Rogue Spy

by Joanna Bourne

  He said, “Get over by the wall. Leave that cloak where it is. I want to see your hands the whole time.”

  “I’m in my shift.”

  “I’ve seen you naked.”

  They’d all seen each other naked in the spartan dormitory at the Coach House. When they were Cachés. When they were children, spies in training, miserable and deadly. When they’d been friends. “I was twelve. Nobody was interested.”

  “I’m not interested now. Get up.” The words scraped out of his throat one by one. If he still hurt, so many hours after she’d thrown the mélange de tabac at him, he wasn’t going to be in a forgiving mood.

  She drew herself together against the cold, feeling hollow and weak. Once, she’d been questioned by men from the British Service. They’d been gentle with her because she looked like a child and they believed her well-practiced lies. The men who came for her this time would not be gentle. They wouldn’t believe her and they wouldn’t forgive her for deceiving them.

  If they were in this house, they were quieter than smoke.

  Devoir said, “Stand up. Get back against the wall.”

  Not Devoir. Paxton. She would think of him as Pax and remove the last familiarity from her mind. Pax, the stranger. Pax, the unknown and unknowable. Dangerous Pax.

  She kneed out from under her cloak, stood, and backed away till her spine encountered bookshelves. She was a model of docility.

  “Very wise,” he said.

  Thin red firelight leaked through the open door from the front of the shop, the half-banked fires that kept the damp out of the books. He crossed the room like a tall shadow, uncannily silent, and knelt on the pile of packing straw she’d slept in. He kept a prudent eye in her direction.

  She said, “You’re safe from attack. You’re four stone heavier than I am and expecting it.”

  “I’m glad we both realize that.” He pulled the pistol from under her makeshift pillow. Fluid, shifting gleams ran up and down the barrel as he inspected it. “Nice gun.” He weighed it in his hand. “It’s light.”

  “I hollowed out the stock.” The first shock was ebbing away. She tucked her hands under her armpits to keep them warm. It also hid her breasts. She was shaking. In the most dire of her nightmares, she’d never imagined facing Devoir as an enemy, having given him so much cause to be furious with her. “I wasn’t going to shoot you.”

  At least, she didn’t think so. She hadn’t considered the matter in depth. “I don’t shoot old friends.”

  He tapped the pistol butt on the floor to knock the powder out and make the gun useless. “That’s reassuring.”

  “If I did, your colleagues would be on me like a pack of wolfhounds. Where are they, by the way?”

  “Here and there.” Pax wore the same dark clothes he’d had on in the afternoon, inconspicuous in the night. His hair was undisguised, pale as old ivory. He laid the gun aside. “Let’s see what other deadly things you’re carrying.”

  His voice was deep and gravelly from the slight damage she’d done to it earlier with the mélange de tabac. He set about plundering her cloak with intent, efficient motions. He was not, she thought, merry hearted and forgiving.

  “Knife,” he said, finding one. “And surprise, surprise, another knife.” He slipped that one from its sheath, admired it, then tossed both of them down beside the pistol. He began pulling four-inch pins from the seam of her cloak. “You’re a walking armory.”

  “I’m not generally. Weeks go by and I’m innocent of anything but one little penknife to cut package string. Most days, I couldn’t menace a stalk of asparagus.” Not being obvious about it, she felt along the shelves behind her. Books were of no use in this situation, but perhaps someone had left a pair of scissors. “I’m no longer carrying a little silver box full of ground pepper and snuff. That bolt has been shot, so to speak. There’s some wire you haven’t found yet. It’s in—”

  “Stop that.” He didn’t look up. He meant, stop searching the shelves, which he had somehow noticed her doing.

  There probably wasn’t anything to find anyway. She hugged herself close and awaited events. Was it a good sign that no one else from the British Service had popped in? Could Pax possibly be working alone? “How did you find me?”

  “I asked the pigeons.” He located the wire in the hem of her skirt and drew it out.

