Circle of Spies (46 page)

“All right.” Her voice strove for confident, but he caught the undertone of nerves.

In silence he set the lamp upon the table and unpacked the crates, laying out papers and books she'd yet to see. Whenever she nodded at one batch, he replaced it with another. Occasionally she would correct him on his ordering as he put it back, but otherwise she didn't speak either.

Within five minutes, they headed back up the stairs, and he couldn't help but note the crease between her brows. Once all was back to rights in the study and they were in the hall, he sighed. “Are you sure—”

“What a long way you've come, Slade, to be wasting words on ridiculous questions to which you already know the answers.” When she glared like that, her confidence outshone her anxiety. She looked once more like the dangerous, catty woman who had so confused him three months ago, and less like the genuine, selfless lady he'd spent so many hours with lately.

Somehow, realizing both were within her made him feel better. He led the way to the side stairs.

Marietta's steps slowed behind him. “Where are we going?”

“Ballroom.”

“What? I thought the entrance was outside the house.” And the outrage in her voice at realizing it wasn't, that the Knights had therefore been coming
inside
her home, made him grin.

He led her past the steps to Barbara's room and down the hall toward the ballroom. The members all used the exterior entrance to the room, through the door partially concealed by the overgrown hedge. Hughes left a key for that door and kept this interior one locked.

Slade knew where he kept this key too, and he used it to let the mistress of the house into the room she probably hadn't seen in nearly two years.

Her breath caught when she glided past him, her gaze latching on the mirrors and windows draped in black. “They never took down the mourning.”

“Hughes apparently forbade the servants from entering since the day of Lucien's funeral. When you gave him the keys to the study and, by extension, the castle.”

She fingered one of the swags of black crepe. “I told them to close it up. I didn't realize…” Huffing, she planted her hands on her hips and turned to a piano in the corner, its coat of dust thick and white. “He could have at least let them drape the furniture first.”

A snort of laughter escaped. He couldn't help it. The things women worried about sometimes.

She spun back to him and smiled. And then went serious again far too fast. “Lead the way, Detective.”

“Right.” He crossed to the far wall, found the piece in the ornate molding that opened the door not so dissimilar from the one in the study, and swung it wide. Here, a recess in the wall of the staircase held a lantern and a box of matches.

They went down the stairs and then along the corridor to the series of rooms. He took her first to the farthest one, the initiation chamber. So far as he had been able to discern, nothing there would be any help. But he intended to be thorough, so she would have no reason to demand that he bring her down here again.

She poked about, looking at every crack and crevice. He expected questions, but she asked none. Not in that first chamber, nor in the next, nor the next.

She studied every detail of the maps, she flipped through the
encoded papers tacked up here and there. She stared too long at the defaced poster of Lincoln. If anything, she became quieter as they went, until at last, when she gazed at the president's faded, smeared face, he had to strain to hear her breathing.

He touched a hand to her arm. “That's all there is to see, Yetta. We might as well go back up so you can read it in comfort.”

Marietta made no reply.

“Yetta?” Sliding his fingers around her arm, he gave it a gentle squeeze to get her attention.

Lately, any casual touch would earn him a smile. Or at least she'd lean in to him a little. Now she didn't flinch a muscle.

Her stillness felt wrong. He set the lantern on a rickety end table so that he could see her face. “Yetta.”

She didn't look at him. Wasn't, so far as he could tell, looking at anything. Her eyes were opened but unfocused, occasionally flicking back and forth, but obviously unseeing. As though she were dreaming.

Claws dug at the pit of his stomach. He clasped her hands, both of them between his. Squeezed, rubbed. Still nothing. “Come on, kitten. Shake this off. Come back to me.”

Shouldn't she have grinned at him for being scared over nothing? Brushed him off like a fly? Done something?

His mind screamed a prayer, though he didn't know what words to use. A plea for help, for inspiration in what to do, for the Lord to touch her and make whatever this was stop. It couldn't be good. Couldn't be healthy, could it, to disappear like this?

He gripped her shoulders and tried a light shake, the type that would rouse a sleeper. Maybe this was some kind of…of trance. Like that hypnosis mumbo-jumbo one of his old gambling pals had told him about. Maybe he just had to wake her up. “Marietta. Talk to me.”

Whatever was holding her erect seemed to snap. She slumped and listed to the right. Slade caught her with a hiss and gathered her close. “I've got you. I've got you.”

So far as he could tell as he hooked the lantern handle on one finger, she couldn't even hear him. But she had to come out of it soon, didn't she?
Please, Lord. Please.
“We'll just get you back upstairs and you'll be fine. You just need to get away from all this.”

He'd known this was a bad idea. Why had he brought her here? The answers weren't worth hurting her. Nothing mattered so much that he should have risked her like this. Even if he couldn't have known that this would happen, he'd known it was too much.

“All right. Okay. Almost there.” He kicked the room's door shut and hurried along the corridor and then up the stairs. Pushing the lantern back into place, he blew it out even as he stepped into the ballroom.

