Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

She pulled a blanket over some of him. When she took the robe she wore up over her head, she didn’t have a stitch on underneath it. She got into bed and she was there with him, warm and soft, and she held him. She hadn’t said a word.

After a minute, he rolled over and pulled her in so they were facing—more than facing—so close there wasn’t any space at all. He grabbed handfuls of her hair and put his head down into it. His breath broke into chunks, cold and sharp, like ice, and fought its way in and out of his chest. There was no way anyone could tell his eyes were leaking.

A long while passed. Daisy stroked the back of his head and down his back. He hid his face in her hair and let himself shake. He could do that because this was Daisy. She knew him from the beginning, from before they joined Lazarus’s gang, back when they curled up together in corners and kept each other from freezing.

At last, she said, “So you won’t go back to your Frenchwoman. Your Justine.”

“No.”

“That’s the end of it, then.”

It wasn’t even the end. It was what came after the end. Not the cliff edge, but the sound you made when you hit the bottom.

“You want one of the girls?” Daisy said.

Damn. He hadn’t planned to snuffle, not even in front of Daisy. “I got—” He lifted himself up on his elbow so he could wipe his nose on his sleeve. “I got the prettiest girl in the house in bed with me already.”

“Do you want a girl to fuck?” she said.

Trust Daisy. Trust Daisy to know the right thing to say. “No.” He flopped back and looked up at the ceiling. “God, no.”

“I thought you might make an exception today.”

“Fucking’s the last thing I need, even if I’d do it here, which I don’t.”

“You want to get drunk? There’s gin in the cupboard. Or brandy.”

One last swipe of his arm across his face. “Not that, either.”

They lay side by side looking at the ceiling as if it might do something interesting. A nice enough piece of plasterwork. A central medallion with scrolls and wreaths looping around. When he bought the house, Daisy wanted to give this room to the best of her girls to impress the customers. He’d had to argue her into taking it for herself.

They’d come a long way from picking pockets on the street, him and Daisy, with Daisy being his stall, bumping into the pigeons to give him that opportune moment.

She filled up her room with little china dogs. Stupid things. Sometimes he brought one back from a mission. He’d been crossing the border once near Salzburg and the guards found one of those bloody dogs wrapped up in his shirts and about laughed themselves silly. Laughed so much they missed the papers hidden in the false bottom of the trunk.

Vienna had been a good operation. He and Justine had—

No point in remembering. He said, “It was her duty to put a bullet in me, her being French and all. I don’t blame her.”

“How nice for her.”

“She didn’t enjoy doing it. Give her that much.” It was a while before he could think of anything else worth saying. He said, “It hurts.”

“So I imagine.”

“Not this.” He tapped his chest where he had his handsome new bullet scar.

“I know.”

Funny how he couldn’t even laugh at the china dogs. Usually they cheered him right up. “And here’s Pax downstairs doing the same thing. Got himself involved with a woman who’ll turn into a cobra and bite him, given the least inducement.”

“Seems nice enough,” Daisy said.

“They do. Women like that. I was looking right at Justine when she shot me and I didn’t think she’d do it.”

“You still love her.”

“Hell, no.”

“Yes, you do. You used to be smarter than that.”

Him and Pax. Both stupid. “I’ll stop doing it pretty soon.” He rolled over on his stomach, being careful with his shoulder. If he broke it open, he’d start bleeding and ruin Daisy’s bedcovers. “So. Give me some advice, then. If you were French and mad as a rabid dog and wanted to blow up a bit of London, what would you pick?”

“He’s dead,” Jacques said. “I didn’t see the body, but I talked to men who had.”

The Merchant was silent for a long time, thinking. Then he said, “Édouard died at once? He said nothing?”

“The woman who owns a shop directly in front of where he died said he was dead when they pulled the horses away.”

“It was an accident?”

“I heard a dozen stories. He ran into the street. He was shot. He was stabbed. He was in a fight over a woman. He fought a German. He fought a Norwegian. He attacked a judge from Antwerp. He was a jewel thief carrying a fortune in rubies.” Jacques shrugged. “I could look at his body. The magistrate took it away.”

