Lenoir paused. He regarded Zera in silence. Had he ever used that phrase in her presence? He had been drunk too many times in these apartments to be sure, but it seemed highly unlikely. He had mocked Kody mercilessly every time the sergeant trotted it out. To the best of his knowledge, he had never used it himself.
He was certain Zera had never met Kody. They had spoken of the sergeant only a few days ago, and Zera had not known who he was. “That is an interesting analogy,” he said carefully.
She gave him a quizzical look. “About the stars? It’s a common saying. Have you never heard it?” She smiled warmly, the elegant hostess once again.
It was that shift in her expression, so effortless, yet so incongruous in the moment, that betrayed her.
Only a few minutes before, Lenoir had referred to Kody in the past tense. Zera had not picked up on that. Zera picked up on everything.
As though in answer to his thoughts, her smile turned suddenly sad. “What a pity, Nicolas. We get along so well.”
A blow landed heavily against the back of Lenoir’s head. Pain erupted in his skull, and he tumbled out of his chair. He looked up to find a servant standing over him with a fireplace poker. It came down in a humming arc, and Lenoir rolled aside, the heavy iron slamming into the floorboards where his head had been. He hooked the man’s ankles with his foot and swept his feet out from under him. The servant came down hard. Lenoir managed to wrest the poker free, simultaneously driving his knee into the other man’s groin. He struck a blow across the servant’s face with the poker, and the man went still.
Zera backed away toward the windows. Her eyes blazed with defiance, and she made a sharp movement with her hand. Lenoir realized that he had misread her gesture moments before. She hadn’t been dismissing his argument; she had been calling reinforcements. You blind fool, he cursed himself inwardly.
He dared a glance around the room, looking for any hint of movement. Whomever Zera had signaled to was concealed somewhere nearby. He held the poker at the ready, his mind frantically trying to gauge the distance to the stairs.
“Did you kill them?” he cried, surprised at his own anger.
“Who? Your hounds?” She sneered. “What do you care? I thought you despised them.”
“Hardin did not deserve to die. Kody does not deserve to die.”
“Deserve?” She laughed bitterly. “I never thought to hear such naïveté from you, Nicolas.”
The creak of a floorboard alerted Lenoir to movement behind him, and he spun, leading with the poker. The weapon crashed against the side of a man’s face, caving in his cheekbone and sending a spray of blood across the creamy velvet upholstery of a nearby chair. The man slumped to the floor.
“A pity about the chair,” Lenoir said. The comment was rewarded with a shriek and a glass projectile thrown at his head. He ducked as the delicate ornament shattered into a thousand tinkling shards behind him.
Footsteps thundered overhead and on the stairs. Lenoir had no idea how many men might be in these apartments; he was not even sure how many floors there were. He needed to get out. Casting a final glance at Zera to make sure she was staying put, he turned and headed down the stairs.
He met only one servant on his way out, heading the opposite direction on the stairs. Lenoir grabbed the handrails with both hands and swung his boots into the man’s face, sending him tumbling back down to the marble landing. He was still moving when Lenoir got to the bottom of the stairs, but not quickly enough to be a threat. Lenoir ran past him and out the door onto the high street. He swung himself onto his horse with the vigor of a man of twenty. Then, with one final look at the place that had been a haven for him for so long, he galloped off into the rain.
CHAPTER 23
Lenoir did not exactly decide to ride to the hospital; he simply steered his horse there, without conscious thought. He needed a familiar face, and Bran Kody was just about the last person left in the Five Villages that Lenoir had spent any significant time with over the past few years. Pathetic, certainly, but a fact nonetheless, and so Lenoir made his way to Mindale Hospital, the only clinic in Kennian that the Metropolitan Police trusted to care for their own. If Kody was still alive, he would be here. It was probably too much to hope that the sergeant might be awake, but Lenoir could accept that. He had always found Kody’s company to be much more agreeable when the sergeant did not speak.
Lenoir was shown to a cramped little room at the end of a long, foul-smelling corridor. He found the physician bent over Kody’s cot, checking the patient’s pulse. Lenoir waited in the corridor.
“He’s alive,” the physician said as he quit the room.
Lenoir waited for him to elaborate, but he did not. “How is he? Will he recover?”
The physician shrugged. “Anyone’s guess. The stomach wound is all right, but the head wound—that’s another matter. He’ll either wake up, or he won’t.” So saying, he took his leave, his footsteps echoing along the barren walls.
Lenoir entered the room hesitantly. He found a stool jammed in the narrow space between the wall and the pallet on which the sergeant lay, and he perched on the edge of it, folding his fingers awkwardly in his lap. As his gaze took in the length of Kody’s prostrate form, something suspiciously like guilt tugged at the bottom of his stomach.
The sergeant’s features were cast in harsh relief, brushed in lamplight and chiseled out of shadow. Combined with the pallor of his skin, it gave him a ghoulish look, like a man hovering somewhere between life and death—which, Lenoir supposed, was exactly what he was. He was too tall for the pallet, his feet hanging over the edge in a position that would surely have been uncomfortable if he were awake. Lenoir rose from the stool and propped it under Kody’s feet. Bereft of any place to sit, he slumped against the wall.
How sentimental you have become, Lenoir. A week ago, you would not have bothered to visit this man at all. Now you fret over his circulation.
He was not really sure why he had come. To pass the time, he supposed, until darkness fell. It was better than being alone. Kody was alone too; his parents no longer lived in Kennian, and his fellow hounds were out scouring the streets for his attacker. Lenoir could have pointed them in the right direction, but Zera would certainly have fled by the time they arrived, and he could not risk unleashing hordes of incompetent hounds on his crime scene. They would only destroy whatever clues might remain. Better to wait for Vincent, who was more useful than any backup the Metropolitan Police Department had to offer.
He would not have long to wait. The afternoon was waning fast. The days were growing short, and darkness would drop swiftly from the sky like a hawk diving for its prey. He should be looking forward to dusk, to Vincent’s arrival. In spite of his miserable failure with the duke, he had tangible progress to report. He should be thrilled to have stumbled across such an important lead. It was providence itself, a life preserver in a heaving sea, thrown to his grasping arms in the final moments before drowning. But he could not find it in himself to be grateful for it. Instead he felt more alone than ever before.
“Why should I care, Kody?” he asked aloud. “What was she to me, or I to her?”
The man on the bed did not stir.
“I confided little in her, and she still less in me. I was just another patron in her salon.” Yet they had been kindred spirits, if not exactly friends, keen students of human nature who perceived the world around them with uncommon clarity. They saw the hidden gears and levers that powered the machine of society. Even more significantly, they understood each other, a rare and precious bond for two people who were not accustomed to being understood. Close or not, Zera had known Lenoir better than anyone else in the Five Villages. That she should be involved in the only crime he had cared about in a decade was a bitter twist of fate.