Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Thomasin had never been good at resisting temptation.
If she wanted something, she usually did whatever she could to get said thing.
She didn’t see the point in denying herself pleasure.
The life of a crime boss was a short one, so why would she waste her very limited time on the wanting phase when she could just skip to the fun part?
All that being said, Thomasin now found herself staring resolutely into the darkness, solemn in her vow to stand guard.
Even as she heard the rustle of fabric and the clank of a buckle being undone.
The soft splash of water, and Edith’s sharp intake of breath.
She didn’t consider turning around once, nor did she make a single suggestive comment.
When she closed her eyes, she could see Edith’s bright-red face, her endearing embarrassment.
Thomasin was more than tempted to storm back into that river and make Edith blush all over again, but she didn’t want to overwhelm her.
Which was odd, because Thomasin didn’t usually make a habit of considering other people’s feelings.
Edith had charmed her somehow. If she hadn’t been so naively sincere, Thomasin would have thought it was a strategy, that she was being manipulated.
And now, Edith was bathing beneath the moonlight, and Thomasin was not looking.
“You were right.” Edith’s strained voice drifted over to her like a gentle breeze. “It’s freezing.”
“Nothing better than an ice bath after sweating your ass off on a horse all day,” Thomasin called back.
“Speak for yourself! Not all of us wear head-to-toe leather. Maybe you’d sweat less in something more practical.”
“Never. Every drop of sweat is worth it.”
Edith laughed. The sound was strangled with cold, but it warmed some forgotten part of Thomasin. “It does cultivate a certain aesthetic.”
“What aesthetic is that?”
“You know.”
“No, please enlighten me,” Thomasin said, picturing Edith’s face. Lips turning up into a smile despite her best effort. Red flush across her round cheekbones, delicate nostrils flaring.
“It’s … striking,” Edith said.
“Striking. That’s all I get?”
“Yeah, striking. You know, it sends the message that ‘hey, I could kill you with my bare hands, but don’t worry, I’ll look really stylish while I do it.’ ”
Thomasin laughed loudly, her head tipping back.
Beads of cold water dripped from the ends of her hair and onto her back, seeping through the thin material of her shirt.
“The aesthetic doesn’t seem to work on you, though.
You smiled at me when I tried to rob you, and then, the same day, strolled into my inn very confidently for someone who had no earthly clue how to hire a mercenary.
” Thomasin said it teasingly, but there was real curiosity beneath the words.
Edith huffed a laugh, and Thomasin heard a splash of water. Edith’s voice sounded closer, as if she had swam up to the shore. “I think I was too busy being impressed by you to be scared of you killing me.”
Impressed? A strange feeling squirmed in Thomasin’s chest. She was impossibly flattered. Edith must have interpreted the silence very differently because she added with a tone of forced humor, “You aren’t planning on killing me with your bare hands, are you?”
Thomasin turned her head to face her before remembering midway through the movement that she shouldn’t look. So instead, she froze with her head half turned, eyes fixed on the ground behind her shoulder. “No. I’m not going to kill you.”
I’m just going to betray you and sell you back to your father, she thought bitterly.
But Thomasin couldn’t allow herself to feel guilty.
Not when her entire career and reputation rested on her getting enough money to bribe the constables into forgetting her transgressions, and not with Worthing lurking over her like a vulture over a not-quite-dead-yet body.
Being a legendary mercenary was all she knew, and if she lost that, she didn’t know what she’d be left with.
She had never spent much time thinking about who she was outside of her work.
As Marshall had told her on his deathbed, she was nothing without the syndicate.
Thomasin thought of how passionate Edith had been about her books, her key, the treasure hunt as a whole. Thomasin hadn’t been passionate about anything in so long.
“Why did you decide to go on your quest?” she asked Edith abruptly.
She heard a ripple of water and imagined Edith tracing her fingers through the surface of the river.
“One of my earliest memories is my grandmother telling my siblings and me bedtime stories about King Arthur. She told us that she had the only key to his treasure and that someday she would go on the adventure of a lifetime to find it.”
“She never did, though?” Thomasin surmised.
