“I don’t know if we can count on that.”
August shrugged. “Forgive me if I don’t feel the need to reassure you of your safety. It’s not like you think it’s important. I kidnapped you and told you to go home, warned you about the dangers of your situation, and all you did was double down.”
I stared at him. Even after hearing him tell Hadrian, after hearing him say it now, I still couldn’t quite believe him. “That, instead of telling me, Hey, maybe you’re in danger, Jamie. Which would’ve been too easy. Or un-psychopathic.”
To my surprise, August looked over at Holmes. “I was raised to solve problems in a particular way.” His voice was clipped and rough, a simulation of hers. “Generally, I ignore my education. There, it seemed apt. I keep my promises, Charlotte.”
Holmes scoffed. “You were serious. You were serious about killing yourself to save us.”
“I was serious about that.”
“Hong Kong,” I echoed. I tried to imagine it. The August from the photos, from the research I’d done. With a professorial beard and a briefcase and a whole bunch of papers to grade. Somewhere out of reach, somewhere far away from all of this.
I couldn’t hold on to the image. It didn’t seem possible, that you could walk away from this burning wreck with a brand-new name and no scars but the scratch on your neck.
“Well, good luck with that,” Holmes said, leaning back into my coat.
“Stop being a child, Charlotte,” he said.
“I’m not being a child. I’m being realistic. How can you believe that your brother isn’t a complete monomaniac? That he has compunctions? You think he won’t hunt you down for sport?” She barked a laugh. “You’d use the name Felix. You’d teach at an English-speaking university. I could find you within ten minutes. Lucien? Within seconds.”
“This isn’t about me,” he said formally. “It’s about you. You’re hurt that I said those things. I understand, you know. It can be difficult.”
“Difficult?”
“Actions have consequences—”
“Don’t you trot out that patronizing bullshit with me, August, I can’t stand it—”
He threw up his hands.
“—I thought of you as the last good one. Of all of us. I thought you’d forgiven me.”
“How could I? How could I possibly, when—” August cleared his throat. “You know where Leander is.” It wasn’t a question.
“Why do you think we’re going back to Sussex?”
“How? How long have you known?”
“No.” She peered at him over my arm. “First show your work.”
That expression crept across August’s face again, the one I’d seen him smother so many times before. This time, he didn’t try to mask it. Bit by bit, it played out, the look of a man who’s torched his own house only to fall in love with the flames. He hated himself, anyone could tell that—the bandage around his neck was still stained red—but I don’t think he hated Charlotte Holmes as much as he claimed. I think it was something else completely.
Did he want to be her? Did he want to be with her? It didn’t matter now. This was the tail end, the epilogue. After what he’d said to us in Prague, I couldn’t imagine our paths would run together much longer.
August leaned forward in his seat, his hands steepled before him. “You haven’t had any urgency on this matter since we’ve arrived. All the tools in the world to track down your uncle, and instead, you play back the same voicemail, again and again, not picking it apart for analysis but listening to it like you’re mourning for him? My brother and sister were at your disposal. At your mercy. You held them at gunpoint, and then at an auction that you demanded they hold, and instead of extracting information from them, by force, about your uncle’s whereabouts—don’t give me that look, I know precisely how bloodthirsty you are—you show a cute little surveillance video that implicates them in his disappearance and then you buy up all the Langenberg paintings, one two three? There’s no hard evidence there. It’s bad detective work, plain and simple. You’re solving this sloppily, Charlotte, with money and borrowed power, and you’re going to use Milo—who, unlike you, has a moral code underneath all that expediency—to put them in whatever black box you put Bryony in. It’s like you’re trying to race to some end before the howling wolves catch you, and that would make sense if you feared for Leander’s life, but you don’t. And now you’re saying he’s been in England the whole time? I don’t know what you’re doing, but why are you dragging me along?”
I wasn’t holding her anymore. I was blank, in shock, trying quickly to catch up. No. That was a lie, and I knew it. But there had been something wrong with the way Holmes had gone about all of this from the moment we’d touched down in Berlin, and all my exhausted heart could do was hope that August had come to the wrong conclusions.
“My brother is meeting us there,” Holmes said. “We need to speak to my father, and then we all need to go. Immediately. All three of us.”
She turned from him, burying her face in the cloth of my coat. August pulled a notebook from his pocket; he turned it over in his hands. And me? I felt so thoroughly betrayed, so abandoned, that I hardly knew what to think. She was holding on to me like she thought it was the last time I’d let her.
And if she’s kept all this from me, maybe it should be, I thought, and stared out the darkened window, waiting for the first lights of London to appear.
WE TOOK A CAB TO THE TRAIN, AND THE TRAIN DOWN TO Eastbourne, and a black car from the station up to her family’s estate. There was snow on the ground, a dusting of it that turned and turned in the wind. We weren’t speaking to each other. None of us. I didn’t know what to say to August, especially now, and I didn’t try. As for Holmes, she’d disappeared into her magician’s trunk and swallowed the key. There wouldn’t be any prying her out, not until the big reveal.
I thought I knew what it might be. I hoped I was wrong.
The house came into view at the end of the drive, and beside me, I heard August draw a sharp breath. He hadn’t been back here since the night he had Lucien deliver his latest shipment of coke. This was the last place he’d been August Moriarty.
It didn’t seem to register for Holmes. She sat between us, hands folded in her lap. Her jaw was set. “You need to decide what we do with Hadrian and Phillipa,” she said to August.
“I thought you’d made that Milo’s call.”
“Greystone is keeping them subdued. I want you to decide what happens next.”
“Can’t we ask Milo his opinion?”
Without looking, Holmes pointed out the window. “He isn’t here,” she said. “Ours are the only tracks in the drive. Things are about to happen very quickly. Make a decision. Or else I will.”
August sighed. “It’s difficult, Charlotte. That’s my brother. My sister. I don’t know.”
“Dammit, August, Milo will have them killed. That’s what happened to Bryony. All right? What do you want? Make a decision!”
The car began to turn down onto the long drive, but Holmes told the driver to stop. August sat stunned and unspeaking.
Holmes took a breath. “Fine,” she said, measured again, and leaned over me to pull the door handle. “I’ll do it my way. The way I’ve wanted to all along. God help me—
“Watson, get out.”
“What are you—”
She pushed me, and I stumbled out onto the gravel on my hands and knees. Holmes followed, and before she slammed the door on August’s face, I heard her say, “You always sit back and let someone else be the monster. Hadrian. Lucien. Me, as a matter of fact, but it stops now. Let’s go.”
I knelt there, on the ground, in disbelief. I’d never seen her do anything that cruel. Never, at least, to me. Even now, she was stepping over me, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her throat, and instead of heading down the drive, she took off down the salted path that cut through her house’s backyard. Careful, even in her haste, to keep from leaving footsteps in the snow.