  “That’s not a weapon. Merely useful. And it’s the end of your discoveries. I don’t expect you to believe me, though.”

  “I don’t.”

  She was chilly with nothing but her shift between her and the night. Her nipples had drawn up tight, making little peaks against the linen. Cold and a bit painful. Also immodest. She covered up as well as she could. It was silly to think of modesty and impossible not to.

  He’d finished investigating her rolled dress and moved on to the pockets, showing no interest in breasts. “You have a penknife.” It hit the pile of knives and metal darts with a musical chink.

  “I’d forgotten that. Can’t think why. You never know when you’ll have to penknife somebody to death.” She could, in fact, kill someone with it if she had to. As Pax knew. “My father used to say the most deadly weapon is the human mind. I agree in principle, but I’d rather face a hundred philosophers than even one gun.”

  Pax was silent in response, a silence she’d call hostile and problematic.

  “Nice set of lockpicks.” He added them to the pile. “So. You weren’t quite disarmed.”

  “Picklocks aren’t weapons.”

  “You could poke my eyes out.”

  “I don’t need little iron sticks to do that.” She’d use her thumbs, as they’d been taught. They’d learned those lessons, the two of them sitting side by side, cross-legged in the dirt, in the courtyard of the Coach House.

  “I hope that completes the arsenal. I’m going to be irritated if I search you and find something else.” He pushed her clothes away and uncoiled upward and came toward her.

  He was fast. There was nowhere to retreat. He pushed her back against the shelves, his arm across her chest like an iron bar. Lines of wood dug in, up and down her spine.

  He snapped, “What does he want?”

  “Who?”

  “Try again.” His arm pushed the breath out of her. “What . . . does . . . he . . . want?”

  Smith. He meant Smith. “I don’t know.”

  “Keep lying and this will be a very short conversation. We’ll finish it at Meeks Street.”

  “Wait.” Her voice wavered at the edges. She steadied it. “Just . . . wait.”

  “Where is he? Why is he in London? What game are you two playing?”

  “No game. I’d rather stuff live rats in my shift than play games with that man. I’ve seen him precisely once. We didn’t exchange addresses.”

  “Why did you meet him?”

  His back was to the door and all the light. His face was hidden, utterly. She spoke to darkness and she told the truth. “About a week ago, I got a letter, a nasty little missive full of threats and blackmail. I came to London to meet the blackmailer. When you walked into that church, I thought it was you.”

  “Really?” The word fell like ice, arctic cold.

  “For six seconds. Acquit me of more stupidity than that. If you wanted something from me, you wouldn’t write letters. You’d track me down to a storeroom at the back of a bookstore and bark questions into my face. You’d half choke me while you were doing it.”

  He stopped pushing his arm into her chest and took her shoulders instead, shaping his hands to get well acquainted. “What’s he doing in London? What does he want?”

  This was not, perhaps, the moment to explain how much she knew about England’s secret codes. So she said, “I have no idea.”

  Pax’s thumbs twitched in the delicate indentation where collarbone met the bones of the shoulder. They’d been taught how to torture captives, starting there, where unbearable pain lay just below the surface. Their teachers had made sure they experienced that pain.


  She felt him carefully, deliberately, loosen his grip and slide his hands downward to manacle her arms.

  “Here’s good advice,” he said. “Don’t trust that man. Don’t believe anything he promises. And don’t lie to me.”

  She could feel anger inside him, like the dark orange coal in a hearth that flares into fire unexpectedly, all at once. She knew him in this mood. In the Coach House, Devoir used to sit up at night, staring into the dark, brooding, radiating this kind of tightly wrapped rage.

  He’d never let it loose. She wondered if he’d do so now. “Let’s talk first. You can hurt me later, if you still want to.”

  “I’m not hurting you. I’m not even making you nervous.”

  “I beg to differ.” Held this way, she couldn’t shrug, but he’d feel the twitch.

  Somewhere in the long years, Pax had become tall. She hadn’t needed to look so far up to talk to him when they were children. He’d been thin then. Now he had the stripped-down frame of someone who’d pushed himself relentlessly, too hard and too long.