After a long silence, Edith said quietly, “No, she didn’t. But I promised her that I’d find it, so that’s what I’m doing.”
Thomasin understood that more than she wanted to admit. “So it’s all for her, then?”
“And myself. I believe in the treasure as much as she did. I spent my childhood following her around the manor, begging her for more stories.”
“Stories you think are true?”
“I do,” Edith said confidently. “And when I find Excalibur, I’ll be able to prove it to everyone else.”
“Why didn’t your grandmother ever try to find the treasure?”
There was a long silence, and it took all of Thomasin’s admittedly weak self-control to not turn around and look at Edith in that moment.
In the week she’d spent with her, she’d come to appreciate how openly the girl’s emotions played on her face.
Edith hid nothing, and Thomasin could read her like a book.
It was a relief to not have to worry about a person’s hidden motivations or secret agendas for once.
Edith was honest and free with her emotions to a strangely naive extent.
Usually, Thomasin would find such behavior weak, but she actually liked knowing what Edith was feeling.
There was a safety in it. With Edith, Thomasin didn’t feel like she was always waiting for the trap to spring shut.
But now, the bonds of propriety kept Thomasin from seeing if her question had offended or upset Edith. “You haven’t drowned, have you?”
“No, sorry!” Edith called back with a forced laugh. “It’s just a long story, and I’m so cold I can hardly feel my teeth.”
There was splashing, and then Thomasin listened to the sounds of Edith getting dressed. The shaky clanging of metal was followed by Edith’s soft voice calling out from behind her.
“Could you—do you think you could help me with this buckle? My fingers are numb, and I can’t quite get it.” She gave a short, frustrated laugh.
Thomasin pivoted on a heel and strode over to where Edith stood near the river.
Her hair was wet and unbound, falling to just below her shoulders.
Thomasin had never seen her look so disheveled before.
Even throughout their travels, Edith had managed to maintain the perfect image.
Her hair was always done up, and her face was always painted precisely with cosmetics.
Now, her pale skin was bare and every part of her looked softer, more vulnerable.
A few strands of wet hair stuck to her cheeks.
Without thinking, Thomasin reached out and brushed them away.
Edith stilled under her touch, eyes widening.
Her cheeks and nose were already bright red with cold, but Thomasin imagined that if they weren’t, she would be blushing.
“Sorry,” Thomasin murmured under her breath.
Edith looked up at her through her eyelashes and offered a shy smile. “Nothing to be sorry for.”
The air between them pulled tight, and Thomasin couldn’t help but stare at Edith, the soft glow of her beneath the moonlight.
She looked away only when Edith fidgeted with the buckle at her waist. “Right,” Thomasin shook her head with a little laugh.
She reached for the belt that held Edith’s skirt in place.
The metal was frigid beneath her fingers.
As she threaded the fabric through the buckle and clasped it in place, she tried to ignore the brief accidental brushes of her fingers against Edith’s stomach.
Even through the linen of her shirt, she was drawn to the soft warmth of her.
She dropped her hands as quickly as she could.
“Thank you,” Edith said, bending over to put on her socks and shoes.
“Anytime,” Thomasin said casually.
Edith stood and smiled up at her with her too-easy-to-read face, and Thomasin’s heart twisted.
She didn’t want to be the person who taught Edith that it was stupid to trust people, didn’t want to be her first lesson in betrayal.
But Thomasin had to look out for herself.
She led Edith back to the camp, and as they walked side by side through the forest, she convinced herself that she was doing Edith a favor.
After this, Edith would know that if she didn’t look out for herself, no one else would.
“Why were you out ambushing people all alone?” Edith’s question pulled Thomasin from her depressing thoughts. “When we first met, I mean.”
“I get bored.”
“I go for walks in the garden when I get bored,” Edith said.
Thomasin laughed. “Rob a lot of people on these walks of yours?”
“Not unless you count picking roses. Although my father owns them, so I suppose that’s not really robbery.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Edith shrugged and mused aloud, “Roses, robbery—to each their own.”
“I don’t think my victims would share your cavalier attitude.”
“Hey.” Edith nudged Thomasin’s side with a gentle elbow. “Technically, I was one of your victims, and look how well that’s turned out!”
