Chasing Shadows

by Ashley Townsend

  “Five more minutes,” she assured herself aloud. After that, she would inquire after his whereabouts and see if she could find him. But what if Will comes looking for you? she asked herself. He had disappeared without notice, and she had no idea what he’d gone out to do.

  Sarah snatched one of the seals from the desk, moving it anxiously between her palms and then rolling it between the fingers of one hand. The back of her mind caught on something, and her hand stilled.

  Bringing the heavy object closer to her eyes, she admired the intricacies of the design. Her gaze narrowed in thought, and she returned the seal to its place and picked up the one beside it. The designs were identical. She couldn’t put her finger on why she was so interested in them; it was just that the slopes and curves pressed into the metal looked so familiar. . . .

  Mind working furiously, she tried to recall the exact details of the design on Robert’s letter, but so many of the seals were similar—her own had nearly been a match—and she couldn’t be sure without comparing the two side-by-side.

  What was she thinking? It wouldn’t matter even if they were an exact match. Damien hadn’t written that letter, she was sure of it.

  The door opened suddenly, and her heart lurched painfully in her chest. Sarah spun around, instinctively hiding the seal behind her back. She gave Damien a smile that said she was glad to see him, but it wobbled nervously at the corners.

  Damien’s eyes widened in surprise for half a second before they softened. “I was wondering where you’d gone off to.”

  She nearly choked on her anxiety over being snuck up on. “I t-thought we should work on your arm.” She stumbled over the words, letting them out in a breathless rush.

  Frowning, he moved over to her. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. Her eyes were too wide, and she made an effort to look at ease. “Just cold.”

  He rubbed his hands over her stiff arms, smiling. “Better?”

  Some of Sarah’s anxiety faded at the warmth in his eyes. She must be crazy to think that he had any part in the schemes going on around the castle. His presence subdued her suspicion, and she felt herself relaxing. Now she was holding the seal behind her skirt in embarrassment. “Much better. Thanks.” She walked over to the door, moving her hand so the stolen object was out of his sight. “I’ll get everything and be right back.”

  He smiled. “Then here I will be.”

  Hurrying across the hall, she closed her bedroom door and stared at the seal in her hands. It was stupid to take it with her, but she had been afraid to admit that, though fleeting, she’d suspected a folly on his part.

  Unable to fight her curiosity any longer, she sifted through her things. She would disprove her unfounded doubts once and for all.

  She found the missive at the bottom of the desk drawer but couldn’t bring herself to reach for it. She knew why she hesitated—what if they matched?—though the idea that Damien was involved was ridiculous.

  Quickly, before she could talk herself out of it, Sarah snatched up the letter and flipped it over with clumsy fingers. Her breath caught. It can’t be, she thought, shaking her head in skepticism. She wouldn’t have believed her eyes if she hadn’t held the seal next to the depression in the red wax. But there was no doubt that it was the same design as Damien’s seal. She recalled the drops of candlewax on the table in his room.

  Red candlewax.

  But that proved nothing. Ten or twenty other guests could have sealed this missive with red wax. To prove correct her intuition about Damien, her eyes scanned the depressions in the wax, searching for some inconsistency that would alleviate her growing anxiety.

  At the bottom right corner, there was a shallow notch where the eagle’s tail feather should have been, as if that portion of the seal had not been properly cut out. Sarah’s eyes flew to the corresponding corner of the seal, searching for the spot where—

  “No.” The word was just a breath from her lips, all at once disbelieving and comprehending.

  On that section of the eagle’s tail, where the feather should have been sunken like the rest, sat one that was slightly raised by the glob of red wax lodged in the crevice.

  “It’s a mistake,” she whispered, eyes wide. But she was holding the proof in her hands.

  Unwilling to believe, Sarah wrenched the letter open, eyes scanning the instructions with a sinking feeling. It was written in a matching looping scroll with the same hitch on the a’s as the partially written letters on Damien’s desk.