Sharply, “No. If there’s interest in the death, you may already have been noted.”

“I was one of a hundred curious fools looking at bloodstains. I listened. I let other men ask questions.”

A careful man, Jacques. Reliable. It was unlikely he’d made mistakes. The Merchant acknowledged it. “You did well.”

“He was carrying a gun.”

The Merchant considered. “It may have been given to the magistrate or carried away with the body or stolen. It’s an English gun with no ties to us.”

“The woman from the shop said his body was searched and robbed by a gypsy.”

“Even better. Theft will break any possible small link to us. What else did you see?”

“A pool of blood beside the road. The cart and horse, gone, probably back to the livery stable. Chatter from a dozen English mouths, but no one asking official questions.”

“The mission is not endangered. No harm done,” the Merchant said. “We will remember Édouard tonight, in a toast. He died doing his duty to the Revolution.”

“There is no better death,” Jacques said.

The Merchant showed no impatience, no anger. Nothing. “There is almost no chance they will trace us here. But we will advance our plans.” He sifted details in his mind. “Hugues and Gaspard will take that woman to the cabinetmaker’s shop and guard her.”

“Now, instead of tomorrow night?” Jacques said.

“Now. We will spend this night and tomorrow at the cabinetmaker’s. A small change of plans. And on the day of the operation, you will perform Édouard’s tasks as well as your own. Do you see a problem with this?”

It was a measure of Jacques’ long, careful experience that he didn’t agree until he’d thought deeply. “Only the woman.”

“Who is always a problem. Tell Hugues and Gaspard to persuade her if they can. Tie and gag her when she becomes noisy. They need not be gentle.”

On the far side of the inn parlor, Camille Besançon sat in the most comfortable chair in the room, wearing the crimson silk robe that had been the price of peace for today. She’d let her long, black hair free over her shoulders to comb it in front of the fire.

The Merchant said, “After she is removed from here, you will pack our bags and cleanse these rooms. Dispose of her clothing and all this . . . trash she has brought in.” What useless, pointless things women were. At least this one was pretty. “My one small regret is that I didn’t give Édouard that woman to enjoy. He asked, last night.”

Jacques shook his head. “You were right to refuse. We are warriors. Women are for after the battle, not before.”

“It’s a waste, though. After the battle that one will be dead,” the Merchant said.

“We’ve found the hat shop,” Cami said. “Miles of walking the streets and the clue is here. One of the women recognized that . . . masterpiece. She saw it in a window and thought it looked good enough to eat. She did not, understandably, buy it to put on her head, but she also didn’t forget it.”

Cami propped her chin in her hands, her elbows on the table, and watched Pax create a map. He swiped flour together into a pile on the tabletop, took it between the palms of his hands, and let it sift down from left to right. He did it the way a man sows fine seed mixed with sand, evenly, scattering a thin film.

They were at the big dining table in the front room of the whorehouse, sitting on Chinese Chippendale chairs, surrounded by paintings of women in various stages of undress. She recognized some as Pax’s work.

She said, “It’s Lilith who knew the hat.”

“Trustworthy source.” Hawker paced the room, side to side, aiming annoyance at Cami every once in a while. Perhaps he was irritated at being called from the bed of the brothel owner, Daisy.

It was late afternoon with the sun at a long slant into the room, but breakfast had just been cleared away and the table polished. Supper would be laid out at nine or ten tonight, when the men began arriving. The women of the house lounged about the parlor and front room in pretty négligée. They wore quite respectable dresses in the evening, apparently.

“Men who visit early gets a bit of a thrill, see,” Lilith had explained. “Makes ’em feel all naughty, seeing us dressed like this.” She was the oldest of the whores in this house and not particularly beautiful, except that she radiated warmth like a stove. “One gentleman comes here regular to watch Luna—that’s Molly over there—put her clothes on.”

Cami knew more about expensive whorehouses than she had this morning. Any day one learned something new was a day well spent. That was a saying of the Fluffy Aunts, not the Baldoni.