“But?”
The blank of his expression should have kept me from revealing any more, but there was nothing left within me to stop the words. “I don’t want you to know.”
Did he soften then? Or did I just wish that he would?
“What don’t you want me to know?” His voice betrayed what his eyes didn’t—pain. I’d done it. I’d hurt him. And now I wanted only to make it better.
I closed my eyes and felt him move closer, close enough for him to reach a hand up to cradle my swollen cheek. I thought I ought to flinch away, but I was desperate for his touch. I would have leaned into his hand if I weren’t afraid of the pain. His thumb gently traced the skin below my eye, and then he leaned in and brushed a kiss just where the ball of my dad’s fist had struck hardest. I shivered and he surrounded me, but not all at once. We moved in awkward increments, Lock waiting for me to step into him before his arms pulled me tighter. Then again. And again.
Soon, I was listening to his heartbeat thump against my ear, hiding my eyes in his shirt, and wondering how long I could stay there before one of us would move and ruin everything.
“Come upstairs?” he asked.
“I can’t. My brothers.”
“Mycroft will see to your brothers tonight.”
A ribbon of relief fluttered through me, even before I asked, “How?”
Sherlock shrugged. “He has his way. I’ll never understand how he makes things happen; they just always go the way he wants.”
We stared at each other for an unreasonable amount of time until I said, “Then, yes.”
His thumb traced gently under my eye once more, his next words spilling out more hesitantly. “What . . . don’t you want me to know?” I shook my head, looked down, but his hands surrounded my face gently and brought my gaze back up to meet his. “What is it?”
“Me,” I said. “I don’t want you to know me. Not like this.” It sounded stupid, but sometimes truth sounds stupid.
He nodded once. “Then you are the puzzle I will never try to solve.”
I didn’t believe him, but it didn’t matter right then. I took his face in my hands and pulled him close enough so that all I could see was his eyes. I didn’t know how to thank him or what to say, so I kissed him like I would never stop. I didn’t want to stop. It was the most painful kiss I’d ever had. Also the most perfect.
x x x
I jerked myself awake, then tried to sit up, but my stomach muscles declared revolt until I lay back down. I tried again and managed to prop myself up on an elbow. It’s always disorienting to wake up in someone else’s bed, even worse because I was pretty sure I wasn’t in bed when I fell asleep. In fact, the last thing I remembered was kissing Lock while he tried to make me keep the ice on my face. How that became me under covers—
“I didn’t suppose you’d be asleep long. You were a bit fitful.” Lock sat in the windowsill, a violin resting between his chin and shoulder. His fingers slid up and down the neck of the instrument, forming practice chords that only he could hear. Instead of a bow, a long, brown cigarette drooped from between the fingers of his other hand. I caught myself following its every movement as he flicked away the ash, pulled it up to his lips. I caught my fingertips brushing my own lips and jerked my hand down onto the bed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. But my heart wasn’t really in the apology. I was too busy remembering everything that had happened before. The trail of my mother’s things. The fire. My dad’s fist. Yelling at Lock. Kissing Lock all the way up the stairs. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Lock blew a stream of smoke out the window and did a piss-poor job of hiding his small smile as he tossed his cigarette and took up a bow. “There’s been another killing in the park,” he said before he slid the bow across the strings, taking up his silent song right in the middle as if it had been playing aloud the entire time. “Another man.”
I’d never been more grateful for a change of subject. Our eyes met briefly—just long enough for Lock to bow his head in a slight nod—his agreement that we didn’t need to talk about my dad anymore. On any other night I might have nodded back or smiled. But I was too fragile to do anything but stare at him while my eyes filled with tears. Another indignity after a long night of them. Luckily, I couldn’t see Lock’s face. I could pretend that I was imagining the slight strain in his voice as he stopped playing long enough to speak.
“A particularly brutal killing. It appears our killer is losing more of his control.”
“Did you observe the scene?”
He played a few overly complex chords and then stopped once more. “I came to get you, but I was told you weren’t home. And you weren’t at school.”
Was told. It was an elegant way of avoiding a reference to my father.
“I had to make a copy of the file,” I said. “I skipped school.”
He was told.
“What is it?”