No, Sophia was thinking. You don’t understand. You don’t know what I was really going to do at the prison. What I thought René was going to help me do at the prison. Plans are in motion that cannot be undone.
Or were they? If they involved René, then perhaps those plans were never going to happen in the first place. Spear had a finger on her cheek now, sliding it down to beneath her chin.
“We’ll get Orla and Bellamy, take Jennifer to her parents, and then you and me and Tom, we’ll all go away together, maybe up west, or to one of the islands, somewhere they won’t bother to look for us.”
She closed her eyes. She could save Tom and Jennifer, but what about the rest of them? How would skulking off to the coast save two out of every three prisoners? Running wouldn’t break the pattern, and it wouldn’t take down LeBlanc.
“Don’t you think we could do that, Sophie?”
She was a burning thing, streaking fire and making thunder across the sky. The finger beneath her chin pushed upward, and Spear leaned down, touching his mouth to hers.
And she woke up. Sophia leapt away like a startled deer, the paper with René’s signature landing softly on the floor. “What are you doing?”
“Sophia. Sophie …” Spear reached for her hand, but she moved it away. He was being incredibly gentle, as if she were a wounded animal. Maybe she was. “This … thing with Hasard. It’s over now. It never was in the first place. You’re free of it.”
A bolt of white-hot pain shot through her middle, making her flinch. She had never wanted to be free of it. She wrapped her arms around her waist.
“And now that you’re free, we can …” He hesitated, and her eyes snapped wide.
“We can what, Spear?”
“We can … be together.”
Sophia felt her mouth open slightly. “Do you really think …” She breathed, searching for her words. “Do you really think that because I have been betrayed, been a fool, been the biggest arse the Bellamy family has ever seen, that because of all that I’m going to suddenly fall into your arms?”
Spear leaned forward from where he sat on the edge of the bed, fists clenched.
“Spear, I don’t love you.”
It was silent in the bedroom, and then all at once Spear exploded, jumping to his feet and kicking the table where she had been forging the passes to the floor. Sophia shrank back.
“Why?” he yelled. “Why the bloody not?”
Sophia watched him, hand hovering near the sword she had strapped to her leg. She’d beaten Tom in a fight, but she had never beaten Spear. She didn’t want to try now. But when he just stood there, waiting, hands hanging loose at his sides, she went to him and put a hand on his heaving chest.
“What I said just then wasn’t true. I do love you. I’ve loved you ever since I can remember. It’s always been Tom, and Father, and Orla, and you. No one else mattered. Just my family. And that is how I love you, Spear. Like my family. I don’t know why it’s different for you than for me. But you need to understand that it’s not going to change.”
She could feel the tension inside him, though whether fury or pain was dominant she could not say. Everything she felt was firmly under lock and key. She was like the firelighter now, moving toward the inevitable explosion, but until then, ticking on and on automatically.
“You’re going to have to let this go, Spear. And if I don’t do what is needed right now, Tom and Jennifer are walking to the scaffold at dawn. You know I’m right.”
Spear nodded slowly, his cool blue eyes staring at the floor.
“Then what I need is for you to get those passes to the gates. You know what to do after that, and what to do if we don’t come.”
He nodded again. Sophia left the passes on the bed, picked up the paper with René’s signature from the floor, and left Spear standing by the overturned table, shutting the bedroom door quietly behind her.
The corridor was a tunnel of dim, flickering shadows, only a few sconces lit. She stood still and dry-eyed, watching the light quiver. She hurt. In her chest, in her fingers, the backs of her legs, and behind her eyes. Every inch of her insides bruising and sore. But she knew this was nothing, nothing at all, compared to the pain and humiliation that awaited her when the ticking inside her reached its appointed time.
She took a step toward the water room, toward Jennifer and Tom, and then she paused, wavering like the candlelight. She was thinking of horrid masks and pale eyes and cemeteries full of the dead. Of the red-tipped feathers she had slipped into her bodice, and fighting in the streets, and the Razor, and LeBlanc’s hands. His bloody, bloody hands. Fire replaced her pain. The blessed heat of rage. She was still going to break him. Without René. Or Spear. But there was something to be done before she left.
She folded the paper that had changed everything, shoving it far down into her dress with the feathers, adjusted the dark hair on her head, and slapped her cheeks, once each in case they were drained of color. Then she turned and walked fast down the hall, opening the door onto the gallery and her engagement party, a reckless smile on her face. She needed to see LeBlanc.
And as she was entering the gallery, Benoit slipped out of Madame Hasard’s door. He went fast down the hall, away from the gallery, a crease in his forehead. He needed to find René.
Sophia came down the stairs, blinking in the dazzle after the dim. René’s criminal friends were very cordial, and she smiled back at them, as if she were happy and brilliant and not a walking firestorm. She spotted her quarry—a black-as-death billowing robe and a streak of white hair—held up her skirts, and made her way through the crowd; she’d forgotten her fan somewhere.
“Monsieur LeBlanc,” she said.
His eyes were nearly slits when they turned to her. “Mademoiselle Bellamy,” he said softly. He reached for her hand, and she immediately offered him the other one. She’d forgotten she was wearing his signet ring, now hidden in the clutched fabric of her silver-gray skirt. Some part of her realized she was out of control, and that Tom and Jennifer were depending on her not being so. But she also didn’t seem to be able to help it. LeBlanc’s lips were cold evil on her free hand. “Allow me to introduce Amber,” he said, “my … friend for the night.”
Amber curtsied awkwardly, not looking up from beneath the hanging front curls. She was even younger than she had looked from across the room. Sophia saw Émile over to her left, inching just a little closer. Too bad, Émile, she thought. The ring is on my finger, and this dress does not have a pocket.
“What a pleasure it is to finally have you in the City of Light, Mademoiselle,” LeBlanc was saying. “Now that you are here, I think that you will never leave it.”
Sophia kept her face pleasant.
“It must be agreeable to your brother,” he added, “to finally take credit for all his deeds. Do you not think that it must be very relieving, to give credit where credit is due?”
Amber raised her head a bit at this, but Sophia just stared back into LeBlanc’s pale eyes. It was true, then. He did know she was the Red Rook. Of course he did. How could he not? She could hear René’s laugh somewhere near. She smiled.
“What a strange thought, Monsieur. But I can honestly say that as long as the goal is met, I do not mind in the slightest if no one knows what I am up to. Or if they do.”
LeBlanc’s slow smile curled, and she matched it. He would be in a million tiny slivers by the dawn, and so would his prison. She glanced past his shoulder and saw René, his arm around a rather lovely young woman in a blond wig. Lies, lies, and lies, served up with more lies. Promises whispered in her ear, arms around her on the roof and just that middlesun, in this very room. I had thought of you living here someday. With me.