“From me, nothing. Truthfully.” Jade lifted her eyebrows in sincerity, hoping to convey the sentiment in her tone of voice as well. “He called me into his office the day after I went to the Carsill estate to tell me Lord Arthur had been found dead. I was prepared to give an excuse for my absence, if necessary, but it never came up. The murder had preoccupied him. And I kept what I found out to myself.”
Nicolas said nothing for a moment, his arms still loosely folded over his chest as he watched Jade, apparently waiting for her to continue. “Which was...?”
Dipping her fingers into the pocket at her hip, Jade pulled out the crinkled piece of paper she had taken from Arthur’s study—the note from Grannam. Arthur’s letter to Arabella remained hidden away. Whether or not she would share that one with Nicolas she had yet to determine.
She extended the letter to him, and Nicolas let his arms fall as he stepped forward, retrieving the paper from her grasp. He perused it quickly, then he met her eyes and lifted it slightly into the air. “Where was this?”
Jade stepped two paces toward him. She didn’t know why, exactly, except she felt like she should. “In Lord Arthur’s study, open on a chair. He’d probably been sitting there reading it when he consumed the drink with rienevoir that killed him.”
Nicolas folded the letter and set it on the table beside him, taking his own slow step closer to Jade. “Tell me what happened while you were there.”
Jade dove into a summarized recount of the events of the night, but when she mentioned her encounter with the assassin on the roof, Nicolas interrupted her.
“You chased down the murderer responsible for all of these deaths?”
“I had to,” she responded with a furrow of her brow. “If I can stop him or track him down to his source, the greater chances there are that no one else will die. And if I can tie him back to Grannam, that’s even better.”
Nicolas closed the remaining space between them, and Jade was forced to tilt her head back to look up at him. He craned his neck over her, a sense of worry pouring out of his fathomless brown eyes.
“You could have been hurt,” he murmured, his entire demeanor shifting from the stern, no-nonsense informant he’d been moments before. He lifted a hand and brushed his thumb against her cheek. “You could have been killed.”
Jade’s first instinct was to pull away, to back up and extricate herself from his touch. But she didn’t. Her feet remained planted where they were.
She cleared her throat. “I can handle myself. The dangers of my job aren’t foreign to me.”
Nicolas’s hand fell, but he didn’t move away from her. “While that’s true, you shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.”
Jade opened her mouth to speak, but the words in her mind turned sour on her tongue. Who was he to tell her what to do? She made her own decisions. She always had. Commander Matherson trusted her enough to make those kinds of life-and-death calls, so why couldn’t Nicolas? He had provided her invaluable information and would hopefully help her bring an end to this conflict sooner rather than later, but did that mean she answered to him?
She’d already proven she would follow his commands, so perhaps it wasn’t as out of line as she had thought.
Then again, if Theo was the one saying these things to her, she would pay attention.
Theo . . .
Jade stepped away, finally leaving the inexplicable confines of nothing more than Nicolas’s proximity. Her head swam.
She walked past the sofa while hugging her abdomen. “Nothing I did was an unnecessary risk.”
She halted beyond the sofa, feigning interest in a soothing painting of the countryside on the far wall. She heard Nicolas’s slow trod approaching her, but she didn’t face him.
“What else happened?” he asked, the gentler tone vanishing as abruptly as it had appeared. “You made it to Arthur’s study, after all.”
Keeping her eyes fixed on the painting, Jade continued, making sure to skip over her injury. She wasn’t eager to inform Nicolas that she’dactuallygotten hurt. “Yes. I lost the killer, so I found a way inside the house and made it to Arthur’s study. He was...still alive when I got there. Seizing.” Jade’s eyes fell from the painting, staring at nothing as she recalled the scene in her mind’s eye. “It was too late for me to do anything. The poison had already taken effect.”
She didn’t need to look up to know Nicolas stood behind her, close but allowing her personal space this time.
“And that’s when you found the letter from the Duke of Evenshold?”
“Yes,” she answered, returning to the painting once again. “I didn’t want to be found with the body, so I couldn’t do a thorough search of the room. But I got what mattered most, it seems.”
Silence reigned over them, heavy and dense, filling every gap of space that separated them. Nicolas cut through it, coming shoulder to shoulder with her, eyes also fixed on the artwork.
“It was good work, Jade.” Though he had lowered his voice again, it was still authoritative. “This letter is physical evidence against Lord Grannam. It will help.”
Jade nodded, unsure what to say. She was acutely aware of every inch spanning the distance between them, lit with something akin to electricity. A current. A spark.
“I can ensure this information will get into the right hands. No need to bring it up with your commander and have it get bogged down with protocol.” Nicolas clasped his hands behind his back, his gaze—like hers—still straight ahead. “Grannam could become unpredictable. It’s hard to tell if he will seek any retaliation or try to finish whatever he already has planned.”