The muted light still felt bright after the tunnel, that was why he blinked so much. And the dust, that's what made his nostrils flare. He put her back on her feet, his arms clamped firmly around her. Maybe sunlight, however diffused, would bring her around. Maybe being out of the castle would be enough. Maybe…

“Ah, Yetta.” He ventured one hand onto her cheek. Her eyes were still doing that strange, blurred half flicker, and now her lips twitched, as though she whispered to herself.

“Yetta. Yetta, I'm sorry.” He pressed his lips to hers, quick and panicked. “I'm so sorry.” It felt right to kiss her. Maybe because it stilled the silent muttering, maybe just because. He kissed her again. “I shouldn't have taken you there.” Another kiss, soft and pleading. “Come back to me, kitten. Please. I'm so sorry I put you through this.”

She drew in a quick breath, the kind one might make when waking. Her hands, resting against his chest, curled in. When she blinked, her lashes fluttered against his cheek. “Stop.”

Thank You, Jesus
. He pulled his head away.

Her eyes still looked clouded, but they were clearing. Even shone a bit—though too dimly—when the corners of her mouth turned up. She shook her head. “Apologizing. Stop apologizing. Don't stop kissing me.”

He breathed a laugh that felt like hope and shook his head too. There she was—shaken, but back. He did the only thing he could possibly do. He leaned down and kissed her.

Marietta closed her eyes against the race of images and focused on Slade. She pushed aside the quick snap and flutter of the pounding parade within her head and didn't let herself ask how she had arrived back at the ballroom when her last memory was of stopping before the ruined election poster.

They still clamored and buzzed, those crashing images. But his lips hushed them. He pulled her back to the here and now—exactly where she wanted to be.

She slid one arm around his neck, rested the other against his chest, and felt a rush of contentment. This, this was what she had been waiting for for so long. This gentle touch of a kiss that somehow both wanted and gave. That touched her heart as well as her lips. When he pulled her close, she wanted to melt into him, to stay just there where all else faded. Where she was safe, protected, cherished.

The kiss took her deeper, and she marveled at how it could while also making her soar. His first embrace, two months ago nearly to the day, hadn't had this effect. Something had changed. Between them, or perhaps in them. It wasn't just wanting anymore.

That terrifying realization may have sent her a step back had he not angled his head and melded his mouth to hers a new way, drawing her back in.

Perhaps she had toyed with the word
love
in connection with him, but she hadn't been thinking of it right. She had been thinking of the quick tumble in and out that she had felt with the Hugheses. The new and innocent kind that had blossomed so slowly over the years with Walker.

This was neither, and both. This was the unfurling of a rose. The summer heat of the sun. The steady rush of a gurgling stream. This was beauty and life and…and surety. How that was possible she couldn't have said. But for the first time in her life, she knew it wasn't a matter of just wanting to be in the arms that held her—it was a matter of belonging there.

As he stroked his thumb over her cheek and eased away, she knew his feelings must have grown too. Did he love her? Did he feel this same stretching of his soul toward hers? This yearning to simply be in the presence of the other? She wanted to believe he did, that he must.

“I don't know what that was down there,” he whispered, resting his forehead against hers, “but don't ever do that to me again.”

She wasn't even sure what he was talking about. Closing her eyes, she toyed with his lapel and tried to ease back into her mind. But there was just so much. The actual memories of her actions in the castle tangled with the things she had seen. The pictures kept shifting, turning, realigning.

The election poster hovered, Mr. Lincoln's face with that dreadful smear. She remembered looking at it, recalling the first time she had done so from the secondary tunnel. For some reason, that had triggered the whirlwind.

Gripping his coat, she refused to be swept up again. Not now. She clung to Slade, shaking the images away and searching for him in the memories of when she stood before the poster. No images, but his voice was there. Begging, pleading with her.

Marietta opened her eyes, narrowed, at his handsome face. “Did you call me
kitten
?”

His blink was blank, but then a smile tugged a corner of his mouth. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

She felt his shrug as much as she saw it. The lopsided smile made no attempt to even out. “You have cat eyes.”

A soft laugh filled her throat. Her fingers, of their own will, feathered through the hair at the back of his head. “Should I call you ‘puppy' then?”

Another blink. “Pardon?”

She grinned. “You have wolf eyes.”

And oh, how she loved the glint of amusement in them. “Nice. But no. Don't even think about it.”

Another laugh soothed its way through her, but quick on its heels came the press of images. Too many, too fast. She kissed him again to force them back, but even as it worked, she knew it was but a stopgap. A rickety dam that would give way at any moment.

She eased back down from her toes. “I need paper and pen to work through this.”

Slade nodded and loosened his arms. The worry took over his eyes again. “Yetta…has that ever happened before?”

“Not to that extent. But as soon as I can bring some order to the thoughts, they will settle.” She let her hand trail down his neck and then over his shoulder. She was reluctant to let go but had no choice. “I am sorry to have startled you. Or I would be, had it not inspired you to kiss me again.”

Chuckling, he turned her toward the ballroom's exit with a hand upon her back. “You're something else, kitten, that's for sure.”

Maybe that shouldn't have felt like the highest compliment she had ever received, but it lit a glow deep inside her. She walked with him toward the closed double doors, wondering if her smile looked as smug as the cat he called her.