Chapter 35
“Imust confess, Your Grace, that I did not expect an invitation to a warehouse at midnight without a servant in sight.” Oldbrook stepped into the circle of lantern light.
He didn’t hurry as he took off his gloves one finger at a time as though he were preparing to inspect the legs of a racehorse.
“I had rather hoped we understood one another.”
He drew off the second glove. “Though I confess I have wondered, once or twice of late, whether you were quite as content to let old graves lie as you gave me to believe. Your father never did learn when to leave a thing alone.” The pale eyes settled on him, mild and unhurried.
“I should be sorry to find it ran in the blood.”
Magnus stood at the center of the empty floor and watched him approach.
He had chosen the location with care. An old warehouse on the river’s edge with its owners bankrupt and long gone. The stone floors were swept clean of everything but dust and cold. The building stood empty except for a double row of squat stone pillars struggling to hold up the roof.
Once, he had thought that he would feel his father beside him when he finished things. He had thought that the closer he came to the men who had done it, the closer his father would feel.
It had never worked that way.
The closer he came to justice, the fainter the memory of his father grew, worn thinner year after year of his hunt.
Magnus could no longer remember the sound of his voice, and he scarcely recalled his last words on the steps long ago.
He had given years to a man who was slowly and terribly becoming a stranger to him.
He didn’t let himself think about what that meant. He had trained himself a long time ago not to.
He had come to it straight from the north.
The sworn depositions were his now. He had prised from a forgotten Edinburgh strongroom that had swung open to a duke’s name where it would have stayed barred to any lesser man, exactly as Deane had.
The better part of a fortnight it had cost him, Edinburgh and back over hard roads.
The proof was complete at last. Every piece of it but the man himself, and the forged letter that would put the noose in his own hand was folded now against Magnus’s chest, waiting.
He had sent Oldbrook a letter three days ago, worded exactly as a defeated man’s letter should be worded.
He offered to talk, to come to terms, and to name the price of his silence before he left England.
He made it sound like he wanted a truce.
Like he was tired, frightened, and ready to sell.
And like a spider waiting for its prey, he had watched his trap close on the one thing Oldbrook could never resist: the chance to buy another soul cheap and be rid of a nuisance.
Magnus had not slept in the three days since he had sent the letter.
He had lain in the cold half of his cold bed and turned every step of it over in his mind.
He considered every place it might go wrong and every way a man like Oldbrook could wriggle or strike, and he had told no one.
Not Cauldwell, who would have advised patience, and not Leo, who would have insisted on accompanying him and risked getting himself killed.
And he hadn’t told Rosaline, who was not speaking to him and would have looked at him with her gray-flecked eyes and seen the recklessness of his plan in a heartbeat. She would have been entirely right to be afraid.
He had posted the Bow Street Runners outside the warehouse in the dark alley and told them the signal to listen for. Then he had come in here alone to finish it, because it had always been something for him to finish alone.
“There’s no price, Me Lord.” He kept his voice flat and almost gentle. “I ken that’s a disappointment to ye. Ye came to buy me. But I didnae ask ye here to sell.”
“No?” Oldbrook’s smile did not waver. Magnus knew by now that the smile held no more feeling than the curve of a snake’s mouth. “Then you have wasted your evening and mine to stand in the cold. I am too old for this. What did you ask me here for, Greythorne?”
“To show ye somethin’.” Magnus reached inside his coat, drew out the forged letter, and unfolded it slowly in the lantern light. He held it up so the old man could see. “This.”
He watched Oldbrook’s eyes flick to the letter. He watched him read it. And for half a second, he watched the snake’s smile die.
“Ye ken it, then.” He did not lower the letter.
“The forgery that killed me faither. Nae his hand at all. Made to order by a man named Weems, an engraver ye kept on a leash for years and paid to forget his own name. He’s remembered it, Me Lord.
He’s set it all down on paper and sworn to it before witnesses.
All of it. Who paid him, what ye paid, and the dates. ”
He let the words sink in before continuing.
“I have the letter. I have the forger. I have the sworn depositions out of Edinburgh, every man in that circle set down in his own hand, yours at the head of it. It’s a case built brick by brick that no amount of money will bury.
