Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Slumped in a puddle of her own blood, it was more clear than ever that in the grand scheme of things, Thomasin’s life meant nothing.
Once she had been secured to the pillar, Worthing and the chief had turned her world into one of nothing but pain.
They had taken turns, landing blow after blow until her eyes went fuzzy and blood pooled in her mouth.
The only mercy they showed her was to cut her ankles loose so that her legs were free to buckle beneath her.
Part of Thomasin wanted to be knocked senseless. She wanted to forget where she was, because being in that alcove was a torture in and of itself. With every hit, she saw Edith as she had been in this very church.
A punch to the jaw.
Edith’s nervous eyes as Thomasin kissed her way down her stomach.
A backhand from Worthing that made her teeth rattle.
Edith’s fingers tugging at Thomasin’s hair.
A kick to her stomach.
Edith coming apart in her arms.
She didn’t know which hurt worse, the memories or the blows.
Thomasin spit another wad of blood from her mouth, then ran her tongue along her teeth, some of which were worryingly wiggly.
One of her eyes was swollen shut, and with each breath, she became more convinced her nose was broken.
There was a vague ringing in her ears that she tried to hear past, listening for signs of her captors.
She didn’t know where Worthing and the chief had gone off to.
It was still dark out, no sign of dawn in the sky.
Though her concept of time was murky just then, she thought it had been at least an hour since they had decided they needed a break from tormenting her.
She fought to keep herself awake, but the exhaustion was winning.
Each nodding off was harder to wake up from than the last. Thomasin knew she must have finally fallen asleep, because she was suddenly thrust into a viciously beautiful dream.
Edith’s face swam into focus. Her hand gently cupped Thomasin’s cheek, tilting her face up. Thomasin leaned into the touch. Edith’s skin was so soft.
“Thomasin, wake up!” Edith’s voice was the barest whisper.
Thomasin smiled, nuzzling against Edith’s hand.
She was just happy to hear her voice again.
But then that hand was shaking her, and the pain in her swollen eye and bruised cheek roared back with a vengeance.
She straightened her neck, Edith’s touch falling away.
Thomasin blinked, rousing herself, expecting the vision of Edith to disappear.
But she remained, crouched before Thomasin, her frame hardly visible in the dark.
Edith had come back for her.
All of Thomasin’s cozy, lovesick feelings for Dream-Edith fell away. “What the hell do you want?” she snarled under her breath, although the effect was dampened by her swollen lip.
Edith held her hands up. “I know you’re angry. But I’m going to fix this.”
Thomasin pulled at her restraints, wrist bones jutting against the pillar.
“Look at me, Edith.” Her name strangled its way up her throat.
“This is your fault.” Thomasin hoped she looked as bad as she felt.
She wanted Edith to feel guilty, didn’t want Edith to think she was making up for all the wrong she’d done by the mere act of coming back.
Edith’s lips pinched into a frown. “I know. And I’m so sorry, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make it up to you.
But first, we need to get you out of here.
” Her face was ridiculously earnest, like she truly believed every word she was saying.
Thomasin wouldn’t fall for that again so easily.
Edith was always earnest. That didn’t matter when said earnestness could switch sides like the flip of a coin.
One minute, she was earnest about loving Thomasin.
The next, she was earnest about leaving her.
Well, Edith could be as earnest as she wanted about coming back for her now.
Thomasin was not going to play the fool this time.
But she couldn’t argue with her second point.
Edith’s return seemed to have hardened all of Thomasin’s despair into rage.
Enough so that she was no longer content to submit to her fate at Worthing and the chief’s hands.
As skilled as Thomasin was at slipping bonds, Worthing was just as skilled at tying them.
She wasn’t getting out of this damned church alone.
Thomasin steeled her heart and put on the mask she had worn her whole life.
The one of the ruthless crime lord. She pretended it fit as easily as it used to.
“Where are Worthing and the chief?” she demanded.
Edith looked over her shoulder. “I didn’t see them. The church is empty.”
“They won’t have gone far. We need to get out of here before they come back.”
Edith jerked her head in a nod. “I have a plan.”
