Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Tonight.
It was the only word written on the note Jade left in the farmhouse.
She placed the folded paper on the mantel and left, hoping Nicolas would be around to see it before nightfall.
Since she had been blindfolded the other times he’d led her into some secret passage and through the underground tunnels to the bunker, Jade didn’t have the first clue of how to find him in the labyrinth below.
Everything about the farmhouse and surrounding property felt different in the daylight, almost like she had never been here before.
The overgrown plants and grasses rustled in the summer breeze, and sunlight glimmered off the glass panes still present in the windows.
Tall trees surrounded the house, the ever-present guardians who had witnessed times past, when the house was a home instead of a crumbling ruin.
Dust kicked around Jade’s heels as she left the border of the farmland and stepped onto the road.
She’d be back on base in plenty of time.
Commander Matherson had been unexpectedly absent, called to Kingdom Command near the castle for a meeting before Jade and Theo had had the chance to debrief.
He’d passed along to his lieutenant commander that the two could take a personal day.
After Theo chose to take a solid nap that morning, Jade decided to go off base.
She’d told the troopers at the gate that she was going into town and would be back within a few hours.
And go to town she would—with a fairly significant detour to the abandoned farmhouse in the country where she convened with Nicolas.
She’d purchased a new notebook in town—nothing that she needed, but good enough for proof that she had actually gone where she had claimed to go.
Matherson was supposed to return tomorrow, so she’d sneak out to the farmhouse tonight. With any luck, Nicolas would have found her note and be waiting for her.
“Now this is a pleasant surprise.”
Nicolas filled the doorway, a smile teasing his lips as Jade tiptoed across the porch to him.
“Are you going to move?” she asked, toe-to-toe with him as the deteriorating boards groaned under her weight.
Nicolas’s smile grew. “Did you miss me?”
Jade didn’t attempt to hide her scowl. “So you’d rather me risk breaking an ankle when the part of the porch I’m standing on inevitably collapses?”
Nicolas lowered his face to hers, mere inches separating them, sucking the air from Jade’s lungs. His mouth hovered near her ear as he whispered, “I missed you too.”
The hairs around her ear fluttered and tickled her cheek.
Jade reminded herself to breathe. Nicolas pulled back enough to meet her eyes, locking her feet in place.
Something swirled in her middle, a warmth that filled her extremities with each pump of her heart.
He was entirely too close. Too close and too . . . captivating.
Jade recovered, clearing her throat and pushing on Nicolas’s chest to move him out of her way. He stepped back without a fight, but not before Jade had pressed her hands against the hard, formed muscles of his chest. Her stomach jolted.
“I suppose you’re going to blindfold me again.”
Nicolas lifted the cloth that he had just pulled from his pocket into the air.
Jade tipped up her chin. “You must not trust me.”
His hand fell as he angled his head, his brow crinkling. “Do you trust me?”
If she wasn’t lying to herself, the answer was yes. But the way he asked made Jade wonder if he assumed she would say no.
“I trust very few people,” she said instead, standing still beside him to allow him to wrap the blindfold around her eyes. Her willingness to comply answered for her.
He raised the fabric again and covered her eyes, tying it at the back of her head as he said, “Then we understand each other.”
Nicolas guided her down once more through the tunnels and into the bunker. Each time he led her through the winding path seemed different from before somehow, but at least she was getting her bearings a little more.
“You asked for me this time,” he said as they walked, his hand gently circling her upper arm. “You must have something.”
“I do.”
“So you didn’t go to your commander first with this one?”
With a subtle shake of her head, Jade replied, “No. No one else knows.”
They stopped, and Jade heard the creak of the door as Nicolas opened it. He ushered her inside, then shut the door and removed her blindfold.
She blinked, taking in the familiar space before her.
Very little about it ever seemed to change.
Did Nicolas spend time down here, or was this just where he chose to meet with her?
For some reason, her inclination was to believe that he was living in this bunker, hidden away from everyone.
Realistically, he probably had his own home somewhere and used the bunkers and farmhouse as a base of operations.
“What does he know?” The question from Nicolas was almost accusatory, and he strode past Jade down the length of the table with his arms crossed, coming to a halt at the table’s end and turning to face her.
