Chapter Twenty-Seven Patrick
They were to leave that very evening.
The police would be out in numbers tonight, hoping to corner the earth Charmer.
Patrick checked the barrel of his pistol and counted the bullets. Three missing.
They’d parted to their rooms to redress, Tamir providing them with clothing fit for travel. Before dawn, they’d be gone.
In the hour before, Patrick paced his room, vowing not to go to Nina’s.
He saw her again as she’d been in Rickers, face white, eyes fixed on something far off, the tendons of her neck and hands so taut they threatened rupture. The whole world shaking on its axis.
She was breaking a little more each day, with each new blow. There was no preventing it.
Patrick was accustomed to fixing things. He was a man of solutions, a man who obtained what he wanted.
Lord, if his body didn’t still want hers.
He’d crossed a line with her earlier, so soon after vowing he wouldn’t.
He had no trouble admitting he was weak where Nina was concerned.
One look from her, and his mind was sprinting ahead to dim lighting, flushed skin, her skirt above her hips, her hips above him, trust be damned.
He could feel her weight still. What harm would it do? To have that just once more?
Some things, though, were too broken to be rebuilt. He’d resist the urge to taper his hands to all the cracks and fissures of her in a desperate ploy to salvage what they’d had. Or at least, what he’d imagined they’d had.
I was going to marry her, he thought. God, how deep had she entrenched herself in him? How far would he have to cut to get her out? He’d been stupid with love. Blind with it, just as his mother had said. Hadn’t he felt that miner’s shiver? How quick he’d been to ignore it.
But surely, he hadn’t imagined all of it. He wasn’t so creative that he could have invented feelings where there were none. He’d seen love requited when she’d looked at him. No one, not even Nina Harrow, was that good an actress.
But therein lay the truth of the matter. He would long for her, even as she lied to him. And she would scheme against him, even as she fell for him. Round and round it would go, the web tightening, constricting.
It had to be left alone. Patrick had turned away from the adjoining door, jaw fastened, head shaking a reproach. “Get your wits about you,” he muttered to himself, pulling his shirt over his head and letting it fall to the bed.
He was running a wet cloth over his skin, avoiding the healing flesh on his shoulder, when he heard the door open, Nina’s distinct steps walking through.
Patrick grimaced, made a poor attempt to gather himself, then looked over at her.
And immediately away.
She was still in that fucking dress.
Already he felt blood rushing south.
He groaned, his head dropping forward. “Do me a favor, Nina,” he said. “And don’t come any closer.”
“Why?” she asked, taking an unmistakable step in his direction.
“Because I’m a man like any other, and not a very good one.”
He heard her bare feet move closer, and he was sure she stood directly behind him, and her forehead touched his spine, and a pent-up breath escaped her, permeating his skin.
He shivered.
“I don’t want a good man,” she said. “I want the one in front of me.”
Patrick closed his eyes, at war again. Always at bloody war.
He abandoned the washcloth. “We’ll be leavin’ any minute,” he said.
She nodded against his back, and he felt her retreat. He breathed in relief, in sufferance.
When he turned, he found she had stumbled back, looking so unlike herself that it scared him. She pulsed with something, her hands interlacing before her, then clutching her rib cage as though holding it together.
Here it was, the breaking. Right before his eyes. Nothing to do but let her. She would crumble and rebuild.
“Breathe,” he said.
And she did. “I think I would have sent the entire building into a crater,” she said, her voice quieter than he’d anticipated. “I would have killed every person trapped inside. What does that make me?”
“Heartbroken,” he said immediately, watching her face. “Only that. You don’t need to look any further.”
He watched her eyes oscillate from collapse to rage with astonishing speed. “They’d deserve it,” she said, words shaking. “Wouldn’t they? They’d deserve it. They stand by and do nothing—”
“Yeah, Scurry girl,” he said. “They’d deserve it. But that hole inside you? You won’t stitch it up that way.”
She turned from the window to look at him, eyes burning. “Then how?” she asked.
He was tempted to lie to her, to tell her something beautiful waited beyond all this, that her struggle would all find its end.
He shook his head. “When I figure it out,” he said, “I’ll let you know.”
Tears filmed her eyes. From between gritted teeth, she said, “It hurts.”
“I know it does, darlin’.”
She closed her eyes, struggling to give voice to the thing gnashing at her insides. “I’m furious,” she said. “I feel I’m going mad with it.”
He knew the feeling well. Knew that people in the brink sated it with bluff or fists. What other way to curb generations of anger?
God, but he wished he could take that from her, even now. But all he could do was win a war. Make it so she’d never feel powerless again.
“Better to let the madness come and go as it pleases,” he said. “No point tryin’ to stop it.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Definitely not,” he said, smirking slightly. “I bottle it all up, then unleash it on hawkers at the market.”
She laughed once, but it was borrowed. She stumbled back a step, falling into a chair by the wall. The split in her dress fell to one side, revealing her thigh, far more of it than was fair.
Even from a distance, Patrick could see the ink smudged there. Could see some other hand’s scrawl.
“What is that?” he asked, eyes flicking up to her face.
He imagined she saw something dark cross his visage. Because she sat straighter, pulled the skirt of her dress down, made the markings of some other man disappear.
Patrick tilted his head, felt something horribly improper invade him. Heat coated his tongue, simmered behind his eyes.
“Patrick—”
“I asked you a question,” he said slowly.
She swallowed. “There was a Scribbler in the club. He was… easily distracted.”
“I can imagine,” Patrick rumbled. That was precisely the problem, he was imagining it with piercing clarity. Some Scribbler leaning in, talking into her ear, scratching his fucking ink onto her thigh. “Who?”
“Does it matter?” she asked. She seemed to sicken as she spoke. She pulled her skirt down farther. “It worked.” She buried her face in her hands, as though she couldn’t bear to look at him. He hated that even more—that she was ashamed.
He watched her, seething, for several moments. Then he turned.
From the basin, he took the washcloth. He swallowed fire as he crossed the room toward her, and, for the second time in as many days, knelt before her like a damned acolyte. He ignored the alarm on her face as he took either side of her skirt in his hands and tugged it apart, ripping it to the hip.
She looked down at him with open desire, her legs parting for him already.
And it was torture not to take that invitation, not to rip that godforsaken dress to the bust. She was all too willing. Always so fucking eager. And there was still so much they hadn’t had time for.
There was a room number inked into her. A meeting time. A question mark. As though there were ever a possibility, a hope in hell, that a Scribbler who wrote on women’s thighs could be indulged by someone like Nina. Patrick rubbed the pad of his thumb over it, and the ink smeared.
Nina inhaled.
“Think about this,” Patrick said. Letting the water from the washcloth drip onto her thigh, the droplets racing over the curve.
She shivered. “We’re going to find the Seam, and I’m going to make you more powerful than anyone’s ever been.
” Patrick wiped the cloth over the Scribbler’s ink.
Her eyes lowered to his lips. Her breaths lengthened.
“And you’ll watch ’em all cower at your feet.
Every lord, every minister. You’ll go where you like, do what you like, and there won’t be a single person who takes it from you.
No one will ever touch you again. And if they try, Nina…
” He gripped her thigh with one hand, washed the ink away with the other.
“I’ll pull them apart myself, piece by piece. ”