  Sarah’s heart thumped wrathfully in her chest even as she shook her head in denial, trying to be reasonable; she was being paranoid. She knew after all the trouble with Will that she couldn’t jump to conclusions at the slightest test of her confidence. Surely Damien had a good reason for writing the letter asking Robert to pose as the Shadow.

  But, of course, that would mean he’d had a hand in Edith’s murder.

  Her quiet intake of breath echoed in the silent room. Suddenly, it felt as if the air had been stolen from the space, and an unseen force had a fist around her ribcage, suffocating her. She dropped the seal onto the table as if it had burned her.

  The seal on Jade’s secret missive. She recalled it in her mind now and knew it was an exact match to this letter. Dread filled her. Sarah couldn’t breathe as the horrific realization crashed in on her, and she gripped the edge of the desk for support.

  Damien said he had business at the livery that day, but neither Will nor Robert had seen him. Damien had written letters to both Jade and Robert, and one—perhaps both—led to Edith dying.

  Sensing she was missing an important link from that night, Sarah racked her brain to remember every blurry detail. She recalled seeing the Shadow, running after him, his hesitation to shoot at her and then surprise when he did. Almost as if he hadn’t meant to, almost like he didn’t want to hurt her.

  But Damien had come from his room, she countered. It couldn’t have been him.

  Sarah closed her eyes to envision that moment when he’d run to her, and her lids snapped open in a panic. He hadn’t come half-dressed from his own room, where she had assumed he’d been sleeping in late; he had run from the opposite end of the castle.

  But that didn’t make sense . . . unless, of course, he had simply waited in the shadows for her and Terrance to leave before he followed them. He would’ve had plenty of time to discard his disguise in a passageway and wait them out. If he timed his appearance right, they would be none the wiser—they had been fooled by his game, Sarah corrected.

  The pieces fell into place then, fueling the anxiety building within her chest as the accusations and memories flashed through her mind: the matching seals, the secrecy, Damien’s insistence that she drop her investigation, lying about where he was going, disappearing for hours on end. It all made sense.

  Sarah had wondered if his aversion to Cadius at dinner was because he was trying to protect her and keep her from stirring the water. But she saw now that it had been subservience and fear that had cowed him at the table. Damien was probably working for Cadius! Even as she wanted to deny it, she couldn’t ignore the clarity of this fact.

  What she didn’t understand, accident or no, was why he had killed Edith. What purpose had it served to masquerade as the Shadow? How could a man she had trusted so implicitly lie to her and comfort her when he had been the reason for her grief?

  Sarah felt a sharp jab of disgusted betrayal behind her ribs, followed quickly by a pang of fear as a memory assaulted her, leaving her breathless. She recalled the raspy sound of the man’s familiar voice, one that she now realized had not belonged to the physician at all. Though she hadn’t seen it, she could hear the scuffle in the back of her mind, the solid thunk, the sound of creaking hinges. Then Edith burst into the room, and Damien was leaning on the chest—for support, Sarah had assumed. Now she realized with increasing dread that they had nearly caught him in the act of stashing Gabriel’s dead body.

  She could hardly bring herself to acknowledge the h
orrifying evidence that Damien had killed Dunlivey and Edith. The man who had laughed with her in the snow and made her feel special—that man did not exist. It was all a lie. The Damien Lisandro she knew was a deceiving murderer.

  And she had played right into his hands, believing the lie because she wanted it to be true. How had she been such a fool? She had been deceived, yes, but she had been fool enough to let herself be led into the charade in the first place.

  Sarah was suddenly very aware that a murderer twice over had been living across the hall from her. A shiver snaked over her spine at the thought that she had been living mere feet from Edith’s killer. And then, unbidden, she remembered the way Damien made her smile, how he’d held her so tenderly, like she was something precious, and the way that he, shaking and frightened as the tremors overcame his body, had asked her to stay with him. How could that frightened boy be the same monster she envisioned? She couldn’t even compare the two.

  She wanted to deny it, to deny all of it—the fact that he had written the letter, her suspicions that he was a cold-blooded killer, and her growing dread that he was involved with Cadius. The only proof she had was the letter he had sealed, and she doubted that would hold up against someone with his connections. She could never get him to confess, even if she had the courage to confront him. What else was there?