“From me, nothing. Truthfully.” Jade lifted her eyebrows in sincerity, hoping to convey the sentiment in her tone of voice as well.
“He called me into his office the day after I went to the Carsill estate to tell me Lord Arthur had been found dead. I was prepared to give an excuse for my absence, if necessary, but it never came up. The murder had preoccupied him. And I kept what I found out to myself.”
Nicolas said nothing for a moment, his arms still loosely folded over his chest as he watched Jade, apparently waiting for her to continue. “Which was . . . ?”
Dipping her fingers into the pocket at her hip, Jade pulled out the crinkled piece of paper she had taken from Arthur’s study—the note from Grannam. Arthur’s letter to Arabella remained hidden away. Whether or not she would share that one with Nicolas she had yet to determine.
She extended the letter to him, and Nicolas let his arms fall as he stepped forward, retrieving the paper from her grasp. He perused it quickly, then he met her eyes and lifted it slightly into the air. “Where was this?”
Jade stepped two paces toward him. She didn’t know why, exactly, except she felt like she should. “In Lord Arthur’s study, open on a chair. He’d probably been sitting there reading it when he consumed the drink with rienevoir that killed him.”
Nicolas folded the letter and set it on the table beside him, taking his own slow step closer to Jade. “Tell me what happened while you were there.”
Jade dove into a summarized recount of the events of the night, but when she mentioned her encounter with the assassin on the roof, Nicolas interrupted her.
“You chased down the murderer responsible for all of these deaths?”
“I had to,” she responded with a furrow of her brow. “If I can stop him or track him down to his source, the greater chances there are that no one else will die. And if I can tie him back to Grannam, that’s even better.”
Nicolas closed the remaining space between them, and Jade was forced to tilt her head back to look up at him. He craned his neck over her, a sense of worry pouring out of his fathomless brown eyes.
“You could have been hurt,” he murmured, his entire demeanor shifting from the stern, no-nonsense informant he’d been moments before. He lifted a hand and brushed his thumb against her cheek. “You could have been killed.”
Jade’s first instinct was to pull away, to back up and extricate herself from his touch. But she didn’t. Her feet remained planted where they were.
She cleared her throat. “I can handle myself. The dangers of my job aren’t foreign to me.”
Nicolas’s hand fell, but he didn’t move away from her. “While that’s true, you shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.”
Jade opened her mouth to speak, but the words in her mind turned sour on her tongue.
Who was he to tell her what to do? She made her own decisions.
She always had. Commander Matherson trusted her enough to make those kinds of life-and-death calls, so why couldn’t Nicolas?
He had provided her invaluable information and would hopefully help her bring an end to this conflict sooner rather than later, but did that mean she answered to him?
She’d already proven she would follow his commands, so perhaps it wasn’t as out of line as she had thought.
Then again, if Theo was the one saying these things to her, she would pay attention.
Theo . . .
Jade stepped away, finally leaving the inexplicable confines of nothing more than Nicolas’s proximity. Her head swam.
She walked past the sofa while hugging her abdomen. “Nothing I did was an unnecessary risk.”
She halted beyond the sofa, feigning interest in a soothing painting of the countryside on the far wall. She heard Nicolas’s slow trod approaching her, but she didn’t face him.
“What else happened?” he asked, the gentler tone vanishing as abruptly as it had appeared. “You made it to Arthur’s study, after all.”
Keeping her eyes fixed on the painting, Jade continued, making sure to skip over her injury.
She wasn’t eager to inform Nicolas that she’d actually gotten hurt.
“Yes. I lost the killer, so I found a way inside the house and made it to Arthur’s study.
He was . . . still alive when I got there.
Seizing.” Jade’s eyes fell from the painting, staring at nothing as she recalled the scene in her mind’s eye.
“It was too late for me to do anything. The poison had already taken effect.”
She didn’t need to look up to know Nicolas stood behind her, close but allowing her personal space this time.
“And that’s when you found the letter from the Duke of Evenshold?”
“Yes,” she answered, returning to the painting once again. “I didn’t want to be found with the body, so I couldn’t do a thorough search of the room. But I got what mattered most, it seems.”