She locked eyes with him. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“Come, now. Moriarty has his fingers in other pies. Yours isn’t the only one.” Morgan-Vilk indicated the files in the document box. “Let me put it bluntly. He’s a brand-name criminal, and I’m in need of the recognition that would come from bringing him to justice. So I’d like to be the one to haul him in, if you don’t mind. I’m working out the extradition details already.”
“Mind?” I laughed, bitterly. “I don’t know about Holmes, but yes, please, for Christ’s sake, drag him home in irons. That fucker just married my mother.”
“Did he?” Milo murmured, the way you would ask about the weather.
“That’s a good reason to be wearing someone’s blood down your shirt,” Morgan-Vilk said.
“I actually don’t know if I agree with that, but sure, fine. Look, he has some kind of plan. Who knows how deep this goes. And he’s on his way to accomplishing it—Milo is hiding out, drunkenly giving you advice in a kitchen, and Holmes and I have our hands tied. I can’t imagine what he’s telling the police right now. The facts themselves are pretty damning.”
“Which are?”
Holmes sighed. “We beat him up, stripped him of his weapons, his wallet, and his fake passport, and then we escaped the police through the bathroom window.”
Morgan-Vilk whistled; Milo stuck his hand out. “His passport,” he said. “And wallet.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No,” Holmes said again. “Why would I help you? Where would that possibly get me?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Lottie. Closer to putting away your tormentor?”
“You don’t help.” She was struggling with them, the words. In her filthy red dress, she looked like a girl who’d wandered away from an explosion. “Milo, you don’t know how to help. You take over, instead. You make things worse. I knew what I was doing! I knew where Leander was! I was going to free him, I went to Berlin to lure Hadrian and Phillipa back to our house. DI Green was going to ‘arrest’ them. Lucien would never let his brother and sister take the fall for something he’d done. He has that much loyalty. In order to spring them, he would have had to make a move! Come out into the open! It was a plan, a good one, and then you showed up with your sniper rifle? Didn’t it have a scope? Didn’t you stop to look before you fired? Did you—”
Milo had his hands up in front of him. They were shaking. “I was trying to protect you,” he said, quietly. “I only ever wanted to protect you.”
“You had years to protect me,” Holmes said, defeated. “That was a piss-poor time to start.”
They stared at each other.
“Charlotte,” Morgan-Vilk said, into the silence.
“Oh, for crying out loud—fine,” she said. “Fine. How about this? I’ll give you copies of Lucien’s forged passport and anything you find in his wallet. In exchange for the originals, I’ll allow you to bring the bastard in when the time comes.”
“And that time is?” Morgan-Vilk asked.
Holmes glanced at me. “Watson?”
She was asking my opinion. “We still have a few loose ends,” I said, taken aback. “How does tomorrow work for you?”
While Holmes supervised the extensive photography Milo’s assistant was performing on Lucien’s things, I stepped aside to turn on my phone. It had been ringing so incessantly since we’d cut and run that I’d had to turn it off to save the battery.
I had nearly a hundred texts, almost all of which were from my stepmother, Abigail. Jamie, what have you done? What were you possibly thinking? and Jamie, come home, it’ll be okay, I promise, a blatant lie, and Your father keeps telling me to let the police handle this but I just don’t know what’s going on, what were you thinking, how could you do something like this? I was horrified for her, but when I began to type out a reply, I realized that she might not be the one in control of her phone. In fact, I’d bet that she wasn’t. If not Lucien Moriarty, then the police.
Nothing from my mum. Well—now that the adrenaline was beginning to leave my system, I had to come to terms with the possibility that there wouldn’t be anything from my mother ever again. I’d just assaulted her new husband in a public restroom. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it, what she must be feeling. Even if she found out that Lucien Moriarty had been behind it all this time, I’d beaten him so brutally that she had to think that I was a monster. How could she ever look at me again?
I realized I was shaking. Nauseous. I took a steadying breath. Think about it later, I told myself. You can’t deal with this now.
Texts from Elizabeth making sure I was okay; she hadn’t heard back from me. Texts from Lena, incomprehensible, thick with unicorn emojis, celebrating some kind of win she thought was coming when we’d meet up tonight.
And a single text from my father. I want you to know that I’m proud of you. Nothing else.
For some reason, that scared me more than anything else I’d seen tonight.
I was crashing, and hard, by the time that Holmes returned with the passport in her fist. “I’m going to have to sleep with this under my pillow,” she muttered, as Morgan-Vilk chattered on a phone in the background.
I showed Holmes my text messages from her and Elizabeth. “What do you think? Should we meet up with Lena? See what she has on the boil?”
“I’d think so. My plan had been to leave the country tonight—”
I stared at her. “Tonight?”
She hurried on. “—but I don’t think it’s safe for me to rejoin my uncle—”
“Wait, you were staying with Leander? For how long?”
“—or maybe it is safe, but why risk it, and then there’s the matter of you being hunted by the police, and I—well. I’d prefer to be here. But Lena said midnight. That’s still four hours until we’re due back in at Sherringford.”
“Jesus.” It was only eight o’clock. I was shocked a whole week hadn’t passed since I left campus this afternoon.
“Well.” Holmes wasn’t quite meeting my eyes. In the background, Milo dumped out a file folder on the table, and papers scattered like a rush of leaves.
“We haven’t had a chance to— I haven’t told you about Shelby,” I said, remembering in a horrible rush. How could I have forgotten? Lucien-stroke-Ted, and our mad dash across town, and Milo appearing like the Ghost of Hangovers Past—all of it had pushed my sister to the back of my mind. “She started her new school today, here, in America, but I think it’s another con of Lucien’s. My mother’s claiming that she’s just homesick, but I trust my sister’s judgment, and Holmes—Shel was scared, when she called. Hiding in a closet scared. That isn’t homesickness.”
Holmes’s eyes refocused on me. “Where is it?”
“Somewhere close to Sherringford, I think? I don’t know—”
“Get her out of there,” she said, immediately. “Now. Now, Jamie. How long has she been there?”
“Only a few hours,” I said. “Hopefully not long enough for anything terrible to happen to her.”
“There are a lot of terrible things,” Holmes said, “that can happen to a girl in a few hours.”
“Can we get a car? How do we get out of the city? Is there—”
“Do you require my assistance?” Milo called.
“No,” Holmes and I said together, and she dragged me away from him and Morgan-Vilk, out into the darkened hallway.
There, she paced, dragging her hands through her hair. “No. No, we can’t be everywhere. We can’t try to be. We have resources—yes. My uncle.”
“My dad,” I said, pulling out my phone. “I’ll text him.”
Dad, I wrote. Shelby’s in trouble. Her new school—I think it’s a front for something.
Holmes was watching my fingers. “Lucien consults for a school in Connecticut. A wilderness rehabilitation school. I’ve been to places like that, and they’re awful, but generally safe. I don’t know how true that will hold if Lucien is involved.”
“She’s just a girl,” I said, almost desperately.