Page 67 of The Spy Who Loved Her
She knew by the dull flush of fury that rose into his cheeks that she had scored a minor victory. With one hand she wrenched the door open and sailed into the room, closing the door behind her and thereby putting paid to any further arguments he might have made.
“Em?” It was a hoarse croak—Kit’s voice.
Her stomach turned upon itself again at the sight that met her eyes. “My God,” she whispered in horror, wilting backward until only the solid wood of the door kept her standing. “What has happened to you?”
The question wasn’t truly in earnest. It was merely a reflex born of outrage, of fear, of revulsion. The answer was self-evident, scrawled in the tense lines of faces full of scrapes and bruises; Kit’s lower lip split, Rafe’s right eyeblackened and swollen. Beneath the table at which they sat, one of Kit’s knees was wrenched awkwardly to one side, as if he could not force himself to straighten it. Upon the surface of the table, the smallest two fingers of Rafe’s left hand were unnaturally bent, nails bloodied and skin marred with deep purple bruises.
Torture. This was why Kit had insisted she keep the journal’s location secret even from him. So that it could not be forced out of him.
What can I do?Emma pressed her palm to her mouth to stifle the horrible little sound that wanted to escape, unaware that she had spoken the words aloud until Rafe responded to them.
“There is nothing you can do.” The words were even, without inflection. A fact, and not even a sad one. Just a simple one, expressed as though he had grown indifferent to it. “There is nothing you can do, Emma. You should not have come.”
“How could I not?” Somehow she peeled herself from the door, her feet crossing the scant distance to the table. “All of London believes you to be traitors. Sir Roger has made certain of it.” Her hand found the back of the empty chair that had been set out for her there, and she sank down into it in a puff of lavender skirts. “He came to bargain for your release,” she admitted.
“No.” Rafe tried to rise, but the pressure of his injured fingers upon the surface of the table pained him enough to weaken his knees, and with a grimace and a foul word he sank back into his chair. “There are more important things than this,” he said, in a rough hiss through his teeth.
“He will hang you,” she whispered, and the reality of it, the certainty of it, sent a shiver careening down her spine. “He willhangyou, and I—I cannot stop it otherwise.”
But she had told them nothing new to them. Nothing they had not already understood. Nothing they had not already accepted as an inevitability.
“Em,” Kit said, and there was a telling gruffness in his voice. “You cannot stop it at all. It is a done thing. You cannot rely upon a man without honor to act with it. Whatever he has told you, you must assume it to be a lie.”
A keening sob rushed from her lungs, the words puncturing the very last tiny bubble of hope that had lived within her. Probably a part of her had known it, had suspected it to be only one more layer of deceit.
She had simply not been able to acknowledge, even to herself, that she had in all likelihood come here to say her farewells to the two men she had loved best in the world.
“Don’t, Em,” Kit said wearily. “You are going to have to be very braveand very strong. Bringing Sir Roger to justice is in your hands now.”
“What can I possibly do?” Emma said in a plaintive whisper. “I am hopelessly outmatched in this.” It wasn’t even a fair game. Sir Roger had made certain of it.
“A traitor within the Home Office could wreak untold damage. At all costs, you must keep the journal from him.” Kit said, and he lifted his hand to swipe away a smear of blood that had begun to drip from his split lip. “You’re cleverer than you know. I have every faith that you will decipher it. And when you do, you must reveal him for what he is.”
“That could take months,” Emma said, with a wild little gesticulation of her hands. “Years!”
“Yes.” It was a grim acknowledgment, rife with the certainty that he would not be around to see it. That he would die a traitor’s death, and that vindication might be a distant thing indeed, if it ever arrived. “I am so sorry, Em, to leave you alone.”
“Don’t say that.” Burning tears gathered in her eyes, turning the edges of her vision blurry. “Please don’t say such things.”
“I will not have another opportunity,” he said. “I must say them now, while I can. Christ, Em, I wish—I wish I had been a better brother to you.”
Had been. Because now—now he never would be. Any potential the future might have held had been snatched away from both of them. She reached across the table, her trembling fingers seizing upon his own. They were cold within the clasp of hers, as if the grave had half-swallowed him already. He squeezed her fingers in his, and it felt like a last embrace before a walk to the gallows. And then, casting a surly look to his left, Kit snarled, “Damn it all, Rafe.Saysomething.”
Emma startled at the fierce insistence in Kit’s voice, her gaze jerking toward Rafe, who had had little enough to say thus far. But then, the last words she had spoken to him had been bitter ones. Reproachful ones.
He recalled them still. For the fraction of a second he allowed his eyes to meet hers, she could see it there within them. And then his gaze dropped away, as if he had not the right even to look upon her. Like he thought himself a lowly thing, both villain and vermin, unworthy of even the smallest shred of her notice.
That was shame there, in the muscle that flexed in his jaw. Guilt in the bend of his head, the slump of his shoulders. Perhaps it had been there all along, only she had been too hurt to see it. But now, at the end of his life, when he had been beaten—broken—she saw himat last.
Shesawhim. Not the second son, the spy, but Rafe. Just Rafe. The man she had loved. The man he had always been. The man who had borne every burden upon his strong shoulders to protect those weaker and more vulnerable than himself. A good man, akindman, so wracked with remorse that it had permeated every part of him. Humbled him, ever so much more than the beating he had received could have done.
Her voice cracked, trembled. The sharp splinters of it pierced her heart. “Rafe, I—”
“I beg you, do not waste your sympathy upon me,” Rafe said, and there was a wealth of exhaustion within his voice. He shoved himself to his feet once more, irrespective of the pain it must have caused him to brace his hands to the table. His gait was unsteady as he approached the door, his back turned upon her. But he paused just before it, his shoulders dropping. A queer, rough sound rumbled up from his throat. “Don’t come,” he said thickly. “When they hang us, I mean to say. Don’t come. I don’t want you there.”
And then he kicked the door with the toe of his boot. A moment later, Sir Roger threw it open and dragged him out—and he was gone.
For the last time.
