Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Thomasin held Edith back with one arm wrapped around her shoulders. With the other, she leveled her pistol at Worthing.
Worthing reached for the knife that had dropped next to Jay’s body. Thomasin cocked her gun, and he froze, half stooped over. She flicked her wrist, gesturing for him to rise slowly and to put his hands up where she could see them.
Edith thrashed against her, soft cries falling from her lips as she tried to get to Jay, but Thomasin held the gun steady, kept her aim true.
“Move,” she ordered Worthing. Under threat of the gun, she directed him away from the body. Only once he was several feet away, her pistol still aimed at him, did she let Edith go.
She fell to her knees next to Jay, and Thomasin let her focus narrow entirely on Worthing.
“Last words,” she said, offering him the decency he hadn’t given Jay.
“You’re not gonna kill me. Not in front of your little girlfriend,” he sneered.
“Watch me.” Her finger tightened on the trigger.
“Wait!” Edith cried. Thomasin spared a quick glance at her tear-streaked face. Edith stared at Worthing with condemnation burning in her eyes, but then she looked at Thomasin and said, “Don’t kill him. I don’t want anyone else to die for this.”
Thomasin paused, the barrel of the gun dipping just slightly.
“Told you.” Worthing’s lips split into a mocking smirk.
Thomasin waited for the urge to shoot him out of spite. To kill him just so she could be right. But it didn’t come. “Get out of my sight,” she said, not feeling the need to volley a comeback.
He took an experimental step back. When Thomasin didn’t fire the gun, he said, “You’re really giving up that easily?” His voice was at once taunting and cautiously optimistic.
“Call it whatever you want, I’m done with you.” And she was, Thomasin realized. It wasn’t bluster or a bluff, she was well and truly finished with always trying to prove her worth to Worthing, with forcing herself to be the worst version of herself to keep him in line.
Because Edith had shown her there was a better version of herself, and that was who she wanted to be. If she kept trying to control Worthing, she would never be that person. The person Edith deserved.
When the tile had cracked and Edith had fallen through the floor, Thomasin had felt a terror she had never experienced before.
A raw, primal, desperate terror that had flooded every nerve in her body.
But now, standing on the precipice of losing the syndicate to her worst enemy, she didn’t feel anything close to that level of fear. All she felt was … relief.
For the first time since she’d known him, Thomasin didn’t feel a roar of hate, or even a simmering resentment toward Worthing. She simply did not care.
She didn’t care if he won, because she didn’t want to play his game anymore.
She didn’t need the syndicate; hell, she didn’t even want it anymore.
Had she ever? She had only ever been what Marshall wanted her to be.
She had only ever wanted what he wanted.
But Edith had shown her something more, something better.
She had held on to the syndicate because it was all she had ever known, because she wanted to be the best, wanted to win.
But with Edith and the quest, she had won something she had never even considered.
So who cared if Worthing won the syndicate?
Who cared if he spent his whole life thinking he had come out victorious, thinking he had bested Thomasin?
She did not need his good opinion. In fact, there was only one opinion she cared about anymore: Edith’s.
“Go,” she growled at him again. He stumbled, eyes locked on her in disbelief. Blindly, he retrieved his bloody knife from the ground and held it at her as he backed away, surely expecting her to spring some trap.
But she was letting him win. She was letting herself move on.
Finally, he turned and ran, disappearing into the shadows.
Thomasin let the gun fall to her side, the adrenaline easing from her system, muscles slackening, thoughts slowing.
She stumbled over to Edith … to Jay’s body. Thomasin hadn’t let herself think about that yet. She’d needed to stay focused on Worthing, needed to protect Edith.
But she didn’t know what Edith needed now. She had never been good at comfort. Thomasin wanted to try, though, for the woman she loved.
Kneeling down, she folded Edith into her embrace, felt Edith’s body collapse against hers, settling in the cradle of her arms. Thomasin held Edith tight, stroked her hair, and whispered the things she had always secretly wished someone had whispered to her when she had been grieving.
Thomasin hadn’t really let herself know Jay.
She could see now how foolish that had been, how cowardly.
She reached out and closed his eyes. Thomasin was grateful to him.
He had saved Edith. When that knife had been held across Edith’s throat, Thomasin had seen red, and fear had clawed at her very bones.
