Footsteps on the stair, a different set of footsteps behind me. Emma had her arms full of files; wordlessly, she handed me half the stack, and we passed them up to Holmes until her mother’s arms were free, and then I lifted her up to the window and pushed her out, my arms aching, my bruises pulling painfully against my skin, and just as August reached down both hands to drag me out of the basement, a voice behind me said my name.
I didn’t have to look to know it was Alistair Holmes. He said my name again, louder, a shout now, “James Watson,” like there wasn’t a difference between me or my father at all, like we were all interchangeable, these idiot Watson men who were beaten up and outsmarted by the enemy, kidnapped and shoved out of cars by their friends, men who left their own families behind to find themselves in the thick of a family feud that would leave a trail of bodies by the time this was all over.
“Jamie,” Alistair said again, approaching me with his hands out, entreating. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Lucien’s made threats. He presented them through Hadrian. He’ll know. He needs to see Leander sick in that hospital bed. He needs to see my wife debilitated in her room, unable to work. He needs to see us at his mercy.”
“What are you even talking about? That isn’t even what I saw—”
“Idiot boy. The cameras aren’t omniscient. I sedated the ‘doctor’ he sent, Gretchen Michaels, dressed her like my wife and put her in Emma’s bed. I locked up Leander, like he demanded, but I had Emma tend to him. He’s fine. Wholly fine. This is—”
“Jamie,” August hissed. “Come on.”
But I was so close to understanding. Alistair was drawing closer to me, his eyes wild, and I said, “It’s crazy. What this is is crazy. Why did Mrs. Holmes help Leander escape? How long were you going to keep this up?”
“Hadrian and Phillipa are here, aren’t they.” There was steel in his voice. “Aren’t they, child.”
“What are you planning—”
Alistair Holmes lunged for me.
“Now,” August said, and I grabbed for his hands. As he pulled me out of the window, Alistair Holmes grabbed at my leg.
I kicked him in the face, and he staggered backward.
There was no time to process what I’d just done. There wasn’t any up or down anymore, any right path to take. August replaced the window, and Holmes was there with a piece of wood from the pile and a hammer. I held the board while she hammered it into place.
I gripped her shoulders. “Your father—”
“Not important,” she said, shaking off my hands. “The car’s out front. Help her—I don’t know about the Greystone guards, if they’re still on our side—”
Holmes’s mother was conferring with Leander. “I’m about to give you something that will make you very sick. In actuality. You understand that.”
His mouth twisted. “I understand.”
“Remember,” she said. “There isn’t any antidote. This will get worse before it gets better. You’ll speak to the police. You’ll have them run tests at the hospital. You’ll implicate Hadrian and Phillipa. And then you’ll recover, and disappear. My suggestion is you go to America. Go see James.” She lifted an eyebrow in my direction.
“Of course,” I told him. “My father can help. And there’s nothing—nothing you can give him to help? Was he poisoned, as you were?”
“There’s nothing he can take,” she said. “I’m a chemist, Jamie. I mixed this myself. I tested it on myself until it became too dangerous to continue. There’s a Dr. Gretchen Michaels comatose in my bedroom. Hadrian sent her here to oversee this whole operation, and she stayed long enough that I had to put Leander under for a night—but the next day, I slipped her enough of this compound to put her into a coma. She looks enough like me to fool Milo’s cameras, to fool anyone watching his feeds. I didn’t need him to worry. I didn’t need anyone else to know.”
“Listen,” Holmes said. “I know you’re tired, but—”
“Don’t you dare patronize me, Charlotte,” Leander said. “Not now.”
“I know what you’ve been through,” she said, taking his arm. It was almost as though she were pleading with herself. “I couldn’t come before now. I needed to know how to pin it on Hadrian and Phillipa—I brought them here, even, but I couldn’t have it be my father’s fault—”
Emma stared at her daughter. “Your father’s fault?”
“You’re sick,” Holmes said quietly. “You’re not working. We’d lose the house. I heard the fights you were having, about money. Through the vents. I heard you shouting at each other. I assumed—” She ducked her head. “I assumed Father was keeping him somewhere until he agreed to give us the money to ensure we’d be okay. There wasn’t a digital record of Leander leaving, not one I could believe. There was a faint echo to his message—that sound you only get in a room with concrete walls. I know every inch of this house. I was made to explore it, blindfolded, so many times, and I . . . he hadn’t left. I knew that he was there. When you eliminate all other options—”
“Don’t you dare quote Sherlock Holmes. You—you’ve been trying to frame them,” I said in a rush. “Hadrian and Phillipa. All this time—you were trying to draw them in close enough to frame them for something you thought your father did.”
Holmes turned to her mother. “He wasn’t—I wasn’t—”
“Lottie,” her mother said. “It wasn’t your father. It wasn’t about money. It was about you. It’s always been because of you. Do you understand? There isn’t time for this. Here.”
She pulled a vial from her pocket and gave it to Leander. After a long, bowstrung moment, he bit off the cap and drank its contents down. Emma turned from us, her phone to her ear. “Yes? Yes, I’m requesting police assistance—” She walked toward the house, out of earshot.
No one moved. Above our heads, the moon hung heavy in the sky. Clouds raced across it, hastened by the wind. Was it shouting that I heard from inside the house? Was it just the ocean against the cliffs?
“Alistair just chased me out of the basement,” I told them. “I had to—I kicked at him, to get out. He was coming for me—”
Beside me, August threw a hand up over his mouth. He was laughing. Silently, horribly, his eyes squeezed shut. “You’re all such monsters,” he said. “Monsters, all of you! Trying to pin this on my family, trying to make us out to be worse than we are, and look at this horror you’ve built with your own hands.”
“No,” Leander said, wrapping his jacket more tightly around himself. “Don’t pretend you don’t know how this started. Not when Lucien Moriarty can say two words to his brother on the phone, and Alistair Holmes is given the option to either turn both Charlotte and all of his ill-gotten holdings, his paintings, his offshore bank accounts, everything over to the police—Lucien has the information, it would be a matter of minutes to bring it to the authorities—or to keep me in his basement until his brother and sister wrap up their Langenberg operation, safely, without my putting them away. Lucien wants this to go nuclear. He wants to bring all of us down. When he spoke to Hadrian and found out that August was still alive—when he heard word from his spies that August was working for Milo—”
“Oh God,” I said.
“Well,” Leander said. “It’s all the same. Everyone has another face. Hadrian and Phillipa are in custody?”
Holmes nodded, her expression unreadable.
“And I’ll be the evidence to hang them with. I’ll be the poisoned, wronged party. Poison—all it took was a single dose in Emma’s tea, administered by the man who takes out the trash, and the whole world goes to hell. Well, I know my place in it. I’ll be used, and then it’ll be over.” Leander turned and spat onto the snowy ground. “And after this, I’m done with it.”
I took a step forward before I’d really processed what he’d said. “Done with it?”