Page 70 of The Light Within

Cinn immediately darted his eyes across the landscape.

Elliot elbowed him in the ribs. “Stop that!”

Cinn glowered at him. Elliot was the one practically shouting in his loud American accent.

“Three o’clock. Sitting in the pavilion. They’re being careful, but they’re glancing through the gaps.”

Far more casually now, Cinn turned his head as if interested in a passing bird’s path. He caught the person Elliot meant. They didn’t look particularly suspicious, but he trusted Elliot’s judgement. And the more he observed the person, the more evident it became that Elliotwascorrect—the figure kept darting their head towards them. The angle made it hard to make them out, but they were tall, almost certainly male, with very dark hair.

“Hey!” shouted Elliot, abruptly shifting gears and heading towards the wooden structure. So much for being subtle. “You alright there?”

The person’s head whipped away from the pavilion’s wall, their darkly dressed form slipping out the other side, where they could easily disappear out of sight down the side of a building.

Elliot came to a halt, grunting in annoyance. “I really didn’t like the feel of that.”

That felt a little extreme. The guy was only peeking through some wood. “Maybe they’re shy,” suggested Cinn.

They continued on, Cinn’s path soon diverging from Elliot’s, to take him to the Ebony Tower. He forwent the so-called elevators for the thigh-aching staircases. He fancied his breakfast should stay in his stomach, thank you very much. The tower was almost deserted—its usual traffic not having picked up yet from the holidays.

Noir had his silver pipe lit already as Cinn took a seat opposite him, taking one of the twin armchairs in the corner of his cluttered office. His wild grey hair and thick beard looked even more unkempt than usual, though the black cloak-like coat he wore was unwrinkled.

Usually the old codger initiated their conversations, but today Noir only nodded, taking a contemplative puff from his pipe.

“Umm… good Christmas?” asked Cinn at last.

“It was certainly a lot quieter than yours,” Noir said, then chuckled warmly. “I must say, I’ve never seen Eleanor Sinclair quite so fired up as when she was talking about Westminster Bridge the other day. I think you added a couple hundred more grey hairs.”

If only he could tell Noir about Béatrice. About her climbing into his shadow, about the raw power he’d felt on the bridge, holding his own against the umbraphage at last. He would bet Noir would have several thoughts on the matter.

But, alas, Noir had betrayed his trust, and it was a very different conversation that needed to happen today.

When Cinn had rehearsed this moment in his head last night, he’d imagined himself stony-faced, furious, giving Noir a good piece of his mind.

Instead, now he was sitting with the man, watching the smoke curl lazily from Noir’s pipe, he found he really didn’t have the energy or the inclination. He’d simply lay down his cards.

He cleared his throat. Looked Noir in the eye. Made his tone as level as possible.

“In London, I met up with my mum for the first time in a decade. We talked about my dad. She told me about some things that happened back then, stuff she put down to mental issues. Then she said she got a call after he died, from a foreign number. Was that Auri? Did my dad come here after he left her?”

Cinn could only hope he’d worded all that in a way where it wasn’t obvious they’d obtained Eleanor’s stash of secret files. What Cinn had failed to do, however, plain to his own ears, was keep the disappointment out of his voice. In a way, Cinn had grown quite fond of Noir during their sessions together. There was no denying it—to learn that Noir had kept this from him hurt.

Noir took a long, slow draw from his pipe, exhaling thoughtfully before he spoke. “Yes, your father came here.”

Cinn stared at him. Was that really all Noir was going to say? “And… you didn’t think I might have wanted to know that?”

“It wasn’t my decision to withhold that from you.”

Cinn didn’t bother to ask if it was Eleanor’s. Frankly, he didn’t care. “Why?” he shot back.

The man sighed, running wrinkled hands through his scraggly beard. “By the time your father came here, he’d gone quite mad. Some would say he was haunted by his frequent encounters with the shadowrealm, which were far more numerous than yours ever were. You described a visit a month perhaps, but his plight was a daily occurrence.”

The way Noir was speaking about him…

“Didyoumeet him?”

Another sigh. “Ah, Nikolas Mavros. Yes, I met your father, Cinn. He was a kind man. But as I said, extremely troubled by the time we became aware of him.”

“So you’ve lied to me this whole time,” Cinn stated, flat-toned.

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