Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

He didn’t answer her.

For what the Merchant had done to his mother, he would die. Bare hands, gun, knife. It didn’t matter so long as the Merchant lay dead on the ground at his feet. This time, he’d be sure the job was done right.

“‘It is better to be the rider of a great hatred than to be the one ridden.’ My family says that and I share it with you. They have a great many wise sayings.” She let her hand drop to her side. “The meeting place is the last important thing I know. The only secret I’m withholding. If I tell you where and when the meeting is, will you let me go free?”

“No.”

“I see.” She closed her eyes and put her forehead down on the cloak where it covered her knees. She sat that way, breathing quietly, her eyes closed. When she spoke again, it was in the most ordinary tones and her voice was muffled against her cloak. “If I don’t walk down a certain street, on a certain day, at a certain hour, Smith will turn into smoke and blow away. You’ll lose him.”

“Tell me the meeting place.”

She looked up to study the straw and floorboards in front of her. “My head is so full of secrets it rattles when I walk. Your Service will lock me up like the Crown Jewels. They’ll send a substitute to that rendezvous or try to ambush Smith on the street. And it won’t work.” She met his eyes. “You have to let me go so I can meet Mr. Smith.”

“So you can pursue some private exchange with him.”

“If you let me go, you can make sure he dies. You, yourself. There will be no political bargaining that trades a French spy for an English one. No imprisonment he can escape from. No bribes that open doors for him. If you let me go, here and now, I will give you his death, into your own hands.”

“You’ve found a way to tempt me.” Wise little Vérité, with her pithy sayings, had most certainly grown up. She’d emerged as Cami, with a cynical, supremely clever understanding of her fellow man.

She said, “If you take me to Meeks Street, your superiors will tell the Foreign Office and Military Intelligence. The Police Secrète will know within a day. Military Intelligence is riddled with French spies. Maybe the Service is.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know two French spies placed right in the heart of the Service.” She grinned suddenly, a wry, feral twist of the lips, and he saw the old Vérité again, inside this new Camille. “We were good, weren’t we? Except, I never spied. I committed a thousand lies, in every way, right and left, but I swear I never passed code to the French.”

“I believe you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay for all the spying I didn’t do. If the Service doesn’t kill me—regretfully and humanely, the way you’d put down a good dog—they’ll keep me locked up till my secrets cool. Years and years. Unless the French dispose of me. Unless Military Intelligence gets me, which they will, because my crimes fall within their authority. Then I am dead.” She reached her hand out from under the brown wool and laid it on his arm and watched it there, as if she wasn’t sure what it might do. “Do you remember what we swore, all those years ago, in Paris, in the Coach House? The Oath of the Cachés?”

“Childish drama.”

“Your idea. Your words.”

“I was dramatic in those days.”

When he’d come to the Coach House, the Cachés were preying on each other. The strong ones took food and blankets from the weak.

He’d put a stop to it. He wasn’t the biggest. He wasn’t even the best fighter. But he was used to getting hurt and he had nothing to lose. He fought with a ferocity none of them could match. In a week, he had most of them behind him. In a month, he had them all.

The Oath of the Cachés turned a dozen vicious, broken children into a wolf pack, faced outward against the world. “I made that up because we needed something to believe in. We needed magic.”

She recited softly, “‘To the last extremity, I will never betray another Caché. We are one blood.’” She said it in French, the way they’d said it, crouched in a circle on the floor of that cold attic dormitory.

He hadn’t thought about the words in a long time.

She said, “So far as I know, none of us broke the oath. Will you give me to the British Service?”

“I have an oath there, too.”

“I’m no danger to England. I swear it. I’ll come to the meeting place with you. I’ll be the bait in your trap. I’ll give you Smith’s head on a platter.” Her fingers tightened. “But don’t give me to the Service. Let me go. I’m asking for my life, Pax.”

She said, “I’m asking for my life, Pax.”

She called him Pax, the name of the man he’d become.

He loosened the grip of her fingers but kept hold of her hand. When he turned it over, there were shadows in the hollow of her palm as if she held darkness there.

