Chapter 10
The clumsy collisions, the fumbling hands, the dramatic stumbling—it wasn't some mysterious infirmity. It was manic overexertion and nervous exhaustion, paired with his age-old habit of psychological warfare. He wanted me rattled. He wanted me off-balance, hovering around him like a frantic nursemaid, entirely dependent on his moods. And now, having lured me within an inch of kissing him, he was threatening to tear the 1342 Mercator from my hands and take the midnight train, leaving me standing in a ruined room like an abandoned child.
*Not this time.*
Outside, the storm lashed the leaded glass, but through the arched windows, the gray sea light still threw the room into sharp, unmistakable relief. Across the solar, thirty feet away, the massive double doors to the gallery were clearly visible, their polished white panels gleaming faintly against the dark wainscoting. The red embers of the five braziers cast long, smoldering shadows across the Persian carpet. Any man with two eyes could see the clear, unobstructed path from the hearth to the threshold.
If Vance Montgomery wanted to claim he was entirely sovereign, entirely whole, and utterly dismissive of my presence, he didn't need my lantern to light his imperial exit.
A cold, diamond-hard resolve settled behind my ribs.
I was done playing his game. I was done being the provincial prop in his grand metropolitan theater. If he wanted to pack his toys and march out into the night, he could do it without hiding behind the warm circle of my work lamp.
I didn't answer him.
I stepped away from table two, moving silently across the Persian rug toward the center refectory table where the lone brass lamp hissed softly in the gloom.
Vance stood ten feet away, near the heavy velvet draperies, his head slightly tilted, his ears straining against the howling wind.
“Julian?” he said, his tone sharpening when he heard no footsteps. “Did you hear me? I said pack the chest.”
I reached the center table.
My fingers closed around the cold, milled-brass valve at the base of the astral lamp.
“You want to go back to the capital, Vance?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm, devoid of anger, flat as a marble slab.
He didn't turn around. His shoulder twitched, his hand rising to touch the velvet fabric of the curtain, his knuckles grazing the heavy weave. “I have no intention of lingering in this damp grave. Pack your kit.”
“You don't need my kit,” I said. “And you don't need me.”
“I decide what I need.”
“Then walk.”
I gripped the brass valve.
With one sharp, deliberate twist of my wrist, I cut the flow of oil to the circular wick.
The hiss died.
The amber flame flickered, gasped, and vanished.
Instantly, the circular solar was plunged into absolute, velvet pitch.
The gale outside howled like a pack of wolves, the rain drummed against the casements with relentless fury, and the red coals of the dying braziers offered nothing more than a faint, ghostly smear of crimson through the thick dark.
I took two silent steps backward, retreating deep into the shadows near the eastern wall, blending into the cold, empty air.
“If you're so far above me, Vance,” I dared, my voice cutting through the blackness from across the room, cold and steady as an executioner’s axe, “walk out that door right now.”
For one second, there was silence.
A silence so dense, so suffocating, it felt as though the entire house had dropped into the sea.
Then, from the velvet draperies ten feet away, came a sound that froze the blood in my veins.
It wasn't an insult. It wasn't a cutting, metropolitan sneer.
It was a ragged, strangled gasp—a wet, choked sob of pure, unadulterated panic that ripped straight from the depths of Vance’s chest.
“Julian!”
The scream was stripped of every shred of pride, every shred of sanity.
Before I could breathe, before I could process the sheer terror vibrating in that single syllable, Vance lunged blindly into the dark.
He didn't walk. He didn't feel his way along the table.
He threw himself forward into the blackness like a man leaping from a burning cliff. His heavy boots crashed into the empty air, skittering wildly across the polished floorboards as his balance tore completely away from the earth.
He struck me like an avalanche.
His massive frame slammed into my chest with bone-crushing force, knocking me backward against the granite wall.
His hands—feverish, sweating, shaking with violent, uncontrollable spasms—didn't strike me. They clawed frantically at my chest, his white-knuckled fingers twisting savagely into the heavy wool lapels of my coat, dragging me toward him with the desperate, dying strength of a drowning man reaching for the only ledge above a bottomless abyss.
“Don't move,” he sobbed against my throat, his forehead driving into my collarbone, his entire body trembling so violently that my teeth clicked together. “God, Jules—don't move, don't move, don't let me fall—”
