Chapter 9
“Is that what it is?” I took another step forward.
We were inches apart now. The air between us was stifling, thick with the smell of lamp oil, damp wool, and the bitter heat of five years of unresolved fury. I could see the rapid pulse throbbing in the hollow of his throat, and the faint, erratic twitching of his lower eyelids.
Everything about him was contradictory: the staggering physical power that had dragged fifty pounds up the cellar stairs coupled with this frantic, fumbling clumsiness; the sharp, metropolitan tongue paired with hands that shook against my sleeve. He looked like a man unraveling under some manic, feverish exhaustion—a breakdown of the nerves that he was desperately, violently attempting to mask with cruelty.
“You came back here to show off,” I said, lowering my voice to a harsh, cutting whisper that seemed to rattle the very glass in the casements. “You rode in from the capital with your tailored wool and your ten-thousand-pound drafts, determined to rub my nose in your success. You wanted to see me bowing over your salvage, begging for your scraps.”
Vance didn't move away. He tilted his chin up, staring down his nose at me with an expression of pure, gilded contempt. “And here you are. Working for my scraps.”
“Then why can't you leave me alone?” I demanded, planting my hand flat against his chest.
Beneath my palm, his heart was a frantic, stuttering bird, hammering against his ribs with terrifying velocity. His wool coat was hot to the touch, soaked with the tension that radiated through every sinew of his frame.
“Why do you stand in my pocket?” I pressed, my fingers curling into his lapel, shaking him slightly. “Why do you demand that I speak every time I turn a page? Why did you hold onto my arm on the staircase like a terrified child, Vance?”
His lips parted. For a fleeting second, the sneer dissolved.
In its place was an expression of such staggering, naked terror that it knocked the breath from my lungs. His eyes darted wildly—not looking at my face, but flicking left, right, up, down, as if the room around him were dissolving into a roaring, featureless void.
His hand rose slowly, rising between our chests.
He didn't shove me away. His fingers curled around the wrist of the hand I had pressed against his coat. His skin was burning, his grip trembling with that same high-frequency, exhausting vibration.
“Julian,” he whispered.
The name slipped out of him like blood from a wound. It wasn't the arrogant challenge of a rival; it was a plea, stripped of every shred of metropolitan veneer.
“Tell me,” I demanded, leaning in until our breaths mingled in the cold air, sweet and hot and dangerous. “Tell me what this game is, Vance. Tell me why you're here.”
His thumb stroked the inside of my wrist, pressing hard against the pulse point, counting the beats. “I told you. I need the best binder on the coast.”
“You could have hired five binders in London! You could have bought an entire conservation firm with the money you're paying me!”
“They aren't you,” he said.
The confession hung between us, heavy and impossible.
My heart slammed against my ribs. The anger in my chest curdled into a sudden, aching heat that left my skin tingling. For five years, I had built a fortress out of old paper and leather, telling myself I didn't care that he had left, telling myself that his brilliant, burning ambition was a disease I was lucky to escape.
Yet here he was. Leaning into my space, his mouth inches from mine, his fingers digging into my flesh as if I were the only anchor in a storm that was tearing him apart.
“Vance...” I breathed.
He leaned down.
His eyes fluttered shut, and in that moment, his forehead pressed against mine, his hot breath washing over my lips. It was a kiss that hadn't happened yet, a collision of two bodies pulled together by an irresistible, terrifying gravity. I could feel the sharp intake of his breath, the tremor running through his lips, the surrender waiting just beneath the surface.
Then, out on the headland, the lightning cracked.
A blinding, jagged bolt struck the cliffs a hundred yards from the manor, illuminating the circular solar in a violent flash of stark, surgical blue.
A split second later, the thunder detonated—a deafening, bone-shattering boom that shook the ancient granite walls to their bedrock.
Vance didn't just flinch.
He gasped, a strangled sound of pure agony tearing from his throat, and shoved me backward with both hands.
The force of the push was violent, full-bodied, sending me stumbling back against table two. My hip clipped the heavy oak edge, knocking a jar of wheat-starch paste to the floor where the glass shattered into a dozen shards.
Vance spun away, his boots catching the fringe of the Persian rug. He staggered three wild paces into the center of the room, his hands clawing at his own temples as if trying to rip his skull apart.
“Damn you!” he roared into the empty air, his voice echoing off the vaulted rafters with terrifying fury. “Damn this place! Damn you, Julian!”
I stood by the shattered jar, my hip throbbing with pain, staring at him through the settling dust.
He had stopped near the center of the solar, in the deep shadows where the light from the astral lamp couldn't reach. He was facing the seaward wall, his back to me, his chest heaving as if he had run five miles through a swamp.
“Get your tools,” he said.
His voice was different now. The raw, breathless vulnerability of seconds ago had vanished, swallowed whole by a sudden, icy wall of condescension. It was brittle, stretched thin as beaten gold, vibrating with venom.
“Get your tools and pack them,” he snarled, keeping his back turned. “The condition report is void. I’m having the collection crated tonight. We’re taking the midnight freight to the capital.”
The words struck like ice water across my face.
I looked at his broad, rigid shoulders. I looked at the way he stood upright, balanced on his two feet, planted before the seaward draperies.
*He was doing it again.*
The memory rose in me, bitter as gall: the academy examination hall five years ago, when Vance had been caught plagiarizing a provenance footnote. He hadn't confessed. He hadn't apologized. He had feigned an attack of bilious fever, dramatically knocking his chair over, leaning on my arm until we cleared the proctor’s sightline—and the moment we reached the courtyard, he had straightened his waistcoat, laughed in my face, and called me a credulous idiot for believing his distress.
He had just hoisted a fifty-pound naval chest up two flights of spiraling stone stairs from the pitch-black vaults without dropping it once. He had shoved me across the room with enough muscular violence to shatter glass. And now, the instant an honest intimacy threatened to expose him—the instant he whispered *They aren't you* and felt my pulse under his thumb—he retreated behind his velvet curtain and his imperial decrees, weaponizing his theatrical fragility just long enough to put me in my place before walking away unscathed.
