Chapter 8
“God damn it, Vance!” I lunged forward, catching him by the upper arm before his knees could fold.
The moment my fingers closed over his wool waistcoat, his other hand snapped out. It caught my wrist in a vice-like clamp, his fingernails digging through the cuff of my linen shirt to bite directly into my skin. He pulled himself toward me with terrifying force, his forehead dropping heavily against the hollow of my shoulder.
“You're in the way,” he choked out against my neck. His voice was a raw vibration, trembling with pure, unadulterated strain. “I told you to stay at the table.”
“You walked straight into a four-foot doorframe!” I shouted, the adrenaline spiking hot and sour in my blood. I tried to pry his fingers off my wrist, but his grip was like an iron shackle. “Are you blind? Did you hit your head down there?”
At the word *blind*, Vance froze.
Every muscle along his spine locked into rigid stone. For two agonizing seconds, he didn't breathe. The storm outside seemed to redouble its fury, throwing a blast of hail against the glass that sounded like musketry.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he lifted his head.
In the dim half-light spilling from the solar, his face was the color of unbleached parchment. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead in damp tangles, and his eyes—fixed upon my collar, never rising to meet my gaze—were wide, feverish, and black to the rim.
“Blind?” A wet, razor-sharp chuckle scraped past his lips. “Don't be dramatic, Jules. The floorboards in this mausoleum are warped three inches out of true. The chest shifted.”
“The chest didn't shift your shoulder into the wall,” I snapped, refusing to back down.
“The light in your hallway is abysmal,” he retorted, his voice rising, regaining that brassy, theatrical swagger that grated on every nerve I possessed. He didn't release my arm; instead, he used his grip to shove me backward into the room, stepping over the threshold with that heavy, exaggerated stomp of his boot. “You hoard candles like an old maid hoarding copper pennies. If my firm hadn't stepped in, you'd be cataloging fourteenth-century maps by fireflies.”
He kicked the fallen chest with the toe of his leather boot. The iron hardware clanged sharply.
“Help me lift it onto table three,” he commanded. “Or are your precious bookbinder’s hands too delicate for honest lumber?”
“My hands are the only reason your investment isn't rotting into compost,” I snarled, wrenching my wrist free from his hold with a violent twist.
He didn't fight the break this time, but as my skin slipped from his grasp, his hand hovered in the empty air for a fraction of a second, his fingers flexing open and closed in a strange, grasping spasm before he jammed them deep into his trouser pockets.
“Table three,” he repeated, turning away.
I grabbed the iron handle on the left; he took the right. As we hoisted the coffer onto the long oak table, I watched his hands closely.
He didn't look at the handle. He fumbled for it, his bare fingers sweeping twice across the grain of the wood before locating the cold iron. Yet when he lifted, the sheer physical power in his frame was undeniable. His shoulders broadened, the muscles of his back knotting beneath the wet wool, taking forty pounds of dead weight with effortless, brutal efficiency. A man suffering from some catastrophic bodily failing could not have hoisted that coffer from the cellar floor. He was solid. He was overwhelmingly, undeniably strong.
When we set it down, however, he misjudged the height of the table by an inch, dropping his corner with an echoing thump that sent a shudder through the floorboards.
“Careful!” I hissed. “The Portsmouth rolls inside could have broken seals!”
“They survived two hundred years of salt rot, Julian. They can survive being set on a table.”
Vance didn't step back to inspect the coffer. He moved along the side of the table until his thigh was flush against the carved edge, leaning over the brass lamp. The warm circle of light illuminated the harsh, beautiful lines of his face—the straight blade of his nose, the sharp hollows beneath his cheekbones, the faint stubble darkening his jaw.
He reached out to touch the brass chimney of the lamp, his fingers extending tentatively, hovering an inch above the hot glass as if he were feeling for the thermal bloom rather than looking at the flame.
“It's getting dark,” he said quietly.
“It's four in the afternoon,” I replied, pulling my magnifying loupe from my pocket. “A squall blew in from the headland. The clouds are low.”
“It's darker than that.”
There was an odd, flat cadence to the words—not an argument, not a sneer, just a cold, blunt observation that sent an inexplicable shiver across my nape.
“I have two more lamps in the supply chest,” I said, testing him. “I can go down to the scullery and find more oil.”
“No!”
The word cracked like a pistol shot in the vaulted ceiling.
Vance’s head snapped toward me, his dark eyes wide and fixed. He leaned across the table, his knuckles planting flat onto the green felt, his broad chest cutting off half the light from the astral lamp.
“No,” he said again, softer this time, forcing his voice into that smooth, condescending register that he wore like armor. “The scullery flues are choked with soot. If you open those cellar doors, the draft will kill the braziers, and the humidity will spike. You stay here.”
“I can't work in the dark, Vance.”
“You have the brass lamp. It's more than enough for a man of your vaunted expertise.” He reached across the table, his hand sweeping toward the row of brass weights I had aligned beside the vellum chart.
His fingers didn't stop where the weights were.
His palm struck the heaviest lead ingot, sending it skittering across the polished oak. It struck a small earthenware dish of powdered gum sandarac, flipping it onto its side. White powder dusted across the green felt like salt.
Vance froze.
He looked down at his own hand, hovering above the spilled powder, his jaw tightening into a white knot.
I stared at the mess, then up at his face. “You just ruined an ounce of purified sandarac.”
“It was in my way,” he said immediately, his voice cold, defensive, and loud.
“It was eight inches to the left of the chest!” My patience, worn thin by two days of his suffocating presence, finally snapped. “You didn't even look at it! You just swung your arm like a blind ox!”
“I said it was in my way, Julian!” He shoved himself off the table, standing tall, his silhouette looming over the amber pool of light. “If you can't keep your workbench organized, don't blame me for the clutter.”
“Clutter?” I rounded the table, stepping directly into his path, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. “I keep an immaculate bench! You've spent two days stumbling through this room, clipping every doorframe, knocking over my tools, and clinging to my clothes like you're drowning!”
Vance’s sneer twisted into something vicious. “Clinging? Don't flatter your provincial ego. If I touch you, Jules, it's because this floor is slick with condensation and your coat happens to be the nearest piece of rubbish to grab.”
