“No.” Jude stands up, one hand gripping the chair back. “He’ll be expecting me to answer.”
We walk to the entryway together. Jude straightens, almost imperceptibly. He unbolts the latch and opens the door wide.
Dylan Osric waits on the front step, in his wool coat and cloth cap, looking much the same as when I last saw him. There’s more gray streaking his brown curls, but he’s still wiry, like Jude, and haggard in a way Jude is not.
“Hello, Uncle.”
Dylan takes off his cap. “Jude,” he says. Then he regards me. “Evening, Miss Alexander. Mr. Irving didn’t mention you were here.”
I fix my gaze on him, offering up a thin smile. “Good evening, Mr. Osric.”
“She wanted to make sure I was all right,” says Jude.
“Hmm.” Dylan turns his attention back to him. “You going to let me in?”
Jude steps aside. In the entryway, Dylan hangs his coat and cap on an empty peg. He turns his head slightly, glancing down the hall.
Jude says, “I can build up a fire in the drawing room. If you’d like—”
“Have there been many people here, then?” Dylan interrupts. His eyes are hard, calculating; I can tell he’s weighing his words, mindful of my presence.
Jude leans back against the wall. He looks ashen and vulnerable in his loose-fitting dressing gown, his exhaustion evident in his posture. I want to reach out for him, to press my hand to his, but I hold myself still. He tells Dylan, “A fair few.”
“Hmm,” Dylan says again. “And what were you doing by the shore? Did that day seem a fine one to be drowned?”
“I was just…”
“Being foolish, that’s what. This is just the way your father was, you know, before he died.”
Jude says nothing. Dylan sets off down the hall, past the staircase, to the storeroom he kept the siren in. He pauses near the door. “Miss Alexander,” he says abruptly, “oughtn’t you be heading home?”
“Moira is welcome to stay as long as she likes,” Jude says. He looks over at me briefly before returning his gaze to his uncle. “Dylan, I—”
Dylan silences him with a raised hand. As he walks back toward us, his eyes do not stray from mine. “Did you send my nephew down there, Miss Alexander? Would he have been on the beach if it weren’t for you?”
And my breath catches with the honesty of it, a chill settling deep in my chest, because Jude wouldn’t have been on the beach if it weren’t for me. Of course he wouldn’t. I’m the one who suggested an investigation in the first place, dragging him alongside me into all of Twillengyle’s dangers and magic.
“All right, that’s quite enough.” This is Jude, his eyes shining bright and fierce. He pulls himself from the wall, leaving my side to catch Dylan by the arm. “I need to speak with you alone.”
Dylan glares back at him. “Very well.” He tugs out of Jude’s grip, turning toward the oak door—heading, presumably, for the watch room.
After he disappears into the tower, Jude comes to place his hands on my shoulders. He gazes down at me and says, voice low, “I’ll deal with him, Moira.” His face is anxious and tired, lovely and sad. “He shouldn’t have spoken to you in that manner.”
I touch his cheek. “Be careful.”
He goes up after Dylan, the door falling shut behind him. I wait a long minute and follow in his footsteps. On the watch room landing, I stop, hearing Dylan and Jude on the other side of the door. I rest a hand against the cool plaster of the tower wall, listening hard.
“Where is she?” says Dylan, so loud and sudden that I start. “I know well enough she’s not in that room. You’ve done something with her.”
Jude mumbles something. A sharp thump resonates from inside the room, and I grit my teeth, digging my nails into my palms.
Then Dylan’s voice, snarling, “You’ve no idea—”
“I do, actually,” Jude cuts in. “I know you only did it for yourself. Were you even thinking of Da when you chained her up? Did you even—”
“You had no business throwing her back. Not now. Not after what I’ve done.”
For the first time in recent memory, I hear ice crystallize in Jude’s voice. “What would you have me do?” he asks. “You tortured her, Dylan, and I’ve spent the past year worried sick over her. If someone found out—”
“Someone did find out,” Dylan growls.
I hear movement, the creak of floorboards. And very softly Jude says, “What?”
“Little wonder how they did. I had dockers asking me why you were stowing supplies out in the shed rather than the storeroom. Hughes thought you were hosting dinner parties with the cuts of meat you kept buying.”
“I didn’t think—”
“Now you have Gavin’s daughter downstairs. Good God, Jude, you’ve got the song in your ears with her, never mind sirens.”
“Dylan,” Jude says, and he’s so quiet I strain to hear him. “Who found out?”
There is a long, long silence. I feel my heartbeat, slow and dreadful, as I wait for something to happen.
“Just—tell me it wasn’t Connor Sheahan. Tell me you didn’t…”
“Now, that was a tragic mishap.”
“Dylan.”
“I wasn’t the one to wield the knife, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Inside the watch room, Jude curses once, and then again. He sounds wrecked, and I’m both thankful and torn I can’t see his expression.
“When I was here a while back, he started asking all sorts of questions,” says Dylan. “Met me on the dock soon as I was off the boat. Said he’d been meaning to talk to you.” He pauses, but Jude remains silent, and he continues. “You’re lucky he came to me instead. That boy was putting two and two together, nosy as anything. He thought there was something going on up at the light, and I asked him—asked him what made him think so. He went off talking about how you were never much at the harbor these days, wondering why you had that one shuttered window, why you were paying out for so much goddamn meat.
“He said he thought he heard something while he was here in the summer. A strange thing—seeing as he knew you lived alone.”
Through the wall I hear Jude make a sound low in his throat, like Dylan’s words have choked him. I bow my head, close my eyes, and try to breathe through the ache in my chest.
“So I dealt with it.” Dylan’s tone is matter-of-fact. “I reckoned he’d go to the police in time. Wasn’t hard to head him off and find someone who agreed with my line of thinking. Llyr was a stone’s throw away from losing this post before he died—I wasn’t going to let that happen to you.”
My lip curls in a sneer. It’s Dylan alone who’s at fault. He put Jude between the hammer and the anvil—there’s no reason why Jude should be taken to task for it.
Jude says, “He was a child,” and his voice is on the verge of cracking in two.
Dylan doesn’t answer immediately. When he does he says only, “Worse things have come to pass on this island.”
“Get out,” Jude snaps back at him. “Get out. Get out of here.”