CHAPTER 54 ROHAN
ROHAN
One more wager, love. Rohan had bet that Savannah would come back to him—even if she got what she was after from Zella, even once he was of no more practical use to her, Rohan had bet that Savannah Grayson just wouldn’t be able to stay away.
I believe I’ve made it perfectly clear what I think of your games. Her voice rang in Rohan’s mind.
You have, love. Oh, how you have.
One o’clock in the morning came. And two and three and four and eventually dawn.
And still—no Savannah. Rohan thought occasionally of the words he’d inked onto her skin and wondered if what he really should have written was a clearer, stronger warning to anyone who might have been tempted to do her harm: M-I-N-E.
Rohan was not a person who worried. He schemed. He strategized. He took calculated risks and paid the price for power, and he did so without shame or fear or anything resembling regret. But he could still see Savannah lying on Helena Thorp’s garden path, still as a corpse.
“She’s not coming back, Rohan.” Brady was spoiling for a fight and had been for hours.
Thus far, the scholar had wisely chosen not to attempt to fight his way through Rohan to get off the plane and depart the hangar in which it was parked.
But everyone had their limits—and at this point, Rohan might welcome the distraction.
He offered up a lazy smile at Brady’s assertion that Savannah wasn’t coming back.
“Either way, she will have gotten their attention.”
Even if Savannah hadn’t gotten any farther than the winter garden, the Devil’s Mercy had eyes everywhere. For better or worse, Savannah would have gotten the duchess’s attention with that dress—and very likely the Proprietor’s.
She’s fine. Rohan made himself believe that, as Brady stood and stepped into the aisle.
“You’re letting me go,” Brady said darkly. Everyone had their limits.
“Now why would I do a thing like that?” Rohan cocked a brow: Take another step and see what happens, Mr. Daniels.
Brady opted for a different move, scooping up the kitten that had just pounced on his shoelaces. “Desperate times,” Brady said softly, “call for desperate measures.”
The man was bluffing, but his hands were large, and the kitten was very, very small.
“Animal cruelty?” Rohan did not rise. “Quite the threat, Mr. Daniels, but you don’t have it in you to harm something so defenseless, so small.”
“Do you?”
That question hadn’t come from Brady. It had come from the plane’s loudspeaker.
Company at long last. Rohan had ensured the cockpit was unlocked. He’d practically engraved an invitation on the door for whomever the Mercy might send.
But that voice meant that no one had been sent.
The door to the cockpit opened, revealing a man with thick white hair who braced his weight on a cane made from solid platinum. The handle on that cane was ornately carved. It might as well have been a scepter, passed from Proprietor to Proprietor across the generations.
“Alastair,” Rohan greeted the man. The Proprietor’s given name was rarely used. Like Rohan, he only had the one.
“Rohan.” Putting more weight on the cane than he once had, the Proprietor of the Devil’s Mercy made his way down the aisle of the plane.
With his free hand, he took the kitten from Brady, then eased himself into the adjacent seat.
Setting the cane aside, the Proprietor lifted the kitten even with his face, stroking a thumb over the kitten’s head, staring the tiny feline down.
“I did not raise you,” the man told Rohan, “to be needlessly cruel.”
The key word in that sentence was needlessly, and Rohan knew it.
“You did not raise me,” Rohan replied with a careless twist of his lips. “I raised myself.”
“I made you. Molded you like clay, carved you from stone—bloodied stone, as it were.” The Proprietor nestled the kitten in the crook of an elbow, and she settled down.
You should not, Rohan thought, settle down, little love.
“That is what makes this so very disappointing,” the Proprietor continued, stroking the kitten again.
Some cruelty had a point. Rohan was not supposed to become attached to anyone or anything, and he knew the Proprietor was not above snapping a kitten’s neck to make that point.
In an attempt to convince him that wasn’t necessary, Rohan smirked like he hadn’t a care in the world. “Her name is Princess Fluffbum.”
“I am not talking about the cat.” The Proprietor’s blue eyes met Rohan’s. “I’m talking about the girl. You led her straight to our door.”
Savannah. Rohan leaned back in his seat.
“I did nothing of the sort. It’s hardly my fault that the duchess struck a deal with Bowen Johnstone-Jameson and offered a certain reckless Hawthorne entrance to the Mercy last night.