  What did it say of a man that his hands were callused from fingertip to palm? That his forearms were wire-hard muscle under the skin? She read years of self-discipline in his body where it weighed, honed and hard, against her. There was no hint of compromise anywhere in the compendium of him.

  She’d fought Devoir on the practice field when they were children. He was stronger. She was faster. Sometimes he won. Sometimes she did. They’d slap the ground and stand up and begin again. If they fought now, she wouldn’t win without hurting him badly. She might not win even then.

  London was filled with amiable fools. It was a pity one of them hadn’t waylaid her. “This is pointless. You don’t have to extract information from me like a toothdrawer pulling teeth. Everything important is in that letter I sent to Meeks Street. Read it.”

  “It’s in code.”

  “Decipher it.” When the Fluffy Aunts came, they’d have it worked out in ten minutes. She wriggled inside his hold, against his body. “I haven’t been benign to you recently, but if I promise to be inoffensive for five or six minutes, will you give me enough space to scratch my nose?”

  “Bear the discomfort.”

  Supportez l’inconfort. C’est votre sacrifice à la Révolution. She remembered cold days, hungry nights. Hours in the bare training field, hurting with a dozen kinds of pain, body and mind. The Tuteurs said, “Bear the discomfort. It’s your sacrifice to the Revolution.”

  In those days, Devoir had been a rock of strength for all of them, endlessly strong, endlessly patient. She missed him. This stranger was no substitute.

  Paxton—most definitely he was Paxton, not Devoir—wrapped himself the whole length of her body, reading the tension of her muscle, ready to predict any attack before she made the first twitch. He was nicely graded force, intelligently applied. One must applaud.

  But any man on earth can be persuaded. A judicious mixture of lies and truth could work wonders. “You’re expecting great revelations. I’d rather you didn’t.”

  He made a disbelieving exhalation between his teeth. That eloquent, familiar noise. That was Devoir’s comment on so many of life’s small happenings.

  His grip loosened slightly. There was room to breathe.

  She said, “I will spill out everything I know in your lap in the hope you will lose interest in me. Shall I tell you the man you seek favors a British gun? A Mortimer, I think. He sounds like an Englishman and dresses like one, but he’s probably French. Police Secrète would be my guess. He knows too much about the Coach House for him to be anything else. He calls himself Smith.”

  “That’s not his name.”

  “My well-trained intellect had already come to that conclusion. Do you know your coat is wet?”

  “A little damp.”

  “You’re soaked. And now I am soaked. We’ll both catch pneumonia.” She shifted in the close confinement of his coat wrapped around her, aware of the edge of a lapel, the round buttons on his waistcoat, the smooth cloth of his trousers. His chest barely shifted with his breath. Otherwise, he was motionless as a wall. She was the one restless against him.

  She wasn’t wearing enough clothes to protect her from too much knowledge of his body. She felt everything through the linen of her shift. Her breasts, sensitive with the cold, shocked when she rubbed against his coat. Old friendship, old memories rose up. She knew him too well. Every touch against him was just on the edge of being familiar and feeling safe.

  There’s too much silence. I have to say something. But she was awash in sensation. It was a hot river flowing under her skin.

  I don’t want this. But part of her did.

  Fifteen

  A wise man comes to a negotiated truce with his cock.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  Pax’s hands closed convulsively. Not by his will. Not by his intent. He couldn’t help it.

  Vérité explored the confines of the hold he had on her, being irritated, talkative, and close to naked. Where she wasn’t soft skin, she was the slide of the thin cloth that barely wrapped her up. Her breasts grazed his chest, swift and startling. Her belly slipped across his. She was everything womanly—strength, softness, mystery. Since she was Vérité, she added a good dollop of deadly to the mixture.

  He had a cockstand the size of a pine tree.

  You don’t think of her that way, a voice inside him said.

  But he did.

  She’s not twelve anymore.

