Chapter Nineteen. A Bad End

C HAPTER N INETEEN

A Bad End

WITH newfound resolve, I spent the rest of the morning packing Mr. Owen’s things. A stark reminder of my last trip back to New York. I’d returned after the war to deal with matters at our family townhome on Sutton Place. Worried about my state of mind, Hari had insisted on joining me. It would be good to have a friend, he said, when packing away the memories of my family—before selling the house for a fraction of its worth. We spent two weeks there, with the curtains closed up, hiding the fact the notorious Vaughn girl had returned. I spent two weeks drinking away the vestiges of the war, struggling to place the memories of my family into boxes and crates, to be stowed away and never thought upon again.

As I folded Mr. Owen’s dressing gowns, the earlier memory was close enough I might have touched it had I not hoped—no— known that I would help him. I might not have been able to keep my family from dying on that ship, but I could save Mr. Owen.

What had he been thinking, confessing to a crime like that? But deep down, I knew. He’d told me as much whether I wanted to believe it or not. That must have been what he’d been arguing with his brother about this morning. He wouldn’t allow me to come to harm. Mr. Owen had known… he’d known the inspector had intended to arrest me and instead he gave his life for mine.

I slammed the trunk lid down and screamed. The sort of scream one would expect of an animal, frightened and wounded in the woods. A scream that brought back all the pain and ache of the last decade. He loved me. He all but told me so.

Once finished, I spoke with the man at the desk to arrange to have Mr. Owen’s things picked up by the duke’s man, and then I set off to find Ruan. Had he heard? He surely would have by now—but if he had, why had he not come for me? Unless he intended to leave now that he was free to go.

I wouldn’t blame him if he did, and I was more than capable of saving Mr. Owen on my own if I must. I just didn’t want to. I made it as far as the terrace when I spotted him. He was walking slowly across the field toward the bridge in the early evening fog. He was far away but I would have recognized the slope of his shoulders anywhere. My heart squeezed at the sight of him and I raced after him.

I was out of breath by the time I reached the bridge. Ruddy-headed wigeons made their way to way to shore, noisily abandoning the water as I approached him at long last.

Ruan stood against the rail, his palms flat as he stared into the water. The sun was setting behind us. It was quiet and for once we were truly alone. Even the sound was damped from the thick air.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” His voice was hoarse, but he did not turn to face me.

“Did you hear about Mr. Owen?”

He nodded with a frown. “I spoke to him as he was leaving. He wanted me to tell you not to blame yourself.”

I let out a strangled sob. Not blame myself— how could I not?

“None of this is your fault,” Ruan murmured into my hair as he scooped me into his arms, holding me tight against him. I let myself melt into his embrace. It was there, in the silence of the fog that I told him everything that I’d learned. Of what Lady Amelia revealed in the library, of my growing suspicion of both the youngest medium and Andrew Lennox, of how I’d failed Mr. Owen. All of the sentiment tumbled out of me and I was helpless to control it.

“Hush…” he murmured. “I hear you. I hear… all of it.”

And in that moment I knew he did. All the fear, all the sadness. He knew every crack, every crevice within my very heart. Whether it was because of being a Pellar, or the odd connection between the two of us, Ruan knew me inside and out.

He pressed a kiss to my forehead, his beard scratching my skin. “We will help him, Ruby. I promise you. You are the cleverest person I’ve ever known. Together we can figure this out.”

I paused, looking up at him, his pale eyes full of emotion that I could not name if I tried. “We?”

He nodded. “We will save Owen from himself.”

I wiped at the wetness of my nose. It was terribly difficult to look dignified while weeping into a man’s chest. “But you are miserable here, you said it yourself this morning. Why would you stay?”

Ruan gaped. It was as if I’d suddenly sprouted wings before him. “Why would I stay? Ruby… I…”

It made no sense. He hated leaving Cornwall. Why would he stay in Scotland with no reason to—

“Because of you. Do you think so little of me that you’d believe I would turn my back on you and Owen now? Walk away and go back to my cottage and my garden and never once think on that remarkable woman who wandered into my village six weeks ago determined to prove me wrong in every conceivable way?”

I sniffled again, unable to look him in the eye. “I don’t remember her. Not now. I feel so… so…”

“Lost?” he supplied.

“It is truly unfair how you do that.”

He let out an amused sound beneath his breath. “It’s only reasonable. You love Owen, and he’s an infuriating old man but you are an infuriating young woman. It’s part of your appeal—the both of you.”

I sniffled again. “I don’t know what to do. I cannot see my way out of this.”

“We’ll figure it out, just as we did before. This may not be Cornwall but the mechanics are the same. A person killed someone, now we have to go dig around and ferret out the truth, mmm?”

