She shivered and laced her fingers with his. “How did you discover they were using this system to kill people?”
The answer didn’t come immediately, and when it arrived, it was unsatisfying. “By accident.”
She waited for more, but more was not forthcoming. Bernie’s complaint—I’ve had the darndest time persuading him to tell me things I need to know—replayed in her head.
“And? You’re the world’s worst storyteller, Hartgrave.”
“I’m glad you find this so entertaining,” he snapped, pulling his hand from hers, “but my darling Pandora, how badly do you want to know?”
She sucked in a breath, anger and shame battling for the upper hand. Shame won. He couldn’t have picked a better cautionary image than Pandora—who, contrary to popular opinion, made the world a worse place by opening a jar, not a box. Curiosity was a flaw they shared, she and Pandora. She’d been so focused on what had happened, she hadn’t given a thought to how it might make him feel to tell it.
Her grandfather didn’t want to talk about the war. Her Great-Aunt Dot didn’t want to talk about the day Great-Uncle Mike fell in the backyard, heart gone still. Grasping for details was cruel, especially when she could picture well enough what Hartgrave’s case entailed: the horror of stumbling onto a great injustice, feeling you had to do something, but at best being able merely to keep it at bay.
“Well?” Apparently his question had not been rhetorical.
“I don’t want to know that badly.” She swallowed over a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
He clambered off the bed, and for a second, she thought he would storm off. To sleep in her office, maybe. But he knelt on the floor between the beds, looking penitent instead of angry.
“I realize it must seem fascinating to you—almost like an adventure novel,” he said. “And I know, I definitely know, that I ought to make my life an open book to you. But Daggett—there’snothingI hate to talk about more than the Organization.”
She hugged him, feeling even guiltier. When they pulled apart, he sat back on his heels and said, “I’ll answer non-magical questions about my life. Assuming you’re interested.”
Did he think she was more attracted to the aura around him, literal as well as figurative, than to him alone? How wrong he was.
“I’m extremely interested,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”
“Mm. My grandfather raised me. If, that is, you’d call shouting interspersed with ignoring ‘raising.’ Half the appeal of an English university was getting far away from him.”
“What about your parents?”
“Dead.”
No wonder he disliked talking about his past. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
“How? Wait, you don’t have to tell me.”
He brushed his hand against hers, a there-and-gone bit of contact that nipped against her skin. “It’s all right. Auto accident, that’s how.”
A sudden, awful possibility occurred to her. “You don’t think ...”
“What?”
“They might have been convincers—”
To her surprise, he snorted. “And Kincaid came to get them? No, nothing so melodramatic. He doesn’t work that way. As far as I know, all the murders he’s committed—or ordered, more like—have been at the victim’s home, away from potential witnesses.”
She pressed back the inevitable questions. She wasn’t going to pry, darn it.
“Besides,” he added, “I was there.”
“What?” she gasped, the question popping out before she could stop it.
“I was seven, but I remember it well enough. My father was driving in a snowstorm, lost control of the car and crashed into a guardrail. Killed instantly—my mother, too. Had I been sitting anywhere but the left side of the back seat, I’d have been dead as well.”
“Oh,” she said in a horrified whisper. To have that happen at age seven—to be in the car, a helpless witness to his parents’ deaths ... She shuddered. “How could you bear it?”