Thomasin rolled her eyes and smiled mockingly. “Do tell.”
Pulling a knife from her belt, Edith said, “I’ll cut your ropes, and then we run away.”
“That’s not a plan,” Thomasin said as Edith shuffled around to the other side of the pillar.
“Yes, it is.”
“Your plan only has two steps. In order for it to be a plan, it has to have at least five.” Thomasin felt the ropes pull tighter as Edith began to saw at the fibers.
“Says who?” Her whisper was breathless with the effort of cutting the rope.
“Says the greatest criminal in all of London.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint. I’m new at this criminal thing.”
“You’ve been a criminal since the day we left London,” Thomasin scoffed. The pressure on the ropes paused.
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Thomasin tamped down the fondness in her chest and rolled her eyes. “Keep cutting, Edith.”
“Oh, right.”
The sawing resumed, and Thomasin tugged at the ropes, waiting for the moment when they would snap free.
But after a few moments, she felt Edith still behind her once again.
Thomasin craned her neck to look over her shoulder, but the pillar was too wide to see past. She opened her mouth to ask Edith what was wrong only to be cut off by the click of a gun cocking.
Thomasin heard Worthing’s voice next. “Well, this is cozy.” At her back, she felt Edith move.
There was a cry of pain, and then the sound of a knife clattering to the ground.
Something slammed into the pillar, pitching Thomasin forward.
Every bruised and broken part of her screamed.
Then, there was another scream: Edith’s.
Thomasin tried desperately to get to her feet, but her heels couldn’t find purchase on the blood-slicked floorboards.
Her arms strained as she tried to wiggle free of the ropes.
“Leave her alone!” she shouted. “Her father won’t pay if you harm her.”
Worthing dragged Edith into Thomasin’s line of sight.
He had one hand fisted in her hair, and the other wrenched her arm behind her back.
“The deal was to take the man to his daughter. I did that, and I got paid.” Worthing sneered down at Edith.
“It’s not my fault you were stupid enough to run away again.
In my books, you’re now just the fool who was caught aiding a convicted criminal.
Isn’t that right, Chief?” he called out into the darkness of the pews.
The chief’s footsteps crunched on the glass as he made his way over to them. “Sounds about right to me.”
Fear flashed in Edith’s eyes, and Thomasin hated the way that she wanted nothing more than to make it go away.
She would help Edith get out of this. But she wasn’t doing it for her.
Thomasin needed to work with Edith so they could both make it out of this alive.
After they were free, Thomasin could go back to hating Edith.
She watched out of the corner of her eye as Worthing tied Edith to the same pillar so they were bound back-to-back.
Once he was done, he sneered down at the both of them, then looked up to meet the chief’s gaze.
He jerked his head at Edith. “You know, I think Lord Darling might be quite generous if we were to offer to wipe her slate clean.”
The chief gave a short chuckle. “I think you’re right. What say we pay him a visit?”
Worthing nodded, then the two men sauntered away.
Their footsteps echoed through the church before fading completely.
Of course, the promise of even more bribe money from Edith’s father would have them feeling all chummy again.
Either way, Thomasin knew that the men’s absence was their chance to escape.
The problem was that her head was fuzzy and heavy, her thoughts circling uselessly.
She tried to break her wrist to slip out, but the ropes were too tight and the angle wasn’t right.
Hours or maybe minutes later—she couldn’t tell because the sky was still pitch-black—Thomasin leaned her head back against the pillar and said, “Your plan went really well.” The bruises across her face stretched painfully.
“Consider me rescued.” Edith’s hands were tied just above her own.
Thomasin could feel Edith’s knuckles bumping into her lower back.
“You’re not going to be able to wiggle out. Worthing is good at what he does.”
“I’m not going to just give up and sit here like you.”
“No,” Thomasin remarked bitterly, “you’ll just run away and leave me.” Edith’s hands stilled.
“I’ll never leave you again,” she said.
Thomasin clenched her jaw, then winced as the movement sent shockwaves through her teeth. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
“That’s okay. You don’t need to believe me. I’ll prove it to you.”