But Jay had saved her. For that, she would hold her gratitude close for the rest of her life.
He deserved more than that, but it was all she could give him now.
Edith’s soft voice broke the silence. “I’ve never seen a dead body before, you know?”
“What about your grandmother?” Thomasin asked softly.
Edith gave a rueful laugh. “I refused to look at her. Didn’t want to see her all … gone.” A sob fell from her lips, and she covered her mouth with her hand, muffling her next words. “This is all my fault.”
“What? Why would you think that?” Thomasin tilted her head to look at Edith, but the other woman avoided her gaze.
“If you hadn’t been worried about me, you would have killed Worthing right away, like you did with the constables. But because he had a knife to my throat, you waited. And now Jay is dead.”
“That sounds more like it’s my fault.”
“No! That’s not what I meant. I made you weak. You’re worse off for knowing me. And not just that—this is my quest. I hired you. If I hadn’t done that, then Jay—”
“You didn’t make Jay tackle Worthing. You were his friend, and he wanted to help you.”
“See, my fault,” Edith interjected.
“You’re not listening to me.” Thomasin took Edith’s face in her hands, made her look at her. “You are not responsible for other people’s choices. You can be sad that he’s gone. You can mourn him. I know I will. But you cannot put his death on your shoulders.”
Edith shrugged those shoulders as if the weight of all that and more was pressing upon her. There was nothing more Thomasin could say to her. When death was involved, there was never anything to say. So she just held her, let her know she wasn’t going anywhere.
They sat with Jay’s body until the moon rose fully above them. Edith’s head rested on Thomasin’s shoulder, their hands intertwined in her lap. Neither wanted to abandon their silent vigil, but their damp clothes stuck to their skin, raising goosebumps and shivers all across their bodies.
When Edith’s trembling lips started to turn blue, Thomasin helped her to her feet.
Edith used Merlin’s staff as a walking stick, which told Thomasin everything she needed to know about how tired Edith was.
Never under normal circumstances would she use an important historical artifact in such a manner.
Sacrilegious, she would have called it. By some miracle, Thomasin managed to lead them back to the pool, to where their packs lay abandoned near one of the crumbling rampart walls.
When Edith spotted her satchel, she broke free from Thomasin and rushed toward it.
She undid the buckle with clumsy fingers and threw open the flap.
At the sight of her grandmother’s urn still tucked safely inside, she sagged with relief.
She drew the bag into her lap, wrapped her arms around it protectively.
“I know it’s stupid,” she whispered without looking at Thomasin.
“It’s not.” Thomasin trailed her fingertips across Edith’s back as she passed her to grab her own pack. After throwing it over her shoulder, she said, “We need to get out of the cold.”
Edith nodded, looking back to where they’d left Jay’s body alone among the trees. Then, she exhaled roughly and swiped her hands across her cheeks.
It didn’t feel right leaving him, but it was the ending that every outlaw knew was coming for them. A quick and violent death. A body without a grave.
That wouldn’t be Thomasin, though. She vowed it right there. She was alive, she had Edith, and she would do the only thing she could. She would keep going.
They ended up at another inn. A fancy, countryside place that catered to traveling merchants and other well-off members of society.
Thomasin didn’t even have it in her to object when Edith dropped her money pouch on the bar and demanded their nicest room and hot baths and meals for the next week.
Thomasin raised her eyebrows at her when she said she wanted to stay for a week, figuring that Edith would want to throw herself back into the quest at full speed.
“I haven’t even solved the clue yet, and we have no idea where it’ll lead until I do. Besides, I think we’ve earned a rest,” Edith said.
Thomasin couldn’t argue with that, so she let Edith lead the way to the suite at the far end of the second-floor hallway. Besides, the police would never think to look for her in such a cushy place.
It was the nicest room Thomasin had ever set foot in.
There was a large four-poster bed with ivory sheets, cloud-like pillows, and a floral-printed quilt.
Across from the bed was a vanity with a polished mirror.
In the reflection, Edith and Thomasin looked like ghosts, ragged and filthy, like this was the last place they belonged.
The door next to the vanity led to a bathing chamber, and soon there were servants bustling past them, filling the wooden tub with bucketful after bucketful of steaming water.