Life was too short to not be spent in nursing animosities or registering wrongs: thus Miss Darlington had educated Cecilia, according to the ideals of the Wisteria Society. So Cecilia had spent the past several years planning for the moment she encountered her father. The speech she would give. The explanations she would demand from him. And the weapon she would introduce to his toxic heart.
Then she actually saw him, and all those careful, precious plans shattered like a teapot at his feet.
As she ran, she imagined what her mind had contemplated so coolly over the years—his body beneath her boots, his voice crying out and then breaking into breathless silence. She envisioned beating him, hanging him, throwing him out a high window while flying above a very pointy mountain. Violence swelled the muscles in her body and heated her breath. She liked its feeling. And yet, the thought of turningaround, going back, doing those things to him, made her want to cry like an anguished child.
When Ned caught her again, halfway along the portrait gallery, she spun about, raising her free hand to hit him. But he snatched her wrist and pulled her against him in a tight embrace.
“It’s all right,” he said. His voice was rough yet consoling.
Cecilia leaned against him. “I’m not returning to that room.”
“I know.”
He laid his chin on the top of her head, and she tucked her foot around his left ankle. “I’m serious, Ned,” she said, and twisted her foot. He stumbled, his grip easing; she kneed him in the stomach and stepped free.
“I appreciate your feelings,” he gasped, snatching the back of her skirt so she couldn’t run again. She fell forward, the sudden unexpected movement causing her skirt to rip from his fingers. Tucking her head beneath her, she rolled over her shoulders on the ground, jumped to her feet again, and was turning back to him with a tiny knife in her hand before he could blink.
“I don’t think you do,” she said. “I watched him kill my mother.”
She lunged with the knife and he sidestepped, grasping her arm and yanking her around. “And I watched him kill mine,” he said as the knife dropped to the ground. He kicked it away and in that tiny moment of distraction she ducked under his arm, twisting it and ramming her fist into his side.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
His breath burst. He pulled from her grip so hard she staggered, and catching her around the waist, he flipped her onto her back. “Thank you,” he said, straddling her hips.
“Were you very young?” Without waiting for a response, she grasped his thighs as leverage and slipped through his legs. Retrievingher knife, she scrambled up and, before he could fully turn around, leaped on his back.
“Thirteen,” he said, his voice constricted by her arm around his throat.
“I’ll kill him for both of us.” She wrapped her legs around his hips so she had more force for strangling him. He ran backward, slamming her against the wall. She groaned.
“That would involve returning to the breakfast room,” he said as her grip loosened and she slid to her feet. He turned, snatching her wrists, pinning them to the wall on either side of her head. The knife protruded helplessly from her fist. “And it would involve becoming just what he planned for you all along—a heartless replica of himself. He’d win, even as you stabbed him. No, I’ll kill him, and save you from being despoiled.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” she said, and brought her knee up sharply.
He blocked it with his thigh. Pressing against her, he wedged her tightly between himself and the wall. They stared at each other with bright eyes, their breath mingling, burning. He could feel her heart pound. She could feel something that was not his heart budging against her. The awareness of it clashed in their gaze.
“Your mother,” she said. “How did it happen?”
He blinked. A shadow slipped beneath his lashes and disappeared again. “Morvath stabbed her. She was a famous seer, she held séances, and every month he’d come to talk to the Brontës. When he found her secret table-knocking device, he murdered her right then and there. I wanted to fight him—”
“You were only a boy.”
“I was weak. I ran. It was Cilla who found me. I’ll never forget her striding out of the London fog in a long scarlet coat, with all that goldenhair and a gold-handled gun. She looked like the queen of pirates.” He gazed at Cecilia unfocusedly, seeing her mother instead. “When I told her I owed her my life, she made me repay it with a promise.”
Cecilia nodded. “It’s the pirate’s code. Never give something without a return.”
He smiled. The memory of Cilla’s ferocious beauty was vivid in his mind, as if he hadn’t gazed upon her insipid, sentimentalized portrait only the other day. She’d been so much more than paints could capture. He remembered, too, the way she’d hugged him, gentle yet fierce, while he wept in anguish. It was entirely different from how he held her daughter in this moment, eleven years later, a man now and strong in body and mind. He’d been awestruck by Cilla Bassingthwaite, but it was Cecilia’s coolness that paradoxically warmed him; her implacability that made him hot in dangerous places; her shadows, so deep beneath the still surface, that burned right through his heart.
He had made his promise to the mother, but he lived it for the incomparable daughter.
“We have to get out of this house,” he said.
“So you really are Captain Ned Smith.”
He grinned. “No. But I am an agent of the Crown. And I am on your side. Cilla bade me work to make the world a safe place for her child.” He paused, releasing one of her hands so he could draw a strand of hair from her brow. The gentle touch made her shiver. She laid her free hand against his cheek, but he caught it, pressed it instead against his heart.
“From that day, everything I’ve done has been for her. For you. I used money she gave me to become a pirate so I’d be strong and cunning. I took Lady Armitage’s contract so a real assassin did not. I endured Morvath’s poetry so as to know his plans and protect you from them. I thought surely he would recognize me, but he never did. I thought more than once I’d kill him, but he has always been too well defended.