  The physician.

  His face came to the forefront of her mind, startling her in its clarity. He was the only one who knew the truth, who could confirm her suspicions.

  With this in mind, Sarah set off for the tower that held the prisoner she sought.

  ~Chapter 44~

  Damien’s door was cracked, and she snuck past his room with a thumping pulse before breaking out into a dead run. The textured paper of the letter brushed against her wrist; she had stuffed the envelope up her sleeve for safekeeping in case Damien discovered her, but she was alone in the hall.

  It was eerily quiet as she raced up the steps, skirts hiked, her ragged breaths echoing between the walls of the tight staircase. Nearly fifty steps later, Sarah gasped for breath at the top as she got her bearings. The long corridor that stretched off to the right was immersed in shadows, and she couldn’t make out the end as the passage faded into inky blackness. But it was the vacant cell that concerned her.

  She stumbled forward, needing to be sure and unwilling to believe he wasn’t here. The door was open, a single key lodged in the lock and the rest dangling from the ring against the bars. She stepped into the cell with hesitant steps. A bird flapped its wings somewhere outside the tiny window high on the left wall—too far up for anyone to see outside, but she suspected the window’s only purpose was to fill a dead man with the maddening possibility of a glimpse of the sky before he was executed.

  Sarah shivered.

  But Malcolm wasn’t there. Maybe he’s in another tower, she reasoned, even as she felt her heart sink. The thought was weak and formed out of desperation as the walls of the cramped cell pressed in on her. Her eyes searched the space, hoping the physician had left a clue behind. Then she froze, realizing that the sound of the bird’s chirps had been eclipsed by the hurried shuffle of boots on the staircase behind her.

  She spun. Damien rounded the corner to the top, immediately catching her wide-eyed, fearful expression. His own face was pained, and he held up his hands as if trying to calm a frightened animal. In one hand was the seal she had dropped on her desk, and with frightening clarity, she realized he’d been in her room. He knew!

  The envelope crinkled inside her sleeve as she fisted her hands. Sarah swallowed, fear coiling in her stomach. She retreated into the cell, though every instinct in her cried out for open spaces.

  “Please, let me explain.” Damien’s voice was soft, but distress tainted his words. He took another step toward her into the cell, moving slowly.

  She jerked back and hit her shoulder on the wall, planting herself in the corner of the cell, as though it would prevent him from reaching her. “D-don’t come near me.”

  He winced at her fear and distrust. Still, he advanced. “It isn’t what you think.”

  “Where’s the physician?” she demanded shakily. She tried to mask her fear, but she was quickly losing control over her emotions. She felt betrayed and angry and sorrowful over the fact that this man still had some amount of control over her: She wanted to believe him. That was the only reason she hadn’t run from him screaming—to hear him out—though it was also due, in part, to the fact that he blocked her way.

  Damien hesitated, eyes crinkling in pain. He stopped close enough to touch her, stuffing the seal in his pocket, though he didn’t reach out. It would only make things worse for her, and it pained Sarah to know that he could still read her so well and cared enough to respect her wishes. “The physician was hanged before dawn. I did not order the execution to be moved.”

  “But you followed orders and passed along the message.” She saw the answer in his espresso eyes before he nodded regretfully. Realization hit her like a battering ram. She now knew it had been Dunlivey that Damien had fought with, but why had she not considered the physician’s innocence in light of this? “Malcolm didn’t even attack you, did he? Why frame an innocent man?”

  Damien’s eyes were so sorrowful it broke her heart. She tried to harden herself against him, to tamp down the sympathy she felt at the regret in his gaze.

  “Because it was convenient,” he whispered, mouth tipping ruefully. “I was ordered to dismiss him, and the opportunity seemed to present itself perfectly.” The way he grimaced over the word caused Sarah to think that he hadn’t been commanded to “dismiss” him at all.

