Page 77 of Hazard a Guest
They sat with that for a moment, the air pulled taut between them.
“You won’t get the money back,” she said softly. “They don’t have it to pay you. I’m afraid it’s gone. But, from what I understand, you had plenty of my debt alongside it. You aren’t completely flush. You just can’t drive me from my own doorstep anymore.”
“No, it seems I can’t,” he agreed, almost politely. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“I suppose you do.”
He scooted back a little, not to get away from her, she realized, but to get a better look at her, to regard her with those dark eyes.
She could see the boy in him now. She could see that dirty flophat and the threadbare trousers, could see the coins he held in his too-big hands, scarred up even back then, even when he was little more than a child.
“Teddy,” he said suddenly, almost startling her. “Or Tod. People call me both. No one uses Thaddeus.”
“No? That’s a shame,” she replied. “It’s the only name I’ve ever heard half as big as you are.”
His eyes widened; perhaps he was shocked by her gall or perhaps he agreed or perhaps he didn’t. It was impossible to say.
“You tried to talk to me,” she acknowledged. “More than once. You weren’t as … weren’t as verbose as you ought to have been, but I probably also didn’t sit down and give you the chance. We did this to ourselves, Teddy. So let’s do better now that it’s all gone completely to hell, hm?”
She fished past Millie’s letter, her fingers closing over the smoothed edges of the playing card she’d put there, all the way in the back.
She pulled it out, the Ace of Hearts, and held it out to him.
“What’s that?” he asked, still very clearly unsettled. “A card?”
“It’s Mr. Withers,” she said, laughing at her own absurdity. “It’s … it’s a card from the deck he taught me to cheat with. His card. Yours. I want you to have it.”
He reached up, his hand giving one single uncertain twitch. He wanted to take it. He didn’t. “Why would you give me that?”
She sighed. “Because we’re the same, fool,” she said. “And we should do what good gamblers do. We should play the hand we’ve been dealt. Don’t you think so too? I couldn’t figure out why you wanted to buy me out so badly, you know. Gambling hells are a kind of … a kind of biology. Each den in a chain supporting the other, a rotunda for vice, a feeding loop. The more there are on a stretch, the more people fall into them, the more they graze, pasture to pasture.”
She flicked the card into his lap, not willing to let him refuse it. She felt a thrum of satisfaction when he caught it under those thick, scar-streaked, impeccably manicured fingertips.
“You wanted a second club,” she reminded him. “A sibling for your Vixen. You wanted the Forge. You can’t have her.”
“I … yes, I think that’s been made perfectly clear,” he returned, bafflement battling irritation in his tone.
“But there’s an empty lot,” she continued, closing the folio, drawing it into her chest, “one I couldn’t afford all on my own, between the Vixen and the Forge. A place with potential and no funding. Like I was once upon a time. Like you were.”
He continued to stare, continued to waver between all the emotions she hadn’t known him capable.
“Think about it, Teddy,” she said, standing. “You know where to find me.”
CHAPTER 27
There had never been a man better suited to creating a distraction than Freddy Hightower.
Joe hadn’t performed much in the way of help, truth be told. Once Freddy was told to get anyone who might cause trouble out of the way, he’d sprung into action like he’d been born to it.
He didn’t know exactly how it had started, but the outcome was as undeniable as the grit in Joe’s boots. Half the damned house was now free of its walls, having wound down the twisting path from Blackcove proper to the shoreline access.
They trailed along in the wake of Lord Penrose, who was excitably gesturing and pontificating on his family’s history, pointing to islets (allegedly) in the distance, identifying (and misidentifying) colorful mollusks underfoot, and promising them all grandeur and dazzlement once they reached the cove that had made his ancestor a (reported) legend.
“That’s actually a periwinkle,” Freddy would mumble now and then. “Whelk,” he’d whisper. “Cowrie.” And then he’d return to his wide smile and eager egging-on of the esteemed baron.
Meanwhile, little Hannah Lazarus was wearing a heavy winter gown that was clearly getting more and more sodden by the step.
“Did I encourage this?” she asked Joe at one point, squinting up at him against the already setting winter sun. “That couldn’t have been me. I’ve never been the stupid one.”