It’s done. I only wanted ye to see me face when ye learned it.
I’ve waited sixteen years for this. I’ll nae pretend I’m above it. ”
The silence stretched.
When Oldbrook spoke again, the warmth had gone out of his voice. What remained was flat and dry, all the pleasantness stripped away. Magnus heard what had been beneath the veneer all along: the cold patience of a snake waiting for something to come within reach.
“Your father,” Oldbrook said, “sat exactly where you are standing and thought he had me, too. He thought he had a cleverer proof than yours. And yet he’s been dead for how long now?
Sixteen years? And I am a peer of the realm, and you, Greythorne, are an uncivilized upstart with a title you tripped over in the dark.
” He put on the glove he had taken off. “I destroyed a better man than you with a stroke of a pen. Did you really imagine I came here without considering that you might be foolish enough to do this?”
His hand went into his coat.
Magnus saw the shape of a small silver pistol a heartbeat before it cleared the cloth. A gentleman’s means of murder.
He moved.
The shot cracked wide as he barreled forward and hit him low. They went down together on the stone floor. The pistol spun out of Oldbrook’s hand and skidded away into the dark.
Magnus curled a hand into the old man’s collar and hauled him up. He used his strength and anger to drive him back against the nearest pillar.
It was easy. Oldbrook was sixty and gone soft from wine and gluttony. Magnus had been born hard and lived harder. He pinned him there with one forearm across his throat and felt the years of his hunt narrow to this moment. Oldbrook’s pulse jumped under his arm.
“There,” he breathed. “There ye are.”
He should have watched the other hand.
The blade came up out of nowhere. A boot-knife. Thin and fast. It went into his side, but not deep. Magnus twisted, and it skittered off a rib instead of sinking home.
The pain was excruciating, and it bought Oldbrook the half-second he needed. He wrenched himself loose and pushed off the pillar with the desperate strength of a cornered dog, both hands on the knife. Then he dove forward.
Magnus caught his wrist. Barely.
They strained. The blade hung between them, quivering, barely a hand’s width from his throat.
Oldbrook’s face was inches from his own, and he was not smiling now.
His teeth were bared, showing his rot. He was no stronger than he had been a moment ago, soft with wine and sixty years of good dinners.
It was Magnus who had changed. The wound in his side had taken the power out of his arm, and terror had made the old man quick and reckless with it.
He got a foot behind Magnus’s heel and shoved.
The world turned over.
Magnus’s back slammed against the pillar, and his skull cracked on the stone. White stars burst across his vision. His knees went soft under him. His grip on Oldbrook’s wrist loosened for one terrible instant, and the knife lunged at his throat.
He had nothing, no strength, no purchase, only the cold certainty that he was about to die on a filthy warehouse floor, killed by the same man.
But in that half-second, the thing that came to him was not his father’s face. It was Rosaline’s.
It was Rosaline’s face across a dinner table. Rosaline choosing him in the garden. Rosaline walking out a door he had let her walk through, believing to the end that he loved a dead man more than he loved her, because he had never once found the courage to say that he loved her aloud.
Not like this. Not with that unsaid.
Something surged through him that was not strength, but stronger.
With a roar, he pushed his boot against the pillar and shoved off it. It bought him an inch, then it bought him the wrist.
Magnus crushed it and felt the bones grind. The knife clattered onto the stone, and he kicked it away. Then he grabbed Oldbrook by the front of his fine coat and hit him, just once, but with sixteen years of pain and ruin behind his fist.
The old man’s head snapped back and struck the pillar with a crack. Then he crumpled to the floor and did not get up.
The warehouse went still.
Magnus stood over him, swaying. He pressed one hand to the knife wound along his ribs, trying to suck in air. His skull hurt. His side burned. The blood trickled slowly between his fingers. It wasn’t much, but it would have been fatal if the blade had twisted an inch the other way.
He heard boots, many boots, coming fast across the stone floor.
They came in through the wide doorway with their own lanterns swinging.
There were six of them, their red waistcoats plain even in the dim light.
