CHAPTER 41 ROHAN
ROHAN
Rohan was not a hero, but he could play the part well enough.
He’d carried both Grayson sisters right out the front gates of the Thorp mansion—and gone back for the kitten.
He was just that magnificent. All things considered, the conquering hero should have either slept well and deeply or stalwartly gone off in search of a dragon to slay, but in the hours that had passed since they’d returned to the bayou, Rohan had done neither.
He’d taken up position on the platform, standing guard, and while doing so, he’d been dogged by the need to check on them.
Gigi and Savannah both.
When Rohan had first seen the pair of them lying on the garden path, he’d thought for the briefest moment that they were dead.
Rohan was no stranger to death, and though it was rare, he had occasionally found himself having made a costly miscalculation, but he’d never once felt his heart pound in his throat the way it had in that moment.
Never, since he was a child.
They were fine. Both of them. And still, Rohan gave into the maddening urge to check on them for the third time.
As he stood opposite the loft bed, listening to the sound of their breathing, he swore this would be the last time.
Instead of retreating to stand guard on the platform, he finally managed to take his leave altogether, to do what he should have done hours earlier.
Find Nora.
Gigi had turned down an offer. She was useless as bait now, so Rohan didn’t even have the option of breaking his promise to Savannah. That said, logic dictated that the Watcher would very likely be seeking an alternative now that Gigi had said no.
Nora clearly had her sights on being that alternative, and fortunately, Rohan had never promised not to use her as bait. As he wound his way through the bayou, he cursed himself for ever letting their knife-loving guest out of his sight.
It didn’t take him long to realize that he was being followed. “You walk lightly for someone your size, Mr. Daniels.”
“You’re going after her.” Brady Daniels was nothing more than a voice in the darkness, but Rohan had already pinpointed the exact amount of space between them.
“And which her is it you believe I seek?” Rohan replied.
“You’d prefer Calla, but you’re not opposed to using Nora as a means to that end.”
Rohan cocked a brow he knew the scholar could not see. “And you are?”
There was a pause, a weighty one if Rohan was not mistaken.
“You know that I’m not,” Brady said.
Desperate men made such useful tools.
“If you were Nora,” Rohan replied, “where in this town would you go to draw the Watcher’s attention and throw your hat in the ring?”
They found their quarry beside the statue of Saint Adelaide. Even in the dark, Rohan knew the exact second their approach had been marked. That their Icelandic friend made no attempt at evasion spoke volumes.
For one reason or another, this was not a confrontation that Nora wished to avoid.
“All by your lonesome?” Rohan called as he and Brady ascended the final step up to the Musée.
“So it would appear.”
“Appearances,” Brady said, “can be deceiving.”
“And yet often enough,” Nora replied, “a spade is a spade.”
“What then,” Rohan interjected, “are you?”
“Nothing of note just yet,” Nora answered. She spoke like a person who was used to the quiet of the night, and Rohan’s thoughts went unbidden to Savannah, to her voice, sharp as diamonds and clear as glass.
“I’m surprised,” Brady told Nora, “that you didn’t intercept Calla in the garden, once Gigi turned her down.”
“What makes you so sure that I did not?”
Rohan should have been sure. He should have known beyond a shadow of a doubt if Nora was bluffing. How very disappointing, he could hear the Proprietor murmuring in his mind, an accusation and admonishment both.
“You saw her?” Brady asked Nora. “Calla?”
“One way or another,” Nora told him, “there is no Calla Thorp anymore.”
“What do you mean, one way or another?” Brady said.
“I’m not the right person to ask that question. I am not in the position to know.”
“But there’s someone who would?” Brady pressed.
Rohan opted for a different question. “The Watcher rejected you? Quite the blow, given how badly you want to be a part of this, whatever this is.”
“What makes you think that I want to be a part of anything? Maybe…” Nora lowered the volume of her voice, beckoning them to shift toward her. “Maybe,” she said again, “I want to tear it all down.”
“Tear what down exactly?” Brady took two steps into the danger zone, far too close to a person who was far too dangerous to treat lightly. “And why?”
“There’s nothing more dangerous than true believers.”
“True believers in what?” Rohan asked.
Now it was Nora’s turn to step forward. “Look me in the eye,” she told Rohan.
There was just enough moonlight for him to obliger her.
“Are you getting anything else out of me?” Nora asked calmly. “Now or ever?”
It occurred to Rohan that if she’d already intercepted the Woman in Red in the garden, then it was probably not her for whom Nora had been waiting next to this statue in the dead of night.
She’d been waiting for him or for Brady or both, waiting to deliver this very message.
Rohan was very good at reading people. “No,” he said, answering the question she’d asked. Nora would not be giving him anything else he could use, and Rohan’s instincts said that every last piece of information they’d gotten out of her, she’d wanted them to have.
“Am I a threat,” Nora asked Rohan evenly, “to you or yours?”
The Mercy was the only thing Rohan had ever considered his, ever wanted to be his, but his fiendish mind went once again to the image of the Grayson sisters lying prone on the garden path.
Rohan forced the image down and answered Nora’s question about whether she was a threat to those he considered his. “No.”
“Are there others,” Nora prompted, “from whom you could seek the answers you desire? People who are not me?”
This time, Brady was the one who replied. “Yes.”
“You won’t find your Calla here,” Nora told Brady. “She will not come to you. One way or another, that is certain.”
“You’re leaving town.” Rohan did not phrase that as a question. “Do you have somewhere else to be, Nora?”
Nora, true to her word, did not answer that question.
“I’m not going to fight you this time,” she promised instead.
“If you touch me, if either of you so much as shift your weight, I’m going to scream the most piercing scream you or anyone in this town has ever heard, and someone will come running to my rescue.
You see, the ability to engender sympathy, to make others want to protect you—it is, in many ways, the most potent weapon there is. ”
“That’s why Calla picked Gigi,” Brady said suddenly. “Isn’t it? You said you weren’t going to give us anything else, but you just did.”
“That,” Nora told Brady, “was for you, not him.”
And then she walked away, and Rohan let her.