She wondered how many timesshe’dsaid that word in her sleep when she was small. For a mother long lost. Into a dark room, with no one to hear her.
And fatigue was a weight on her, but a sort of peaceful release, like a fever breaking, and she kept her eyes open and she watched him.
Chapter Ten
Consciousness seeped in a bit the way a high tide gradually fills a dark cave.
It began with an awareness of a burning itch below his ribs. Perhaps the fires of hell already getting to work licking at him for eternity.
But tenderly cradling his head was a cloud.
No. It was a pillow.
Why would he be given a pillow in hell?
He fought to the surface, but tendrils of memory snagged him in the shallows of consciousness. Screaming. There had been so much screaming of glass-shattering caliber. The treble of women’s voices, the bass voices of men speaking in clipped military cadences. He knew those kinds of voices. Who were they? Were they real? Were they fever fragments, fashioned of his own memories, the way dreams were?
Then later . . . oh, there had been a voice of such tenderness and beauty, and it had sifted down over his senses through the nasty vise of the fever, penetrating a sleep teeming with shadows and terrifying images, and the voice had buoyed him like feather down. Perhaps he had overheard angels haggling over his mortal soul. But he could have sworn a woman had spoken of boiled sweets, and staring atthroats, and a bastard. She had not screamed. That’s what she’d said. He remembered some of her sentences clearly.
Perhapshewas the bastard? It seemed a reasonable assumption.
He’d certainly been called one more than once.
He’d thought, but could not have said, please keep talking. Say anything at all. I’ll stay alive just to hear you speak.
He decided to inventory the rest of his body. Something cool and soft supported his back.
Which was bare.
Howmuchof him was bare?
And how had he gotten that way...?
And...whohad gotten him that way?
He moved his toes and shifted his legs. He was still wearing trousers, but they’d been pulled down to his hips. He wished he was naked, because the sheet beneath his back was smooth and cool and he realized it had been so long, so long, since he’d allowed himself to merely savor comfort.
He lifted his left arm, touched his fingers to it, testing to see whether he was still corporeal. His flesh sank beneath his fingertips. He was clammy, but he was made of flesh and bone, of a certainty.
And then he slid his hand down to his ribs and found the bandage.
His eyes snapped open as memory returned as a whole, in a rush.
The alley. The one between the livery stables and Lovell Street. By the docks. He’d followed the information given to him by the hack driver, and he’d walked down the narrow zigzagging street alongside the livery stables adjacent to Lovell Street.
Some bastard had lunged, stabbed, and vanished like smoke.
In fucking daylight, he’d done this.
If Hawkes hadn’t been fast—he should have been faster—if he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head as well as everywhere else, if he hadn’t twisted his body just so in time, the would-be assassin would have emerged with Hawkes’s liver on the tip of his knife and Hawkes would be a corpse in an alley.
He must have been followed from the Stevens Hotel.
But why?
His instinct told him that had naught to do with Lady Aurelie Capet, and everything to do with his visit to Harrigan. Brundage must already be in London, and he must have heard somehow that Hawkes had been to visit Harrigan. Perhaps he knew the account books were missing.
They were, at this moment, locked in his chest at the Stevens Hotel.
