Chapter 33 A Safe Passage #2
Unease filled Leena’s chest. It was widely known that St. Silas was an extremely deadly shot.
His sword work, on the other hand, was nowhere near as exceptional as Rami’s.
This would put him at a disadvantage—especially as she knew that Mr. Martin, while he had also been cultivating his boxing career, was also known as a ruthless swordsman.
Leena started to pace, as she often did when trying to steady the hum of her fears.
“Leena.” St. Silas watched her turn about the room for a further few moments, finally halting her with a light touch on her elbow. “Do not be afraid. I vow that, whatever happens, you will come to no harm.”
“It is not myself I worry for,” she replied distractedly.
“Rami will also be safe.”
Leena turned swiftly to look at him. Was it not obvious? In her every expression? In the way she now looked at him? Had he, the Saint of Silence, cunning and perceptive, a reaper of secrets, not seen the confession so openly written on her face?
Her mouth was dry when she spoke, choked with emotion. “For your sake, I worry also.”
Even that was a sliver of what she felt.
Suddenly, all the unsaid things between them ignited to the surface, unable to find a home in the choked silence.
He nodded once, tightly.
Then, St. Silas did something that she did not expect.
Slowly, he reached into his hidden coat pocket to withdraw a rectangular object. At first Leena suspected it was the red diary again, and she gasped when she saw A Guide to Botany in his hands. His steady gaze did not leave her face as he handed it to her.
She stared wide-eyed at it for a moment, disbelieving. She had thought it burned, fed to the fire, another past memory cremated.
The blue cover, still so familiar to her heart, was intact, and she could see no sign of missing pages. Without the book, the sound of her mother’s voice had been extinguished to a faint murmur, but now it roared back to life—a beloved and much-missed melody.
With slightly shaking fingers, she reached for it.
His voice was low. “I restitched the first three pages.” His eyes were dark with repressed emotion. “I wish I had never taken it from you.”
Leena opened the cover reverently, and almost let out a peal of laughter when she saw the pages St. Silas declared to have burned in the days of their first confessions.
She traced the bumpy but small stitches over the spine that kept the first three pages intact. They were not sewn like a seamstress would sew a garment, in continuous stitches, but as a surgeon would sew a wound, with urgency, with precision, battling to keep the blood within.
“You did this yourself?” she asked softly.
The muscle in his jaw worked. He gave a brief nod.
With her heart in her throat, Leena had sudden images of St. Silas in his study, setting aside the endless tasks always demanding his attention to do this.
His brows would have been furrowed in concentration as he bent over the pages of A Guide to Botany, weaving the small needle in and out with his large hand, before cutting the thread with his teeth.
“Where did you learn to sew?” she asked through the lump in her throat.
He gave her the first smile of the evening. “You and your questions.”
She smiled back. “You and your non-answers.”
He huffed out a laugh. “If you must know.” He stepped back and did yet another unexpected thing. He removed his jacket and began to unbutton his waistcoat. As he did so, Leena’s eyes widened with his every movement, unable to tear her gaze away.
“What…?”
He freed his white linen shirt and pulled it from his trousers, revealing the rigid expanse of his abdomen.
He seemed carved from stone, all hard, brutal muscles, causing the long and irregular scar that stretched across his right ribcage to appear more startling.
“Before Mrs. Van, there was only Arthur and I. There were some fights that did not require any suturing. And some that needed to be done in the darkness, with nothing but a small candle and a sharp needle to stem the flow.”
“You did this yourself?” She found herself asking the same bewildered question twice, almost reaching out for him, barely stopping herself in time.
His eyes followed her hand, and it took him a long moment to answer. “Yes.”
“You are a man of many talents, Lord Avon.” It took all Leena’s self-control to place her hand back in her dress pocket, where she clenched it into a fist.
His eyes moved from her face and landed on the large bed behind her. His color heightened, and he tore his gaze back to the falling snow outside the window.
Fire scorched her veins.
For the first time since knowing St. Silas, it was a marvel to realize that, here in her bedchamber, they both saw the same thing, imagined the same thing, and were caught in the same impossibleness of it.
He did not say anything further as he righted his clothes.
“Do not give yourself cause,” Leena finally said hoarsely, “to bleed again.”
His only answer was silence.
Then St. Silas took out his pistol. “One last thing.”
Her nerves caught in her chest; there was too much uncertainty tonight for Leena to be able to reason her way through it.
She remembered the last time she had held his pistol and what the result of that had been.
So much had changed since the Festival of Demons. In regard to Leena. In regard to him.
“You remove the safety like this. Be mindful of the jar to your shoulder when it fires. Hold your stance firm so you do not fall back. You have two bullets before you have to reload.”
Her mind swam at the surreality of the night—at the fact that St. Silas was teaching her how to shoot.
“I will not need—” she began, but he grasped her hand and clasped it firmly around the pistol, holding it tightly there for a moment.
Lightning coursed through her at his touch, almost painful in its intensity, but she did not pull away.
“When you aim, make sure you aim two inches above your target for best accuracy. If you can, toward the heart.”
Next time—if you ever desire to kill someone, not merely deliver a flesh wound, aim here.
She tried not to sound afraid. “It is as if you’re saying goodbye.”
He gave her another slow smile. “Don’t aim the revolver at me.”
Reluctantly, he let go of her hand.
Another heartbeat between them, reverberating through the walls of the chamber. She understood what he was doing even if he did not speak it. He was ensuring she had a chance—a safe passage home.
Instead of turning to go, St. Silas reached out and carefully unfastened the pins holding her hair, letting them clatter to the floor one by one. He watched the curls tumble to her back, and for a moment, under the glimmer of the candlelight, there was no mistaking the look in his eyes.
She could not say or do anything to stop him; tears obscured her vision.
He did not deny it. It was a farewell.
Roughly—as if having to extricate himself from the image of her standing before him, hair unbound, the unsaid goodbye flickering in her gaze—he turned toward the door.
“My lord, I ask you again: Do not bleed and do not give me a reason to use this. Come back so that I can return it to you in person,” Leena said to his retreating back.
He exited the room quietly, leaving her to the silence of the gun.