I pressed a hand over my eyes, trying and failing to think. I heard him start to ask another question, and threw up my other hand to silence him. “Just… Just stop. Wait. You had the box?”
He nodded. “Mr. Stoke gave it to me for safekeeping.”
Slowly, I sat back down. Mr. Stokehadfled with the artifact. Hehadleft me to face Mr. Wake alone, even after Mr. Wake attacked him and ransacked the office.
He had abandoned me.
The hurt of that met with the reality of Mr. Stoke’s death in a blinding wave of emotion. I was unseated, unmoored, lost to the maelstrom. There were excuses in that tumult, frail hopes and explanations that tried and failed to soften the blow.
“I sent Mr. Wake to you because I hoped you might be a match for him. He is a Silver, too,” I heard myself explaining, though I neglected to note just how powerful I suspected Wake was. I was trying to excuse my actions, not dig my grave deeper. “I was in desperation for my life and… I am sorry. I did not know you had the box. When did Mr. Stoke give it to you?”
“I’m flattered you thought me his match.” Harden was still watching me, but with more concern now. “Mr. Stoke left it at the mirror shop, hidden behind the counter. I found it soonafter our last meeting. I didn’t see Stoke, so I can’t rightly say when he left it.”
“Was there a note?”
Harden nodded. “No explanation, though. Just asked me to hold the thing, and I would be well compensated.”
“Yet when Mr. Wake showed up, you handed it right over?” I clarified.
“Of course I did. Stoke is dead, that was all over the papers. And you had vanished. Why not trade some old wooden box for your life? Didn’t turn out quite so simple, but I found you in time.”
I opened my mouth to ask something further, but no words presented themselves. Instead, I lost myself in my own head for a long, long moment.
I came out of my fugue when Harden took my hand. He peeled it off my chest, where I had unconsciously clamped an arm across my ribs, as if trying to hold myself together.
He folded my hand between both of his, warm and comforting.
“Ottilie, it’s time you tell me everything,” he said.
I drank in his touch. It was an anchor I wanted to cling to desperately. It was a direct path to my innermost fears and I had never been more grateful for a gesture.
Perhaps it made me short-sighted. Perhaps it proved me fickle, even when Lewis’s shadow loomed. But Harden’s expression was one of patience and a protective kind of trepidation, and his grasp was firm.
“The day after you gave us the box, Mr. Stoke sent me home early,” I told him. “He informed me he would take a holiday, and would not need me for some time. But he would leave my pay from Stillwell in the safe.
“The next morning I came to retrieve it, but Mr. Wake was there. He said he was Stillwell’s man, and that Mr. Stoke had failed to deliver the artifact and vanished. He demanded that I help him find Mr. Stoke. So I started looking. That night we crossed paths? That’s what I was doing, out so late.”
Thoughts passed behind Harden’s eyes but he did not interrupt.
“I had no idea Mr. Stoke took the artifact with him,” I said, numb. “I thought someone else had and we were both under threat because of them.”
“Stoke didn’t strike me as that kind of man,” Harden murmured. He watched something transpire across the room, half-focused. “To off with the artifact and leave you high and dry.”
“Nor I,” I admitted. “But there are… other factors.”
He returned his attention to me. “Like Wakenotbeing Stillwell’s man? Some shock I had, when I trailed him right to Baffin’s own house.”
The flow of my honesty slowed then, and I searched myself. Just how much could I disclose? How much did I trust Harden?
I was not sure of the answer, despite the way his touch calmed and steadied me.
So I did not tell him of Pretoria or my time at Golden House. Instead, I focused on my time with Baffin, recounting the trunk and the conversation I had overheard between Baffin and his aide, of allowing the Zealots to kill me in order to provoke the Guild.
“Baffin succeeded, in that,” I concluded. “The Guild did intervene.”
Harden nodded, noncommittal and distracted. “A box,” he muttered. “He put you in a fucking box.”
“I was not the first.” I recalled all the memories I had pulled off the wood. “Not by far.”
