Dray reaches around my hip for the window latch and, tugging the handle, unlocks it.
The draught is instant—
And it’s freezing.
A shudder strikes me, violent.
I make to shimmy off the ledge.
Dray is an unmoveable statue, trapping me on the windowsill.
His smile is lazy around the unlit cigarette.
He reaches aside for the spine of an armchair, then draws off the blanket from the smooth leather.
He hands it to me.
I don’t hesitate.
I snatch the blanket and throw it around my shoulders, because there’s no point in trying to get away yet or fight him on this.
It’s not part of my game plan.
The article is.
At the thought of it, the reminder, a sudden surge of anxiety lurches through me.
Dray lights the cigarette, then swaps out the lighter for the tumbler. “I’m not going back on our deal.”
It takes me a moment—but then I realise, he’s just misunderstanding my unease.
I let him believe the fear is for him, not the article.
Turning my cheek to the soft touch of his mouth on the cigarette, the way he swaps it for the tumbler, a scotch that leaves the slightest of glistens on his lips, I look out the narrow gap of the window to the darkness beyond.
Can’t see anything.
Not the mountains, the clouds, the moon, nothing.
Just pure darkness out there.
“What do you think of James?”
I sip the burn of the scotch. “In what context?”
“An aide,” he says.
An aide, like Mr Younge and Mr Burns. A main assistant, a right-hand man.
But there’s a problem.
“Aides are always elite.”
The bloodlines matter that much.
Elites, even if they are gentry, understand the world, the things that have to be done, better than a made one ever can. They are raised in it, a loyalty that should extend to the aristos.
James was raised in an orphanage.