  A thought struck her, turning her stomach. “Lisandro was written all over his cell,” she breathed in accusation. “You must have seen that he’d etched it into the stone at some point. It wasn’t out of obsessive retribution, was it? He was sending a warning!” All along he was trying to point out that he was innocent, and Sarah had assumed the physician was crazy. She had done nothing to get him out, and now he was dead.

  “I never intended for it to end this way.” Damien reached out to touch her cheek, as if to offer comfort. She imagined it was the same hand that had ended Gabriel’s life.

  Swatting it away, Sarah glared at him, feeling bolder by the minute as her indignation overshadowed her fear and common sense. “You’re a murderer, and you expect me to believe this dribble?”

  He froze, shocked at her outburst. She drove the knife in deeper, though her hands were trembling. “I know you killed Dunlivey. I saw his body where you hid it and witnessed your cronies light him up in the forest. Were you the one who had the evidence destroyed, or was that someone else’s doing, too? Cadius, perhaps?” In the back of her mind, Sarah was aware that it was entirely unwise to taunt a murderer, but she was beyond holding back.

  Damien looked as though his legs wouldn’t hold him. He shook his head in shock. “How did you—” His head swiveled as he shot a glance down the corridor. Lowering his voice, he whispered desperately, “I’m no murderer.”

  “Oh, right.”

  His hand flew around her arm in a flash, eyes on fire with the need for her to understand. Sarah winced at his grip. “Honestly! His contract was terminated, and he wouldn’t go peaceably. Dunlivey drew a knife, and when we struggled, he lost his balance and caught his head on the corner of the chest. I panicked and hid his body inside and had just wiped the blood off the edge when you came in.” Sarah recalled Will’s finger grazing the splintered corner of the wood and allowed herself to wonder if there might be some truth to his claim.

  Narrowing her eyes at how easily he could sway her, Sarah asked, “And did you stab yourself to make it look like you were the victim?”

  Damien shook his head so vehemently it displaced his perfectly arranged locks. “He must have nicked me as he went down. I didn’t even realize he’d stabbed me, I was so frightened at what I had done.”

  She didn’t want to believe him, but the panicked sincerity in his eyes
made her wonder. “If you were so worried about being found out, then why did it take you so long to get rid of him?”

  Fidgeting anxiously, his grip on her arm tightened. She hid her wince with a steadfast glare. “I tried, several times, to dispose of the body, but there was always someone nearby. So I locked the door from the outside and hoped no one would discover him in the meantime.”

  He said it like his actions were warranted, like they made sense. Sarah swallowed. Maybe in his mind they did.

  “Do you at least regret killing him?” she asked, slightly exasperated. Some part of her wanted to see the old Damien, the one she had started to fall for.

  His sigh was heavy. “I won’t lie to you,” he whispered. Throat working convulsively, he answered, “No, I don’t entirely regret it.” She blinked in surprise at his candor, and by the way he rushed on to explain, she knew her disappointment was palpable. “I didn’t want to, but I had to do it! He would have killed her if I hadn’t gotten to him first.”

  His hand slid up her arm to cradle her cheek, eyes filled with torment and regret. She wondered whom he was protecting when his voice softened and he leaned closer, as if to brush his lips to hers. Eyes warm, he whispered, “But I am no murderer, Sarah. I’d never hurt you. And if I have any unwarranted sins, surely your goodness will wipe them clean.”

  He was insane! Alarmed at her desire to believe him, added to her rising anxiety as he leaned in, Sarah lost it.

  She slapped him so hard the clap echoed through the corridor like a crack of thunder. Damien reeled, losing his grip on her as he slammed into the wall. She saw her chance and bolted around him, running for the door and grabbing hold of it. With a terrible, stridulous sound as it scraped the stones, she slammed the door closed behind her. The force dislodged the key from the lock, and the ring clattered to the floor, skittering a few feet away.

  Sarah watched its progress with a panicked gaze and ran to snatch it off the floor, wasting precious seconds she didn’t have. Damien was already on his feet by the time she fumbled to shove a key into the lock. It jammed inside, and she wrenched it free, groping for the next one, her panic increasing with each rapid pulse of her heart. Which one was it?