hand that burned and a soul that had been split open and set alight.
And all Beck could do was accept that he’d been irrevocably changed.
Even if he never saw her again.
Well, if he never saw her again in the waking world.
He knew even as it happened that his dreams would now be haunted by Hannah Lazarus, from that day until his very last.