Sophia James – A Night Of Secret Surrender (страница 11)

‘Who stays the same, Celeste? Who has that luxury in these times?’ His tone was as flat as her own. ‘Who taught you to use a knife?’

What, not who, she thought, and stood so that she could breathe more easily and so the hate that ran through her in waves of nausea did not spill out as words she could never take back.

‘We should sleep.’

He nodded and turned his face upwards, eyes shut against the moonlight. A strong face with the swell of the battering still around his eyes and mouth. She hoped this would not give him away when he left here, but then she thought if anyone might manage to escape, surely it would be him. She would leave as soon as she was sure he slumbered, slip into the shadows of Paris as she had always done, unencumbered, and disappear.

She wished she could stay, even as she sat there watching him, but there were things he could not know, things she dared not tell him.

Who stays the same in these times?

Once she might have thought goodness would win out over evil, that a just regime could easily shatter a corrupt one. That was only until the blacks and whites had all turned into greys and she had understood the true nature of what was left.

There was no one to help her now. She liked it that way. No recriminations. No honesty. Nothing that would make Major Summerley Shayborne look at her in disgust or pity, because nearly everyone who knew her secret was dead and she wanted to keep it that way.

* * *

He was worse by midnight and she knew beyond a doubt that she could not abandon him, his glassy eyes darker when contrasted against the red bloom in his cheeks.

‘You need to drink.’ His skin felt dry and hot, stretched close across his bones in that particular way of illness. Lighting a candle, she untied his neckcloth and loosened the fabric, an old scar she recognised there. He’d once told her his older brother had pushed him off the roof of a garden shed and he had hit the spikey branch of a lemon tree on the way down. Memories. They were both potent and impossible.

When he sipped wine from a bottle she’d opened, she encouraged him to take more for he needed to drink.

Her mind calculated the possibility of being run down here by Benet and his men. Guy had not known of this apartment and because she had seldom used the address she doubted anyone was watching the place. It might be a hideaway for a day or two, or a week if she were lucky. She pulled the thick velour curtains across the window, but did not dare to light the hearth. It was one of the ways she tracked people down, those hiding in an empty home they thought secure save for the telltale smoke curling into the sky above them. There were lots of secrets to be discovered from the rooftops of Paris and she did not intend her own to be one of them.

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