“No,” I said, and affected a smile. “Not really.” And it was late, and soon enough Watson got up to shower, and when he climbed back into bed, he pulled me up against him and fell almost immediately asleep.
If anything could make me feel better, it would have been that.
And yet.
I slipped out of bed, taking up my phone from the nightstand, and crept through the flat in the dark. I checked the locks on the door and the windows, drew the curtains. I poured myself a glass of water. I was stalling, I knew. I didn’t want to do it. It wouldn’t do me any good.
And yet.
I locked myself in Leander’s bedroom, at a far enough remove that I wouldn’t wake Watson. It was spare, tidy, the lair of a man who was always on the move. The only extravagance was the bed, piled high with duvets and pillows, its mattress pillow-soft. I flung myself down onto it, buried my face in the quilt. Someone in my family loves me, I told myself, inhaling. Someone in my family tells me the truth.
I rolled onto my back, and I called my brother.
He picked up on the first ring.
“Lottie?” he said, thick with sleep. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
I had it planned, an insouciant little snipe of a story—guess who I saw tonight, etc. What came out of my mouth was, “He’s alive. You bastard. He’s alive.”
“Oh,” Milo said, and he sounded very, very awake. “I was wondering when I would get this call. Araminta?”
“Yes,” I said. “Tell me how.”
It was the same question I’d put to my aunt, but Milo, being Milo, answered it much more succinctly. “A blood capsule in the mouth. I fired into the hedgerow. He wanted to disappear, Lottie. It was the only way to make it work.”
I breathed out through my mouth. “Jesus Christ, Milo.”
“You didn’t honestly think that I shot him with a sniper bullet traveling at supersonic speed and he survived?” He scoffed. “I thought our father taught you better than that.”
“I was in shock,” I said.
“You were.” His voice gentled. “You didn’t even check him for a pulse, Lottie.”
“He’d even told me . . .” August on the plane, flying back to Britain. I’ll change my name. I’ll disappear. They’ll never find me. “I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“Not then,” he admitted. “You’re in a fragile place, and last year . . . last year, you were a force of nature, and not one I could predict. This is still sooner than I’d like for you to know. I thought you could handle it eventually, when you—when things had calmed down.”
I forced myself to keep breathing. A force of nature. So strange. So unnerving, and so young. “This is why you ran. Why you didn’t want to go to prison.”
“I don’t kill without reason,” Milo said tartly. “And I don’t put my neck on the line for just anyone. I did it for you.”
“For me,” I said.
“I took August in for you. I gave him a job. A home. We became friends, Lottie, and we made a plan. And when you decided to run roughshod through Berlin, guns akimbo, acting like you suddenly knew best—yes, Lottie, you, the girl who’d stirred all this up to begin with—well, forgive me if I didn’t think to bring you in on it.” He sighed heavily. “Forgive me if I mourned the loss of both you and August in one fell swoop.”
I shut my eyes. “Fine,” I said, because it was always this—love and disapproval in the same breath—and I had to escape it.
He could tell I meant to hang up. Milo’s instincts had always been razor-sharp. “Wait,” he said. “Your case.”
“What about it,” I said. It was pointless to ask how he knew. My brother, the spymaster.
“Rupert Davies. He’s living with your Watson.” A shuffling sound, fingers on a keyboard. “Old family. Very old. Lots of history there.”
“Get to the point.”
“His grandfather was in Parliament. His father’s brother was an MP as well. For years. He’s only just retired. And . . . well, Lottie, on his staff—”
“No,” I said, my brain speeding ahead. “Absolutely not.”
“One of his staffers was a young Lucien Moriarty.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” I heaved myself up and off the bed and began to pace. “That family is everywhere. They have their fingers in everything.”
“And once you’re beholden to one, you are for life. At least that’s the case for Lucien. Did you know that the Davies family owns a small plot of land outside of Oxford proper? What do you think is buried there?”
“It can’t be. Rupert’s the only one out of that whole wretched cabal who’s a decent person,” I said.
Milo sighed. “Can you honestly tell me it’s a coincidence, that the only person in your program—your whole program, Lottie, I vetted them all—who has a connection to that family was assigned to live with your boyfriend?”
I stopped at the door, my hand on the handle. “I can’t do this again,” I whispered. “I can’t have him in danger, Milo.”
“Then walk away,” Milo said. “August did.”
At that, I hung up the phone.
It was three in the morning by the clock on my nightstand when I crept back in. I dressed as quietly as I could in the dark—Watson didn’t stir—and picked up the bag I’d packed when Leander and I had first moved into this flat, the bag I thought I wouldn’t ever need. In the kitchen, I looked over my uncle’s plants, by the window, and picked up the one I had placed there that afternoon.
I sent three text messages, and then I was putting on my shoes at the door.
“Where are you going?”
Without looking up, I zipped my other boot. “New information,” I said, straightening the cuffs of my jeans. “I need to act.”
“I’ll get my jacket,” he said.
I looked up sharply. His hair was mussed, his feet were bare. “You’re not going,” I told him. He belonged back in bed. He belonged in a dorm room, in a typical summer, somewhere far, far away from me.
“I’m not.”
“No,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Holmes,” he said patiently. “If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you. Are we really going to play this game?”
I dragged my hands over my face. “The stakes just changed,” I growled. “I might need to make some . . . decisions.”
“Stupid ones?” he asked, creeping forward. “Tell me you’re not going to go and make stupid decisions without me.”
I laughed, despite myself, and I kept laughing despite the nervous hammer of my heart. “Watson. Go back to bed.”
“No,” he said, and caught me around my waist. “I heard you might be in some need of a partner.”
Twenty-One
WE CREPT BACK TO ST. GENESIUS IN THE DARK. IT WAS late, far past curfew, and Watson had to hoist me over more than one fence before we made our way back to the quad. By the time we’d made it to his stairwell, I’d finished filling him in on everything I’d learned.