  He wanted her in the most straightforward, simple, earthy way. Maybe it had started when they stood facing each other in the church. Maybe before that, when he watched her cross Braddy Square in a long, lithe sweep of brown cloak. Maybe when she became exquisitely lethal and attacked him.

  Her hair brushed his face, tightly curled, glossy, feather soft, smelling of wood smoke and snuff. It grabbed him and pulled him into memory, into the years of the Coach House. In the stark dormitory under the rafters, two dozen starved, savage, brilliant children slept on mats on the floor, huddled together in the cold dark, sharing blankets. Vérité used to fit herself beside him, snuggled up to keep warm, her hair tickling his nose.

  The way it was doing right now. If he chose, he could lower his head to that bedlam of curls and breathe her in. He could sort through the waves and semicircles with his lips. He could drop his hold on her arms and put his hands to her breasts and run his thumbs across her nipples, back and forth, learning them by touch, feeling a miraculous response in them.

  He’d painted women clothed, naked, and at every stage in between. This was different. Vérité was more than an image made with pigments and brush. More than blended color and the fall of light. She was touch and smell and taste, breath, life, pulsing blood.

  He’d seen the dark fuzz between her legs through the linen of her shift. The image filled his mind. He imagined stroking that soft kitten. Touching Vérité, pleasing her, enticing her. Persuading her down into the straw.

  The unbearable sensuality of the image climbed out of his groin and plucked at every nerve in his body. His body tightened like iron bands.

  That wasn’t for him. Not with Vérité. Not with anyone.

  She gave an impatient, determined shove at his chest. “I can’t talk like this. You’re just bullying me. I’m not trying to run.” Her voice came up, muffled, from the region of his cravat. His coat was pushed aside where she twisted against him. Any minute now, she was going to brush up against his cock.

  Then she did exactly that. She gave one startled jerk and went absolutely still. He felt her vibrate with her heartbeat.

  She whispered, “Let me go. I said I’d tell you what you want to know.”

  If he didn’t let go of her now, he might not be able to.

  He opened his hands and stepped away and away, keeping an eye on her, till he felt the storeroom door at his back. He reached behind him to open it and let more light in.

  She didn’t try to hide herself. She kept her arms at her sides, her fists clench
ed. Her skin was pale as milk in this weak light, a sketch in pastel, laid down in thin shades of color. She looked scared and sneaky and determined. A warrior maiden, utterly indomitable in a shift that didn’t cover half of her.

  She was beautiful. Add that to the list of complications.

  She was also cold. He’d dragged her out of her warm nest and left her shivering in the damp air.

  He gathered up her cloak from the floor and tossed it to her across the space between them.

  “Thank you.” Gravely, she organized it in her hands, turned it right side out. “There are some complications it is better to ignore.”

  That was Vérité, being direct.

  “I intend to,” he said.

  “Then we both shall. Why are we still alone? I keep expecting your friends to arrive in a great thumping vehemence. I don’t hear them.”

  “They’re waiting outside.”

  “So you came to take me alone. That was either a mistake or very subtle. I don’t think you make many mistakes.” She circled the cloak around her and was enveloped in darkness. Only her face showed and her feet, white and vulnerable against the wood floor. “This is better. Ask your questions.”

  She didn’t look at where his cock was hidden under his coat, being obstreperous.

  It wasn’t that easy for him to ignore what his body demanded and demanded.

  He thought, You can’t have her. But the corridors of his mind were crowded with old choices, clamoring to be reconsidered. The rules for every other woman on earth didn’t apply to Vérité.

  I want her. That was the path to madness and beauty. I could convince her. She knows what I am and I could still convince her.

  He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Deliberately, he ran his hand into his sleeve and found the old burn scar on his forearm. The skin was thin there. The surface of the scar felt nothing. Beneath that, there was no protection against pain. It lurked there, waiting for the slightest touch.

  He dug his nails in deep, found pain, and held on to it till he was in a place clean of thought and feeling. Till the universe narrowed to a single cold, spiked, dark point.