Page 73 of Hazard a Guest
When he asked about Hannah Lazarus, noting her absence, Ember gave him a small, curving smile and said, “She won’t try to escape tonight. I trust her.”
Joe didn’t press for more. He suspected that if he had, he wouldn’t have gotten an answer anyway. He liked knowing that, actually, that Ember kept Hannah’s secrets in sacred hold. That she honored the trust given to her by others.
She’d tell him, he knew, if she ever needed help with it. Ember Donnelly just didn’t often need help, because she was capable and because she was good.
“I wrote out an order to arrest him, you know,” she confessed sometime after midnight. “I wrote out so many things. I walked down a lot of possible paths with my pen yesterday, some of them terribly vengeful and terribly satisfying too.”
“Is that right?” he asked, running individual coils of her hair through his fingertips, marveling at the softness and the spring.
She watched him, so close on a shared pillow, her golden eyes warm and soft in the candlelight. “It’s funny that you resisted my ultimate conclusions, Joe, because I wouldn’t have found them if not for you. I wouldn’t have considered stopping and listening and considering. I would have blazed ahead the instant my eyes touched the words on the page and never thought twice about it, even if all that was left in the end was char and ash.”
It had made something inside him hurt, but only sweetly. It had made him feel important.
She had told him once about his tendency to blush, that she liked knowing that someone like her could matter that much to someone like him. She’d said that without a single hint of irony, not knowing that the opposite was far more true and far more obvious to the world they lived in—the world they were going to make their own.
“I was acting like you,” she said sleepily, “and you were acting like me. Isn’t that something?”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It really is.”
Had he been thinking with passion instead of reason? He wondered at it as she drifted away, as her breathing steadied and her expression fell to peace. He hadn’t tried many cases on his own, but he’d managed a great deal of them under Silas Cain, and perhaps Ember had a point.
This was the fastest he had ever wanted to slam the cell door on a man. Perhaps it hadn’t only been justice. Perhaps it hadn’t been simply the straight lines of a barrister’s approach to right and wrong.
Perhaps it had been because Beck had tried to harm Ember, specifically. Perhaps that had been the inciting factor, the thing that had lit a much shorter fuse on Joe’s commitment to processes and nuance.
And perhaps that was well, he thought with wonder, because as much as he’d absorbed her fire and passion, she had absorbed something from him too, even if it was only the quiet, even if it was only the tendency to turn a thing over and over in his mind until it was worn smooth on all sides and easier to carry.
Nothing had combusted because they had found balance in one another’s company, even from across many shut doors in a cavernous house that did not belong to either of them.
The only belonging that mattered was to one another.
He had never belonged anywhere before. He had stood outside the Meeting in Shropshire. He had vanished in the Society throngs of London. He had been only a visitor in Lisbon. He was only a guest here at Blackcove.
He had accepted it. He had even liked knowing such a thing about himself, that he could adapt and become, that he could find peace in places like his narrow law office or the steady green embrace of his flat or amidst the noisy throng of the breakfast crowd. It made him feel safe, somehow, to not rely on a tether in the name of contentment.
He had simply never seen the power of a well-made tether.
Now that he’d found his, he would need to forever. He would hold his tether to Ember Donnelly for all the days of his life.
The thing that was truly miraculous, however, was that she would be holding it too. Even if it was stupid and reckless and awful, he thought with a quiet smile.
She loved him.
She’d said so.
And he loved her too. He always would.
Breakfast allowedthe chaos back in, but at least this time, they were both well-rested when they met it.
Ember, it seemed, had started to build a quiet company of feminine aid in the halls of Blackcove. Joe could only watch in fascinated admiration as she dispatched a plump blonde maid in one direction and Hannah Lazarus in another.
If there had been more women at this gathering, would her army have been larger?
And then, he realized with a jolt as both he and Freddy were sent on their own errands, itwaslarger, and it was not just women.
Ember Donnelly really was a general.
As though she’d heard the thought in his head, she parted from him from the breakfast table, saying, “I’ll find you after tea, my own. I need to go put on a new set of armor.”