The man at the front had a warrant in one hand and a pistol in the other.
He stopped short at the sight of the two of them: Magnus standing there bleeding and the Earl slumped against the pillar.
“Your Grace.” He took in the scene—the fallen pistol, the knife, the blood. “You cut it close. We heard the shot.”
“Aye.” Magnus’s voice sounded distant. “So I did.”
“Is that him?” The man was already moving, his colleagues spreading out. One crouched by the Earl, while another lifted the knife carefully by its handle. “Oldbrook?”
“That’s him. He came armed. He confessed to everythin’ before he tried to open me up.
There’s a letter yonder in his own hand that’ll bury him deeper than hell.
” Magnus let go of his ribs long enough to point.
“The forgery. Take it, but guard it with yer lives. It’s sixteen years of a good man’s name. ”
The Runners lifted Oldbrook between them. He came round as they cuffed his hands. He spotted Magnus across the warehouse, and for a moment, his smile came back, ghastly and automatic, the last reflex of a lifetime of it.
“You will regret this,” he threatened, his voice thick. “You have no idea who I am. What we are. You have made enemies tonight that will—”
“Take him out,” Magnus said, tired, “before I forget you are watchin’.”
The Runners dragged Oldbrook out into the cold drizzle. He was the man who had murdered Magnus’s father with paper and a reptilian smile. The man Magnus had hunted across a kingdom for half his life was now walking away in shackles.
He waited for it. The rush of satisfaction. The peace. The weight set down at last.
It did not come.
He had built his entire self around the expectation of this hour, the way a house was built around its hearth.
Now the hour was here, but the hearth was cold.
There was no father waiting on the far side of it to be proud of him.
There was no boy on a staircase made whole.
There was only a tired man of thirty-two in a cold warehouse, with another man’s blood and his own drying together on his hands.
There was only a vast, ringing silence where years of purpose had stood a moment ago.
He looked down at his hands. Blood slicked his knuckles, and all he could think was how close death had come. An inch, perhaps less. Another moment, and he might have died on that floor, with Oldbrook still beyond justice and his father’s name still tarnished.
Worse, he would have taken something else into the dark with him. The one truth that mattered beyond any of it. The words pride and grief and cowardice had kept locked behind his teeth.
I love ye, Rosaline.
He had never said it. Not on their wedding night, not in the gray hour of any morning since, not when she stood in his study white-faced and begged him not to go north.
Three words, and he had let them sit in his mouth like stones because saying them aloud would have meant admitting he had something left to lose.
He had a wife.
He had a wife three miles west of here, in a house he had made cold. A wife who had chosen him once with her brother’s hand around her wrist. Who had said, Then we will find them, and meant it. She had understood him better than he understood himself and begged him not to die.
And he had let her walk out a door believing she had lost him to a ghost.
Magnus had nearly made a widow of her. He had nearly made her worst fear true and left her nothing but a grave to visit and a marriage that ended in a hallway with a stiff bow.
He thought of the fear on her face the night he had told her about Edinburgh. The fear he had been too self-righteous and too blind to honor.
She had not been trying to unman him. She had been trying to keep him alive. She had seen where his recklessness might lead, and she had begged him to stop. And he, in his blindness, had called listening to her cowardice.
Now he knew better. She had never been the coward.
For too long, Magnus had lived for the dead. He would not do it anymore.
He pressed his coat harder against his side and turned his back to the warehouse. Oldbrook was in shackles. His father would have justice. The vengeance that had governed so much of his life was finished.
There was only one thing left that mattered.
He started toward the horses, moving faster with every step. Rosaline would be awake. He knew her well enough to know that she never slept when the house was troubled. If he rode hard, he could reach her before fear or pride found another reason to keep him away.
Pain tore through his side, but he kept going. He could bear a few cold miles for his wife. For his love.
He would hold the wound closed with one hand and the reins with the other. He would reach her tonight and finally say the truth, so she could hear it. Then he would do what he should have done in the garden—he would put the choice in her hands and let her make it.
Magnus swung himself up into the saddle, turned the horse west toward home and his wife, and took off.