Strike at Midnight(88)
“That’s right,” he said, then he squeezed his eyes tight before looking at me again. “I’m sorry for deceiving you about Emily living down on the docks, about everything.” He sniffed and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Part of me thought that you could actually find my brother, even if I was here for different reasons. I thought maybe you could follow his trail so I could be released from Piper’s service. I’m so sorry.” He whispered the last part, and it almost broke my heart. The words I needed to say were stuck in my throat, but I coughed as if to clear an invisible blockage and let them spill out.
“He’s dead, Rem.”
My words didn’t seem to register with him at first, but then his face crumpled. Marcel acted quickly and grabbed the cup out of Rem’s hands as he let it go. A wail came out of his mouth and Melody caught the poor kid in an embrace.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to do. “Piper said that he had an accident on his horse. He broke his neck.”
The details were necessary, and he needed to understand that his brother’s death had been accidental and quick. But that didn’t make me feel any less of a bitch for saying them.
His sobs were crippling as I watched him cry into Melody’s shoulder like a babe, and I had to look away as she tried to comfort him with her arms and her soothing words.
Marcel stood up and came up beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and that was the only thing that kept me rooted to the spot. He was hurting too and needed the contact otherwise, I would have been out of the door with rage and banging down Peacock’s door.
Lord Peacock might not have had anything to do with the death of Rem’s brother, but he was the only one among all this mess who wasn’t either dead or tied up.
“I’m sorry, Rem,” I whispered, and I closed my eyes to the sounds of his grief. This shit needed to end, and after all the emotional crap over the past few days, I was done with feeling so much.
Fuck it. Fuck it all to damn hell. Peacock was going down, the duke was going to be found, and I was going to go back to my sorrowful existence of self-pity and hunting down simple criminals for coin. I wasn’t any more than this, and I wasn’t a person who deserved a happy ending.
It was time I put any flickering notions of that to rest, once and for all.
*
It was early morning when I finally woke up from my brief sleep after we had managed to settle Rem down in Marcel’s room. We had told him that he could stay with us a bit longer until we worked it all out, and Melody and Marcel had stayed with him while he slept.
It was sweet of them, and I had been happy to leave them to it before heading up to my own room and discarding an alcohol-induced sleep. I didn’t want a peaceful rest, and I wanted to wake up as soon as I was able so I could confront Lord Peacock.
My head was still sore from being whacked over the head with something hard enough to knock me out, and after some investigation beneath my locks, I had found dried blood. After a short deliberation, I decided to just tie my hair back and have a quick wash before getting dressed in my hunting clothes. I wasn’t vain enough to give Peacock the time to leave his home for his daily activities, so I left the inn after a swift cleanup.
I appreciated the walk to the part of the city where Lord Peacock lived. It helped me to come around to fully awake status without the aid of coffee, and it helped clear my head a little.
We couldn’t just chuck Rem out on the street after what had happened, and I knew Marcel would feel the same way. So now we had two additional horses to look after and another mouth to feed. That was if Rem wanted to stay. But after last night, I doubted the kid wanted to be on his own. It was going to need some serious discussion, and it was one that needed to wait for a few hours.
All that shit with the prince was starting to feel a lot less threatening this morning, and I felt that my feelings for him were starting to fit a little better. Not enough for me to even think of him sacrificing a part of who he was to be wed to someone like me, but enough for me to have been allowed the pleasure of knowing such a man.
Through our brief conversations—and the way he had made me feel with his sweet opinions and lack of judgment of me—I was happy that I had at least gotten to know him and to understand that there were good people in the world of the nobility. Even if he was a little ignorant to the bigger picture around him.
He would make a great ruler if allowed to be, and hopefully, he had been given some insight into the happenings of his kingdom through meeting me if nothing else.
A sigh escaped my lips along with the dreams of being married to such a man. It was fantasy, not reality, and this case had made it more evident in which world I belonged. It made me realize that I was someone who was used to surviving, and that was my security blanket. Just like it had been for Rem when he thought he was working off his brother’s debt. We didn’t think about grand plans or long-term desires because it was all about getting through the day and making it to the next. That was what life for us was all about, as grim as that sounded, but that was what made us get through the days. I just needed my heart to catch up with my rationalization of it all, then hopefully it could all go back to how it was before.
Lord Peacock didn’t live on his lands—even if he had any left after his gambling escapades—but he did own a house in the most prestigious part of the city.