Roland’s eyes had a wide, incredulous impatience to them, moving between the trio assembled before him like they had come simply to destroy his peace.
“Roland, I should be very distressed if it festers,” Aristotle added, giving his son a meaningful pout.
“Fine,” he decided, tossing his hands up. He turned his head to Mae and jerked it behind him toward the bannister. “Upstairs.”
“Oh, good,” said Aristotle, clapping his hands together. “I can show Sybil my new carpets while you tinker. Come along, Sybil.”
Mae found herself following Roland, silent and a bit chastened as he stomped his way back up the stairs, his brown jacket hanging over his arm. He did not speak, turning once down the hall into a study and gesturing sarcastically for her to enter the room first.
She rubbed her hands over her skirt, aware that they were sweaty and the right one was still smeared with purple flower-petal juice. “I don’t have my kit,” she said softly.
He ignored her, tossing his jacket onto the back of the desk chair and pulling the tail of his shirt out of his waistband, then liftingthe shirt itself up over his ribs to display the cauterization—shiny and pink and perfectly healthy-looking.
She stared at it.
She did not stare at his navel.
“Well?” he said, after a moment. “Is it infected?”
She shook her head, trying not to whimper when he dropped the shirt back into place, covering all that freckled skin back under the tyranny of linen. She stood silently for a beat, staring still at his ribs, where the wound was, listening to the emptiness of the room.
“Why did you come here, Mae?” he asked, his voice dividing the quiet with a velvet edge.
She lifted a shoulder and dropped it, shaking her head. She felt herself blushing. “I don’t know,” she said. “You never came back.”
“I did,” he corrected, drawing her attention up to his face. “You just didn’t see me.”
It was enough to scatter the humility that had overtaken her, annoyance flaring up in her chest. “Oh?” she said, blinking. “You’ve been lurking about, then? Watching instead of speaking? Again?”
He gave her a wry twist of his lips. “Yes.”
She made a sound of disgust, throwing her hands up. “I’ll just go,” she said. “I don’t know why I came here, actually. You’re right. It makes no sense. You are never going to change.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, moving so fast that she barely had time to turn around, much less take a step toward the doorbefore he was standing in front of her, barring her way. “Not yet. You came here. You walked into my territory. You are going to hear me out.”
She came up short, almost colliding with his chest, gasping in outrage. “Roland!”
“Mae,” he replied, his eyes glowing that otherworldly turquoise. “I thought you wanted me to speak to you.”
She took a rapid step back, swallowing hard. “I thought I did too,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve changed my mind.”
He looked like he wanted to smile, though he also did not look even remotely amused. He folded his arms behind his back and leaned down until their faces were level, his hair tickling at his cheeks. “I can make you stay,” he said softly. “Do you want me to make you?”
“Don’t you bloody dare,” she replied through her teeth, sparing not a single thought to the way her heart sped up at the suggestion of it.
“I couldn’t come back to work,” he said, a self-satisfied smirk flickering briefly on his face as he straightened, “because I’ve been repeatedly requisitioned into other tasks by force. I’ve had to keep an eye on you in stolen moments and hard-won detours, and I haven’t been able, yet, to handle the dung-slinging students the way I intend to do.”
“Requisitioned,” she repeated, refusing to stumble or retreat. “By whom?”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “Have you, by chance, seen a tiny silver thimble floating about in your social doings? Flashes of it in the strangest of places?”
She blinked, a memory rising to her mind of Rosalind toying with one on her pinky finger the other day. “So what?”
He made a face. “It is a game. A dare totem. It is being passed around by Vix to torment and control me, specifically, because it amuses her. First to Tod, then to Hannah, who had me at the Flaming Fox for the better part of a week, stuffing envelopes to solicit donors for this year’s clinic fundraiser picnic at the church, and now to bloody Rosalind, who I thought above such things, who has called in a favor and put her brother’s investigative agency on the case of our woes at the clinic.”
“That sounds like it has very little to do with you,” Mae returned, raising her eyebrows.
He grimaced. “I came here to make a list of all the intelligence I’ve gathered about the student vandals and the attacks in the press because my father has a proper office for me to use. I was hoping that once I delivered this list, I could finally return to the clinic. I would have come back. You did not have to hunt me down like a rabid animal.”
