instant the question left my lips, I wanted to take it back. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care to know that the Veil had harmed innocent people for failing to do a task I would not allow them to do.
I left her standing in the dark and did not look back.
I passed trickling streams carved and inlaid with smooth, polished stones, topiaries and gardens fading into winter’s slumber. I followed a stone wall, tracing the cobbles for a time until I realized that it was no wall I occasionally touched but the side of a structure with no windows.
When I found the door, I studied its thick metal hinges, the heavy weight of the braces bolted into it, and the wide keyhole.
This old-fashioned type of lock is the best for a student of the black art such as myself. The heavy iron tumblers would hold the door well, but the largeness of the mechanism made picking it rather easy.
I did not stop to consider why Hawke might be behind a closed door in what appeared to be a stone fortress, small as it was. I did not think that he may be occupied—with a woman, or with business, or anything of the sort.
It did not occur to me to knock, for I had ceased to imagine myself a thing of logic and become an arrow of focus in the darkness.
Opium lifted my heart from its terrible slump, and though I walked as if in a dream, I was once more unbreakable. Untouchable.
I pulled two pins from the crown I’d made of my braided hair and did not care when the blackened plait dropped to my shoulders. I’d lost most of the pins I had left. I would need to beg more of the sweets, but not now.
Now, I focused on doing what it was I did best.
It took precious little time. The lock clanged loudly as the tumblers slid into place, and I withdrew the pins I’d used to successfully force the issue. Pocketing them with the remains of my opium, I laid one hand flat against the metal door and pushed. Warm light spilled out to caress my booted feet.
The door did not screech, as I expected. The hinges were well-oiled, and the weight held firm by the stone frame it was affixed to. This was a mighty portico, built to withstand assault.
Was this where the Veil lived, then? His very own fortress?
I should have been more careful. I should have stepped out the instant I thought of the matter more carefully, turned my back on this foolishness.
I did not. If Hawke was in there, then I would force him to rescind the order that would see others punished for my efforts. I would demand he offer resources to find both the Whitechapel murderer and monstrous collector.
I would see this ended.
Smiling without humor, I flicked my braided hair to hang at my back and strode inside, eager to surprise the Veil and his puppet at their prideful feast.
I could never have been more wrong.
The room was a single chamber, painted red and gold by the fire leaping inside a large iron hearth. While a part of me registered the warm air, the fragrance of spice and burning coal, I could not have given name to any of it were I to try.
My gaze, my senses, my shock was claimed by the centerpiece of this elegantly furnished domain.
Hawke hung from a twisted knot of thick chains, his arms extended over his head, his feet limp above the stony floor. He faced the fire, presenting me with his taut back; an athletic vee of muscle wrenched into rigid tension. His crisp white shirt glowed obscenely bright against the fire-gilded tint of his swarthy skin, pulled tight against his flesh with the strain of the shackles banded around his wrists.
The Midnight Menagerie’s ringmaster had always been the center of attention. Now, obscene in his chains, he served a rather more literal center function.
His hands had become dark stains over his head, nearly purple from the constriction of his own weight against metal braces. Black hair covered his face, a raven’s wing curtain, as if he were asleep or unconscious.
How much pain was he in? How long had he been strung high for display? And for whom? The Veil’s spokesman? Someone else?
Who would dare?
Reaching back, I pulled the door shut, lest a passing servant find it and run tales to the Veil.
The metal panel clanged loudly.
Hawke’s head rose. His hair slid from his shoulders, down his white shirt in a pin-straight sweep. He did not attempt to turn, or to look behind him to see who it was intruding on his imprisonment.
He said nothing.
I did not know what to say.
First, I’d witnessed the scars upon his back, painful and wicked. Now, I found him in manacles.
Who would dare to break a tiger already caged? For what reason could they possibly?
Purpled fingers stretched, wrapped around the chains forcing his arms so high. It set his shoulders shifting, rippling with strength I could not imagine. To be held aloft for so long, and still force one’s body to obey one’s will? All but impossible.
I approached on near-soundless feet. “Why are you chained?” I asked, and the chamber took my voice and bandied it about between hollow walls. Even the lavish furniture, as polished and masculine as that in his quarters, could not wholly soften the stony prison.
He did not answer. The fingers wrapped around iron links tightened.
Did I know that I played with fire?
No. Not entirely. The opium I’d taken softened all such fear, and I was untouchable.
But I did know guilt. Where I had hoped to cultivate resolution, there instead came remorse.
It was a thing that grew in one, nurtured on the terrible circumstances that forced my hand, again and again. I knew guilt for all who had come to harm for my sake, and as I studied Hawke’s still figure—stretched taut and silent in the middle of a lavishly appointed nick—guilt once more bit.
The risk was not in feeling it. The risk came with the need to take more tar, smoke more of the pipe, drink even more of the laudanum to ease that guilt.
I wanted to eat all of what I had left.
Sweat dampened my palms beneath the gloves. The breath in my lungs thinned, and I inhaled so deeply that my collecting corset tightened against my expanding chest. “I did this,” I said on the exhale, answering myself with a certainty that did not ring of anger or deserved apology.
It fell empty and hollow between us, me and the prisoner I had put there.
The chains clinked gently. “Leave.” Hawke did not shout. He did not snarl. With only a single word, he laid before me an order that left no doubt I would obey.
I refused. I closed the distance between us, circled around him to look up into his eyes.
They were blue. Violent, wicked blue, same as the heart of the flame within the hearth. They blazed into mine, and I gasped a note that was as much question as bewilderment.
I had seen these eyes before. The first time, when I’d found him roasting in the Veil’s meeting chamber, I thought I’d dreamed them. Now I stared into that wicked blue flame and could not reason why they had changed again.
Was it my doing? Were my senses truly so far gone on the tar that I could paint Hawke with such outlandish fantasies?
He closed his eyes as if to clear them, his midnight lashes a thick fan. “You should not be here.”
I shook my head, as much to shake loose the webs making it difficult to reason through as to deny his influence. “That has never stopped me before,” I assured him.
When those dark lashes parted once more, his eyes were same colors as I’d ever known, tawny in the light and slashed in the blue I’d only just dreamed they’d been.
Readily solved, then. I was dreaming. Blissed out, more like.
There was no other explanation for it.
“Don’t be a fool,” Hawke said tightly, as if the words labored to escape his straining chest. His arms tightened, and the chains rasped and clinked in response. “Leave me.”