“Good point.” Thomasin smiled, trying to mask the bitter taste of the words.
“Why do you get bored? I would have thought the life of a criminal to be never-ending excitement.”
Thomasin considered for a moment, lifting a tree branch for Edith to pass under. “It used to be. I’d wake up every morning not knowing what was going to happen, or if I was even going to make it through the day.”
Edith grimaced, but Thomasin shook her head, looking for the right words to explain how those early days in the syndicate had felt.
Once the terror and grief had worn off and she started to thrive in her new way of life.
“The uncertainty … it gave things weight. Everything was a challenge, and every success was a massive celebration. I was always pushing myself for more gold, more women, more power.”
“What changed?”
“I got bloody promoted. Turns out management is a lot more delegation and a lot less doing whatever the fuck I want.”
“That must be a lot of pressure,” Edith said with a sympathetic twist of her lips.
Thomasin shrugged. “Just less fun than it used to be. Anyway, that’s why I sneak away when I can. Hold up some rich bastards to remind myself of the good old days.”
“Well, I’m very glad that you held up this rich bastard,” Edith said with a proud smile. Thomasin barked a laugh, and they let the conversation fade away into a companionable silence.
Once they reached the camp, Edith sat at the fire across from Jay, who smiled at her.
They quickly became engrossed in conversation, and Thomasin was shocked that Jay had so much to say.
She had categorized him as the sullen, silent, boring type almost immediately upon meeting him.
But Edith, it seemed, could get anyone talking.
Thomasin would have joined them, but she didn’t feel like stabbing herself in the face with guilt anymore, which was what being around Edith was starting to feel like the closer they got to Slaughterbridge.
She walked until she was out of earshot of their quiet voices but could still see the red bursts of the fire.
There, she laid out her bedroll to try to get some sleep.
Edith and Jay went to bed, the fire faded to embers, and the scurrying of nocturnal animals echoed through the trees, but Thomasin found no rest. Lying on her bedroll, one arm tucked beneath her head, the other fidgeting with her knife, Thomasin stared up at the sky.
She used to be able to name almost every constellation.
She had the vaguest memory, so fuzzy it very well could have just been an imagining, of her mother pointing at each star and speaking to her in a soft voice.
Funny, she hadn’t thought about that in at least a decade.
Her mother had died, and there had been much more important things to remember than which constellation was a ram and which was a fish.
The cluster of stars that might have been a ram was now eclipsed by Worthing’s face. Thomasin scowled instinctively and sat up. She stabbed her knife into the earth next to her. “What?”
“Did you send the ransom letter?”
“Of course I did.” Thomasin had dispatched their fastest rider with a letter for Edith’s father, telling him where to meet them and when. Assuming the letter had reached him, and assuming he wanted his daughter back, he would show up at Slaughterbridge tomorrow to claim her.
You’ve been a killer since you were a child.
Marshall’s parting words spun circles in her head.
What she was doing to Edith wasn’t murder.
It was nowhere close to being the worst thing she had ever done.
But somehow, this was the guiltiest she had ever felt, which was ridiculous.
What Marshall had said was undeniably true.
She was a killer. It was who she was. It was all she was.
“I don’t ask because I doubt you,” Worthing said in a tone that made it obvious that he had indeed doubted her. “I’m just trying to plan my day tomorrow.”
“Fuck off.” Thomasin glared up at him. “You don’t get to plan, you only get to do as you’re told.”
He raised his hands placatingly. “Very well, boss. For all our sakes, but especially yours, I hope everything goes to your plan tomorrow.”
Worthing slunk back off into the night, and Thomasin dragged her hands down her face, growling into them.
Worthing couldn’t wait to watch her fail.
He probably assumed she didn’t have a plan, but she did.
It just wasn’t a very complicated one. She would let Edith use her key and have a few precious hours where she could live out her fantasy and follow her quest. Then, when there was no treasure, and her world came crumbling down around her, Thomasin would hand her over to her father and demand an exorbitant amount of money, thus shattering whatever would be left of Edith’s dreams and ideals into a million little pieces.