“Who, Tori?”
Victoria blinked at his harsh tone, her lashes staying low to hide the changes her eyes would make, coloring to her mood. Sadly, he’d never look at her again and think of her as anything but Tori, a nickname he’d created on a whim. Not when she’d repeated it to herself in that soft, dreamy voice.
Tori worked quite well with Blue, should it have come to that.
“I’ll wait another minute, then I’m coming around this battered slab of wood, and you may not like the result. We haven’t tested what happens when I touch you and very diligently try to steal your thoughts. I’m willing to take them by force if I have to. I’ve scrambled minds when I’ve pressed too hard, left people in a state for days, and I would hate for that to happen to you. But as I see it, how I, in truth, saw it this evening, your dreams are rightfully mine.”
Her head lifted, her gaze scalding him where it landed—belly, chest, shoulders—before settling on his face. Hers was dusted with flour and flushed with remorse. “I didn’t know how to tell you. What to tell you. This dream interpretation business is more involved than a simple parlor trick where I make someone forget a foolish thing I’ve done behind a potted fern. I’m still feeling my way here, whether I’m given leave for that or not.”
“Who is she?” The whisper was low and furious. One second. He was one second away from demanding she release his life to him, demanding she kiss him as she’d done in the library. As if it were the first of her life, the only that had ever mattered to either of them.
Get the information and be done with her, push her away, stay safe.
He held up a finger. “One.” Another. “Two.”
“Your sister! I think she’s your sister!”
The kitchen fell deadly quiet, apart from the ragged breath he took and the clipped one she released. “I don’t have a sister. I have no one from the past.”
“Did you see her eyes, Finn? And how young she was? There could be no one else in the world with eyes exactly like yours so close to our age who is haunting our dreams.”
“I don’t have a sister,” he repeated in a gruff voice, the words sounding like they’d been rendered on the edge of a blade. His heartbeat gained speed, cracking against his ribs until he feared pitching to a lifeless heap at her feet. There was no sister. There was nothing before Seven Dials. Before Julian and Humphrey. Piper. Simon. Ashcroft. Harbingdon. And if he’d once recalled a girl reaching for him as tears streamed from eyes exactly like his, he couldn’t endure admitting it.
“I’ll tell you everything,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ve seen enough, perhaps, to find her. She has a slight accent. French? Light hair—and those eyes. And she’s in London. This I have witnessed. This I know.”
Finn stumbled back, out of reach. If Victoria touched him, he would go up in flames. Turn to ash and blow away in the breeze, an eloquent end to the Blue Bastard.
Sister.
A headache had started to thump, and he pressed his hand to his brow in agony. Victoria’s answering look of pity shot a crimson haze across his vision.
Her fingers grasped his sleeve as he stormed past, out the servant’s door, and into the walled side garden. The grass was damp and chilly beneath his bare feet, a crescent moon casting muffled light and shadow across his path—and before he had time to formulate a plan he was running. Past the clump of unpruned rose bushes, past the gardener’s cottage, the conservatory, the potter’s shed, the lake. Running until his lungs burned and his skin stung, until sweat coated his face and trickled into his eyes, through fields and forest he’d traversed as a young man, every nook and valley as familiar to him as the lines on his palm.
He ran until he got far enough away from Victoria Hamilton for his gift to return in full force, bringing with it the torment of his life, hearing too much.
When his legs finally gave out, he locked his hands on his knees, hung his head, and gulped in sputtered breaths, stunned to find he’d made it to the Stone Fortress, the dwelling receiving its name when the Duke of Ashcroft lived there when he first joined the League, the lone structure on the estate impervious to fire.
The sound of the front door opening didn’t shock Finn.
On this night, nothing else could shock him.
Slowly rising, he swiped his hair from his eyes to find Humphrey lounging in the entranceway, hands in his pockets, a golden flood of gaslight spilling around him.
“Come in, then, as you look in the middle of a first-rate sulk. Unless you’d like me to come out there. We can crack each other’s teeth until your fury’s got nowhere to hide. Sometimes that makes a man feel better. Crude, but efficient.”
With a grimace, Finn crossed the yard and shouldered past Humphrey and into the cottage, never once considering the brutal offer. He’d no desire for a man Humphrey’s size to ‘crack his teeth’ when he quite liked them. Too, he already had the chip from his fall off his mare. His smile was almost as noteworthy as his eyes, and one had to protect one’s assets in an uncertain world.
The Stone Fortress was modestly furnished, rustic, and cozy, which suited the hulking man currently perusing the collection of bottles lining a rough-hewn sideboard. A fire was crackling in the hearth, but the open window allowed a bracing draft inside, opposing sensations Finn let swirl and settle. He had no fight in him at this point, even to decide between being cold or hot.
Humphrey held a bottle aloft. “I’d go with Ireland, as you look like you’ve been pulled through a keyhole. Scotland requires more soothing contemplation.”
Finn grunted and collapsed to a brocade sofa that had seen better days. He poked his finger in a hole in the faded upholstery, remembering Humphrey had moved to the cottage once Ashcroft found reasonable control over his fiery talent, and Julian no longer feared letting him reside in the main house when he visited—because the main house certainly better suited a duke. But stone walls better suited a man known to start fires.
Humphrey retreated to a chair across from him, a bruised leather piece that looked like a castoff from the servants’ quarters. He offered a glass—filled to the brim, thank God. “Go easy,” Humphrey advised, “this is the strong stuff.”
Finn winked, saluted, and drained the glass in one shot. His eyes watered, and he coughed, the whiskey burning a path from his lips to his heels, just what he needed to incinerate the vision of Victoria’s ashen face and the dark blue eyes from his dream.
A sour smile crossed Humphrey’s face, and he shoved to his feet, bringing the bottle back and pouring another draught for Finn. “One of those nights, is it? Going to have to hold your head over a rubbish bin, I’m guessing. The anticipation of that is killing me.”
“It’s one of those months, Rey. And never fear, I’ll puke outside in your azalea bushes. I’m a gentleman.”
Humphrey took a leisurely sip, gazing at Finn over the crystal rim. Patient, almost as patient as Julian, when Finn had little of the skill himself. Twitchy when he was a boy, full of verve and arrogance as a young man. Reckless. Even a mite demonstrative, something a lad wasn’t often allowed to be in an aristocratic household. Julian’s words sounded in his mind, about Humphrey comforting him during the night terrors, and he wondered why the hell anyone, a young man himself, would have accepted this responsibility? Why would anyone want to be surrounded by the occult and the danger it presented? Especially when you weren’t cursed yourself.