“I do not understand how you can be calm about all this.”

“Don’t you?” He raised a brow. “Ruby, I…” He paused, shaking his head, and instead leaned down, tipping my chin up with his forefinger. The wind whipped around us and I unconsciously moved into his lee. He took me by the shoulders, gently rubbing the tight muscles there and taking away a bit of the ache inside my very soul. That familiar cold rush flooded through my veins until I no longer wept. The tears replaced by resolve I thought I’d lost. We would save him. Just as we’d found the killer in Lothlel Green.

An odd streak of silver flashed through his green eyes, one of the few visible aftereffects from when he’d drawn upon his abilities. I doubted he was even aware that his eyes did that, but I was altogether too aware of him. The edge of his mouth curved up as a dark curl fell into his eyes.

“Thank you…” I murmured, stretching up, meaning to press a kiss to his cheek but accidentally brushing the corner of his mouth. His body tensed at the contact, not certain what to make of it. But he didn’t pull back and neither did I. The two of us remained there frozen in time, breathing in the other, not certain whether to give in to the growing attraction between us or to do the sensible thing and walk away.

“Of all the souls in this world for the old gods to bind me to…” Ruan murmured against my lips. But before I could respond to the very disturbing words he uttered, he crushed his mouth against mine, washing away any memory of what came before or after. The world narrowed to only Ruan. The green scent of him, the faintest bit of honey candy on his breath. I wasn’t at all prepared for this—for him.

I reached up, pulling him closer to me, and suddenly remembered… I remembered everything .

The sea of blood.

The mud.

The poppies blooming on his chest.

It had been Ruan I was looking for in that terrible dream and as soon as I’d found him, I’d lost him forever.

But before I could pull away to warn him that I’d seen his death, the sniper’s shot rang out—just as I’d foreseen—the force of the round piercing my body from the back and pushing us both over the granite railing.

Ruan’s eyes shot open, almost fully silver now with only the faintest hint of green, as a searing-hot pain burnt through my shoulder and the two of us went tumbling into the icy water beneath.

The White Witch was right when she’d warned us in Lothlel Green.

I’d killed him.

I’d killed us both.

A COLD WHITE fire ran through my body as I sank deeper into the water. It started in my shoulder where Ruan’s hand held fast to me and ricocheted through my veins with a force I’d never felt before. He held impossibly tight against the part of me that hurt the worst, tugging me down to the lake bed with him, allowing the water to claim us both.

The sea will give and the sea will take.

An ancient warning echoed in my head, whispered by a voice long forgotten. Deeper and deeper until we lay together on the rocky floor. The silver had fled Ruan’s eyes at last, as he lay still beneath me. His lifeless green gaze staring right through me.

Not like this. We would not die like this.

The red blossoms spread across his chest, creating clouds in the water around us. I could scarcely see from all the blood. Mine or his, it did not matter.

I wriggled in the water to get a better position before I hooked my uninjured arm around his chest, in a mockery of our previous embrace. Struggling to find my feet, I kicked hard against the rocky bottom, sending up a cloud of water, mud, and blood. We couldn’t be more than fifteen feet from the surface, if that.

My sluggish muscles rebelled.

Struggling against the water and his considerable size, I clutched his chest against my own, yet Ruan remained eerily still against me.

Please don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.

Come on, Ruan. You great stubborn ox.

My lungs stung as I battled the water. I needed to surface. Needed to breathe.

I kicked harder.

My own pulse slowed as my body lost more and more of its strength to the icy water. At long last, I broke the surface with a gasp. Our mingled blood and muddy water flooded into my lungs. Salty and metallic as I coughed in the chilly October air.

My tenuous grip on him slipped and his head fell down into the water. I jerked him hard, pulling him farther up my body, keeping his face above the waterline. It would do no good to pull him up only to let him drown. With a pained grunt, I shoved us both onto the rocky shore, to the very spot he’d woken me from my nightmare.

It had been a warning then, or meant to be one.

Except I hadn’t remembered until it was too late.

Ruan was either dead or unconscious, but I was too exhausted to tell which. I reached up with my free hand, feeling for a pulse, but his heart had always been so eerily slow that I could not have been certain whether I felt it or not.

Surely someone heard the shot.

Someone would come.

In the shallows, I gave one final tug, dragging us another six inches toward land, when my body finally succumbed to the cold. I collapsed upon my back, water up to my ears with Ruan’s head resting on my chest where the pain still seared through me. Our bodies were held together by his weight and that damned ring of Mr. Owen’s pressed hard into my flesh. I could feel it digging into my belly.

Perhaps Mr. Owen had been right about the ring after all.