Chapter Fifty-Seven
Damien stopped – his breath coming in jagged pants, the cold air making his chest ache with the effort.
He knew he should feel a thousand and one things – anger, fear, betrayal, sadness, loss, longing – but instead he could only feel the prickle in his lungs, the cold air rushing down his throat as he tried to catch his breath; as images fizzled and popped across his mind like the searingly white potassium flash of cameras.
Ava’s expression as she’d said: You’re not a monster.
The press of his lips against hers.
The sharp, stabbing pain of the glass across his shoulder as he’d scrambled out through the window.
He reached up now to the rip in his coat, his fingers coming away bloody. Oddly, he could not feel it. He could feel the throb of a paper cut just a moment after it had happened, but the wound deep enough to score his coat in two was painless.
All he wants to do is talk.
Damien sucked another deep breath into his lungs, trying to will the power back into his legs. Tommyrot did the man just want to talk. He’d been breathing down his neck since London, and Damien’s little stunt in Leeds had only shaken him for a moment.
He wanted to drag Damien back to his father.
But Damien would not be caught. Damien would not be dragged.
He needed to move, regardless of whether or not the man was watching the ports, the roads.
He needed to get out, and he needed to do it under a different name.
There was a cold sort of calmness spreading over him now, for he had walked this path before – and he had escaped.
It was how he’d spent the better part of a decade, in a game of hunter and hunted that he was only ever a half step ahead of.
But this time, something was different.
Because this time he found himself paralysed by one thought, repeating at the same relentless rate as his own sawing breath.
You won’t see her again if you do this. You’ll never see her again.
The thought mingled with all the others clamouring for his attention, until he slammed his fist into the cold brick of the alleyway.
He had a ticket. He had a way out. But the boat wasn’t due to leave for another few days.
Unless someone could help him.
Unless …
He willed strength back into his legs and ran.
Mr Briggs was saying something, but Ava could not focus on the words. They slipped through her mind like water, drowned out by the same thoughts, over and again.
He’s gone.
I made him run again.
She bit down upon her lip, trying to stop the ache in her throat from spreading, though it was near impossible.
For the thread that had wound itself around her heart was now pinched between two thoughts, and pulled endlessly back and forth in a game of tug and war that only tightened it ever further.
What if you never see him again? whispered the first voice.
What does it matter now? countered the second. He was Lillian’s creature. Lillian’s. He betrayed your trust, just as you betrayed his.
‘Ava?’ It was Jem who spoke now, Jem’s hand upon her elbow. She hadn’t remembered sliding to the floor, but she was in a puddle of her own dress, the cotton spooling around her in blue-grey reams. ‘Ava, that man has gone to try and find him. What happened?’
‘Me.’ She didn’t want him to see her cry, and yet she knew, as she turned to face him, that her eyes were already filling up with tears, for his face had gone from sharp to a wobbling blur of pale skin and copper hair. ‘I happened. I hurt him, and I hurt myself. I … I did it all over again.’
Because for days she had walked around with this jittering feeling in her stomach, this flopping worry that she had done the wrong thing in speaking to the man at her door – this Mr Briggs – and all the while Damien had been lying to her. Working against her. Working for Lillian.
‘Come on,’ said Jem, his grip around her elbow tightening. ‘Let me help you up, Ava.’
She pinched her lips into a line, but let him hoist her up, brushing some of the dust from her skirt. ‘Miss Fairchild saw him there …’ she said dazedly. ‘And Lillian … is that why Lillian took my mother’s things? Because he’d told her what I’d said?’
Jem’s eyebrows twitched. ‘Lillian? Whatever are you talking about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Ava, brushing the dust from her skirts, and feeling some of the ticking sensation in her chest settle into something else. Something that began to smoulder, an ember flaring into flame in the pit of her stomach, sharp and searing. ‘I suppose Oliver was right, after all.’
‘In what?’ Jem asked, his voice a little gentler now.
‘Love is just giving another person everything they could ever need to hurt you, isn’t it?’
And she didn’t see how Jem’s expression stuttered. Didn’t see how it clouded.
‘Come on,’ he said, his voice taut. ‘Let me help you home.’