She was the one to speak. “We were friends once. I would have trusted you with my life. You would have trusted me.”

“Not recently.” But she’d picked the right argument. It was unsettling how well she understood him and he understood her. In the long, lying years in the Service, he’d missed having someone to talk to.

He’d already decided what he’d do.

On her palm the lines of fate and fortune were strongly marked, but imperceptible to his fingers. The tendons under the skin were invisible, but he could feel them with the lightest pressure. So many differences between seeing a woman and touching her.

Vérité knew what he’d been and what he was capable of. She’d seen him curled on the ground, shaking, exhausted, and beaten. She’d seen him commit murder. She’s the one woman I don’t have to lie to.

He didn’t so much make a decision as accept an inevitability. He might have been waiting ten years to sit across from Vérité in this pile of straw, talking about friendship and trust, the two of them a bare inch from attacking each other. He knew what he was going to do. Some part of him had planned it before he climbed in the window of Braid’s Bookshop. He said, “I can say anything to you.”

“You’re armed and I’m not. You can recite Dante in the original Italian if you want.”

That made him smile. “Or I can do this.” He kissed the hollow of her hand. Maybe it tickled.

She drew in a breath, sharply. He had her attention.

She said, “Pax?”

The inside of her wrist was filled with the pulse beat. He ran a touch up and down the side of her fingers, between one finger and the next, where it was soft. Sensitive, he thought. She’d be sensitive in lots of places.

“What are you doing?” She frowned down to where he explored her hand.

“This.”

They knelt in the straw, facing. He set two fingers under her chin, lifted her attention up to him, and considered the woman who’d grown from the child Vérité. A tilted nose. Raphael would have put that nose on an impudent cherub. Dark eyes making some realizations. The curve of her cheek that held the sensuality of a Caravaggio.

She looked startled all the long moment he leaned to her and convinced her lips open with his and went into her mouth.

“And this,” he said. He felt her surprise. Her lips were full of tiny shocks and a disbelief that held her still, and then the softening. He pursued that softening, demanded it, gave neither of them time to think or plan. He wasn’t in the mood to trade calculation with her.

“Now this.” He nuzzled across warm smoothness of cheek and forehead and the planes and valleys of her nose. Into the silly, frivolous ears lost in the ocean of her hair. He’d drawn the geography of a face a thousand times. This transformed shape, line, light and dark, all shades of color into texture. It overwhelmed thought.

He sucked her lower lip. Softness and slickness. She was . . . oh, she was remarkable. A thousand distinct complexities of her mouth came to life under his tongue. This is the way it should feel. Every discovery of shape and taste robbed his brain, tugged at his cock, wound the tension inside him tighter and tighter.

After the first surprise, she wasn’t reluctant. She licked into his mouth. Nibbled at the corners of his lips where the skin went thin. Little teeth held his lips, anchoring an instant, stretching, pulling, letting go.

She grabbed her fingers into his jacket. Stretched upward to him. Kneeling, pressed against him. Her mouth became passion incarnate. She was heat and quick breathing and her arms went around him. Under the wool she wore, her shoulders were naked. He pushed the cloak away and put his hands on her and felt her thin bones shaking. Vérité, the great schemer who planned everything, wasn’t scheming this.

He drew back. She was breathing fast, lips slack, eyes open but empty of thought.

He wondered if he looked like that. Stunned.

Awareness crept back into her gaze. He saw the absolute puzzlement, the amazement. Then she blinked and laughter welled up everywhere inside her till it spilled out into the dim air of the storeroom. Deep, husky laughing. That was pure and simple Vérité. Her unquenchable delight in all of creation.

She said, “Why did we do that?”

Because I wanted to. You wanted to. Because I’ve made my choice of betrayals. “You tell me.”

“Are we seducing information out of each other?”

“If we had all night, maybe. But we don’t. We’ll do that next time.” He got up to standing, clumsy about it. Aroused. Vulnerable to attack and knowing that he was. The brush of his trousers across his cock struck like hot lightning. “Think about this. Whatever I am, whatever I’ve done, you know I wouldn’t kiss somebody I was about to turn over to the Service.”