Pity Jameson wasn’t more discreet about taking the duchess up on her invitation, but you know how Hawthornes are. ”
“You wanted my attention, boy. You have it.”
Rohan’s smile deepened. “Be an obliging chap, Mr. Daniels, and show the man your arm.” Be smart, scholar. Don’t fight me on this.
Brady met Rohan’s gaze, then rotated his wrist, turning his forearm toward the Proprietor.
“Every third letter on the tattoo.” Rohan didn’t bother seeking confirmation that the duchess had been forbidden from interfering with the Grandest Game—he’d been raised to know, not ask. “Disappointing, is it not?”
“Where is she?” Brady demanded of the Proprietor. “The duchess?”
“Mr. Daniels here wants what Zella promised him, I’m afraid,” Rohan clarified helpfully.
“And what,” the Proprietor asked Brady, “were you promised?”
“Information.” Brady had enough sense to keep his response brief, which opened the door for Rohan to make his next move.
“She promised him answers about a missing American woman, one who seems to have some very interesting ties to our duchess and to a group whose interests may or may not align with our own.”
The duchess’s allegiance may very well lay elsewhere. Rohan let that sink in. Care to ask me where?
“I see.” The Proprietor stroked his hand over the kitten’s head—and neck—once more. “And you, Rohan? Do you intend to ask me about the girl? About the fate that met her in a place she should not have been?”
The girl. Clever, merciless, formidable winter girl. “Do you want me to ask you about the girl?” Rohan volleyed back.
“She won’t be returning to you.”
Rohan had always excelled at poker, at playing the odds and playing a role. “Oh?”
No part of him could be allowed to so much as think: M-I-N-E.
“She didn’t know.” Zella announced her presence, entering the fray through the cockpit door.
“You didn’t tell Savannah that to become Proprietor, one must swear off all worldly ties.
No family. No friends. No life in the world above.
” Zella arched a brow at Rohan. “No entanglements of any kind. That is what it means to sit on the throne you seek, Rohan, and you didn’t tell her.
” Zella gave a light shake of her head, her braids swaying. “So I told her for you.”
Savannah was alive and well—and she wasn’t coming back. She hadn’t known that once Rohan became the Proprietor, this thing between them would end, that it would have to—but now she did.
And she isn’t coming back.
“Bit of a double standard, if you ask me.” Rohan did not allow his mask of casual indifference to waver, even for a moment. “You are a duchess, your grace, precisely because you have attachments. You married your duke. True love, or so they say.”
“And what is love, Rohan?” the Proprietor asked, his voice soft and silky.
“Weakness.” Rohan knew that. He had always known that. “A lever to pull. A trap just waiting to be sprung.” Romance was a trick of light. An illusion.
“The duke is in hospice,” Zella said, her own tone as even as Rohan’s. “With not much time left to live, I’m afraid, a fact I would have expected you to be well aware of, were you not… off your game, as it were.”
She wasn’t wrong about that.
“If you’re the duchess”—Brady drew Zella’s attention his way—“then you owe me.”
“I pay my debts,” Zella replied.
The Proprietor shot the duchess a censuring look. “You were told not to interfere.”
“And Rohan was told to bring you ten million pounds.” Zella executed the most graceful of shrugs. “It seems we’re both disappointments this morning. You have another choice, I imagine, for heir. A fail-safe of sorts, but you’d hate to use it.”
“I have done many things,” the Proprietor replied, “that I hated to do.” Seconds passed like years, each one a bit longer than the last, and then the man stood, reclaimed his cane, and handed Rohan the kitten.
“Flip the switch,” he said, and then he turned to make his exit, the cane beating an audible rhythm on the floor with each step.
“Prove that you still can, Rohan—if only to yourself.”
And just like that, the man who had made Rohan was gone.
Flip the switch. The kitten was warm and soft in Rohan’s arms, and with warmth and softness came a low humming in the back of his mind, his mother’s song. Flip the switch.
“Calla spoke of you,” Zella told Brady. “She loved you in her own way—and Knox in all ways. That love was her undoing in the end.”
“What end?” Brady demanded. “You promised me information.”
“And I am giving you what was promised.”
Flip the switch, Rohan thought.
“Calla was tested,” Zella told Brady. “And Calla failed.”
Flip it now.