Her face changed, tightened, and she hissed, “But you took everything else! Do you think it works that way? I might have pointed the gun at my head, but you’re the one who put the bullets in it! Do you think a woman can give a man everything while still withholding her heart? We are not made that way!”
“I asked for nothing.”
“And gave nothing,” she spat. “Do you know how it feels to realize that the one person you’ve entrusted with your heart has none?”
“Why are you here, Fiona? To show me you have a new lover? To beg to return to my bed? It’s full, and always will be. To apologize for trying to destroy the one chance I had by killing her?”
“The one chance you had for what?” I pounced on it immediately. Getting angry at her for nearly killing me hadn’t been about me at all but about the fact that I was somehow his one chance at something?
Fiona looked at me sharply, then at Barrons, and began to laugh. “Ah, such delicious absurdity! She still doesn’t know. Oh, Jericho! You never change, do you? You must be so afraid—” Abruptly, her mouth parted on a sudden inhalation, her face froze, and she sank to the ground, looking startled and confused. Her hands fluttered upward but did not achieve their destination. She crumpled limply to the pavement.
I stared. There was a knife buried deep in her chest, straight through her heart. Blood welled around it. I’d not even seen Barrons throw it.
“I assume she came with a message,” he said coldly, to one of the guards.
“The Lord Master awaits that one.” The guard nodded toward me. “He said it is her final chance.”
“Remove that”—Barrons glanced at Fiona—”from my alley.”
She was still unconscious, but she wouldn’t remain that way long. Her flesh was laced with enough Unseelie that not even a knife through her heart would kill her. The dark Fae in her blood would heal the injuries. It would take my spear to kill what she was now. Or whatever weapon Barrons had used on the Fae Princess. But his knife sure had succeeded in shutting her up.
What had she been about to say? What didn’t I know that Barrons might be afraid I’d find out? What “delicious absurdity”?
I glanced up at “my wave,” the one I’d chosen to carry me through this dangerous sea. I felt like a child plucking daisy petals: I trust him, I trust him not, I trust him, I trust him not.
“And you can tell Darroc,” said Barrons, “that Ms. Lane is mine. If he wants her, he can bloody well come and get her.”
I went straight to both gas fireplaces the next morning, lit them, and turned them up as high as they would go.
I’d had the dream about the beautiful cold woman again. She was alone, something was very wrong with her, but deeper than her physical pain was the suffering in her soul. I’d wept in my dream, and my tears had turned into ice crystals on my cheeks. She’d lost something of such importance that she no longer cared to live.
As usual, I’d woken iced to the bone. Not even a scalding shower had eased the chill. I hate being cold. Now that I’d remembered I’d been having this dream all my life, I also recalled dashing from my bed as a little girl, with frozen feet and chattering teeth, running for the warm comfort of my daddy’s arms. I remembered him wrapping me in blankets and reading to me. He’d put on his “pirate voice,” although in retrospect I have no idea why, and say, Ahoy, matey: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold …”
And as Sam McGee had grown hot enough to sizzle on his funeral pyre, I’d shivered myself warm in my daddy’s arms, thrilled by the madness of moiling for gold in the Arctic, dragging the corpse of a friend behind on a sled, to burn on the marge of Lake LaBarge and keep a promise made to the dead.
As I warmed my hands before the fire, I could hear Barrons through the adjoining door, in his study, speaking angrily to someone on the phone.
We’d exchanged a total of eight words last night, after he’d knifed Fiona.
I’d looked up at him as he unlocked the back door, considering all kinds of questions.
He’d pushed the door open and waited for me to walk in, beneath his arm, looking down at me, his gaze mocking.
“What? No questions, Ms. Lane?”
I’d pulled a Barrons and said coolly, “Good night, Barrons.”
Soft laughter had followed me up the stairwell. There’d been no point in questions. I wasn’t one for exercises in futility.
I heated a cup of water in the microwave behind the counter and added three heaping teaspoons of instant coffee. I opened the utensil drawer. “Damn.” I was out of sugar, and there was no cream in the fridge. It’s the simple pleasures that have come to mean the most to me.