The emotion in her voice made Thomasin squirm. In a desperate attempt to diffuse the tension that was rising in her chest, she said, “Well as it is, we’ll die together very shortly, and you’ll be proven right.”
“Always the pessimist,” Edith said as she resumed her wriggling.
Thomasin’s frustration finally snapped. “What on earth are you doing back there?”
“I have a knife tucked into my belt. I’m trying to reach it,” Edith said. Thomasin could tell that Edith was carefully modulating the condescension that she would usually infuse into a statement like that. “I can’t quite bend that way though. Do you think you could reach it?”
“I can certainly try.” Thomasin marveled at Worthing’s oversight.
It was absurd that he wouldn’t have checked her for weapons.
Underestimating Edith would be his downfall.
As it should be, Thomasin thought proudly.
And then she mentally slapped herself for thinking something so sentimental about Edith.
She cleared her throat and asked, “Which side?”
“My left.”
Thomasin twisted her wrists, stretching her right hand as far as it would go. She was just able to get a grip on the leather of Edith’s belt. Tracing her fingers along the leather, she searched for the knife.
“Thomasin!” Edith gasped, her voice tight.
Thomasin froze. “Did I hurt you?” Despite everything, guilt bloomed in her chest. But then she realized Edith was laughing quietly.
“No, it just tickles,” she mumbled.
Thomasin resumed her search without mercy.
“You’ll live.” Angling her shoulder down to lengthen her reach, her fingertips finally brushed up against something hard.
But she couldn’t quite get a grip on it.
“Can you scoot any closer?” she asked Edith, who then shifted back and forth, trying to get into a better position.
She jutted her hip out, and Thomasin’s quick fingers latched onto the knife, pulling it from the belt. “Got it.”
They breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief as Thomasin flipped the knife in her hand and got to work cutting the rope.
Her shoulders and forearms ached terribly, but she kept going until her ropes finally fell away.
The world spun as she rose to her knees and turned to start cutting Edith’s ropes.
She took a mental inventory of her injuries as she worked.
Heavily bruised jaw and cheekbone. Swollen lip.
Likely broken nose. Maybe a broken rib. Her vision was a little dim in her right eye, but she could still blink normally. She’d had worse and kept going.
With a final snick, Edith was free. She bolted to her feet, pulling Thomasin along with her at a dizzying speed.
When she stumbled, Edith took her shoulders, holding her in place until she found stable footing again.
The second Thomasin was sure she wouldn’t fall over, she shrugged out from Edith’s touch.
“We need to get out of here before they come back.”
Hurrying past the pews, Thomasin forced herself to keep up with Edith.
Every step hurt, but she limped along without complaint.
They reached the ramshackle door and stepped through the threshold.
Just as the moonlight washed over Thomasin’s face, a hand grabbed a fistful of hair at the back of her head and yanked her off her feet.
She landed on her back, coughing and wheezing. A man stepped over her. Through the stars sparkling in her vision, she saw the chief leaning over her, his face eclipsing the moon.
Edith threw herself at him, punching at his back, tugging on his shoulders, trying desperately to get him away from Thomasin.
He shoved Edith off of him as easily as if she were a gnat.
She landed in a heap a few feet away, and Thomasin could do nothing but watch.
She couldn’t get her limbs to obey. The muscles in her arms were limp, and her legs shook.
She could barely lift her head from the ground because every time she did, an all-encompassing dizziness overtook her.
Her eyes struggled to focus on the chief. There were three of him bobbing above her. Three guns aimed at her forehead. “Did you really think we would leave you here unguarded?”
Thomasin’s tongue was heavy in her mouth, and her jaw was too tired to move. The time for witty remarks had passed. She looked past the chief to the stars twinkling through the breaks in the clouds. She would never relearn the constellations.
Something hot dripped onto Thomasin’s cheek.
The chief was falling. There was a knife sticking through his chest. She heard a squelch, and then the knife was gone.
His body lurched to the right, and he collapsed face-first beside Thomasin.
She coughed through the cloud of dirt that puffed up when he hit the ground.
It was Edith now who eclipsed her view of the stars. “I’m a proper criminal now,” she said, the blood-soaked knife still clutched in her trembling hand.