Alan explored his memories of the past few months like someone gingerly handling an ancient scroll. Pieces slipped and crumbled. He remembered … Edwin handing him a loop of paper with one side, and the idea of channels carved within him by the rosary. Alan held that image and breathed with it, as he’d done when Bastoke was pouring that yellow spell around his head. It had felt like the perturbation was working. And then he’d felt nothing.
“I have most of it back now, I think.” His voice was a dry ache.
Jack put the book down at once. “Name and year and Prime Minister.”
“Asquith. Nineteen-nine. And my name’s Julius Caesar.”
Jack lifted a hand, hiding the shape of his mouth. “And mine?”
Alan automatically delivered one of the worst profanities he knew. “My lord,” he added.
Jack stood from the chair. He tugged a bell rope to summon a maid, and ordered tea. They were in Jack’s own townhouse, then. The style of this room fit with the parts Alan had already seen.
A slow, awful dread was winding Alan’s guts around its hands. He did remember it all. He remembered the hatred in Violet’s voice and the anger in Robin’s, when his traitorous role in Bastoke’s scheme had been made clear. He didn’t have any memory of how Jack had looked. He hadn’t had the courage to glance in Jack’s direction at all.
And now Alan was … here. How? What had happened between Alan falling unconscious in the Lockroom and now?
Alan’s tongue thickened and his heart thudded rapidly. However it had happened, he was alone in the heart of Jack’s territory. Jack had ordered tea, as if settling in for a leisurely session of—what? Interrogation? A slow, masterful flaying with the edge of Jack’s insulting tongue? Alan would prefer a hard beating with sticks to the way his betrayal squatted invisibly in the room between them, fouling the air and leaving him tense and miserable with nerves.
The tea arrived. Jack brought a cup and saucer to the bed and gestured Alan to sit up and take it. Perhaps this was where the poison was. Alan was too thirsty to care. Black tea, very sweet. It was the best thing his parched throat had ever experienced.
“So,” said Jack calmly. “Did you fuck me as part of playing the spy?”
Arsehole that he was, he’d waited until Alan had a mouthful of hot tea. Some of it went down the wrong way. Alan choked, spilled tea onto his shirt, and contemplated tossing the rest of the cup in Jack’s face.
God, he was so tempted to say yes. To drive a knife into this and let it die. But he hesitated too long.
Jack answered his own question. “No. I didn’t think so.”
Alan had learned a new method of lying from Maud Blyth: Don’t say anything untrue. Keep your secrets in the gaps between your words. But he’d lied in action, he’d betrayed them all to the elegant monster that was George Bastoke, and now the weight of that sat leaden on his shoulders.
“I didn’t need to,” he said. “Maud and Violet—even Edwin—they all let me into the fold without thinking twice. I was trying bloody hard not to fuck you, as a matter of fact. Given that it seemed like the worst decision I could make.”
“What happened to that plan?” said Jack, down in those dangerous registers of his voice.
“My willpower failed and I did it anyway. Christ, you’re a smug prick.” Nothing to lose. He might as well interrogate in return. “What happened?”
“To my willpower? I wasn’t exerting any.”
“To me. To everyone. What happened in the Lockroom?”
Jack told him. It took some time, and the growing horror of it got under Alan’s skin until he couldn’t sit motionless in the bed any longer. He got up and paced, and had more tea, and listened with gritted teeth to the disaster that was his own fault.
Jack hadn’t stuck around to find out how much of the Barrel was still intact, but he’d sent a servant to that corner of London later, and the answer was: not much. The same servant then went to Spinet House, where nobody answered the door to knocking, but an hour later a note from Violet was delivered. The others were all safe.
Alan’s legs weakened with relief to hear that, and he leaned against the bedpost. Something shaped like a prayer haunted the roof of his mouth. His back and one of his knees ached as if—well, as if he’d been dumped unconscious on a hard floor and left there, and then—
And then what?
We got out just in time, Jack had said. No specifics.
Alan might be small for a man, but neither Violet nor Adelaide would have the strength to carry him bodily out of a collapsing building. And from the sounds of things, Robin had had his hands full with Edwin.
A dangerous emotion broke in waves against the wall of Alan’s will.
“You saved my life.”
Jack didn’t deny it. His mouth curved a little. “Next time I’ll leave you to die, if your pride insists.”
There was that cut on his head. And he’d sat here in those ruined clothes as Alan slept, and made Alan’s tea perfectly, and Alan deserved none of it. Alan wanted to toss it in his lordship’s face like a handful of hated diamonds.
The waves broke through, and they were scalding hot. Before Alan’s common sense could raise even a feeble protest he was standing between Jack’s legs, leaning down to grab hold of Jack’s shoulder and shake. It was like trying to shake a lamppost.
“What the devil—”
“Stop pretending you’re not angry,” Alan snarled. “It’s—it’s fucking patronising, is what it is, and I can’t stand it.”
Jack’s free hand went to Alan’s wrist, as if to remove it, and Alan lost his head entirely. He planted himself in Jack’s lap; the chair was large enough that he could wedge his knees on either side of Jack’s hips and rest his full weight on Jack’s thighs. Jack went still. His pupils darkened and his mouth tightened. The air between them had the heady closeness of the hour before the heavens opened and flung down a storm.
“I betrayed you. You’re furious with me.”
“Yes,” said Jack. His hand was tight around Alan’s wrist. Alan could pull against it and never be free, and right now that was the only thing in the world that he wanted. The only thing that would help.
He hissed, “Show me.”
Contained fury bled across Jack’s face. He snatched Alan’s other hand and now his grip was circling both of Alan’s wrists at once, holding them pinned, the bones grinding painfully against one another. Alan gasped. Jack’s other hand was beneath Alan’s arse, and before Alan could breathe again Jack was standing, bearing Alan’s entire weight, and Alan was being flung hard back onto the bed, where he sprawled ungainly with surprise.
It knocked a laugh out of him: one he didn’t recognise. Wild, snarling anticipation took him between its teeth. And then he lifted his head and saw Jack’s face.
“Stop that,” said Lord Hawthorn. It was flat and final, and far more an order than anything that had passed between them before now. “Don’t you dare do that to me.”
“Do what?” Alan asked. He didn’t know what script they were playing from.
“When I fuck, it’s because it’s what I want. Not because I’m punishing someone, or too angry to be safe.”