The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(79)

I wasn’t holding her anymore. I was blank, in shock, trying quickly to catch up. No. That was a lie, and I knew it. But there had been something wrong with the way Holmes had gone about all of this from the moment we’d touched down in Berlin, and all my exhausted heart could do was hope that August had come to the wrong conclusions.

“My brother is meeting us there,” Holmes said. “We need to speak to my father, and then we all need to go. Immediately. All three of us.”

She turned from him, burying her face in the cloth of my coat. August pulled a notebook from his pocket; he turned it over in his hands. And me? I felt so thoroughly betrayed, so abandoned, that I hardly knew what to think. She was holding on to me like she thought it was the last time I’d let her.

And if she’s kept all this from me, maybe it should be, I thought, and stared out the darkened window, waiting for the first lights of London to appear.

WE TOOK A CAB TO THE TRAIN, AND THE TRAIN DOWN TO Eastbourne, and a black car from the station up to her family’s estate. There was snow on the ground, a dusting of it that turned and turned in the wind. We weren’t speaking to each other. None of us. I didn’t know what to say to August, especially now, and I didn’t try. As for Holmes, she’d disappeared into her magician’s trunk and swallowed the key. There wouldn’t be any prying her out, not until the big reveal.

I thought I knew what it might be. I hoped I was wrong.

The house came into view at the end of the drive, and beside me, I heard August draw a sharp breath. He hadn’t been back here since the night he had Lucien deliver his latest shipment of coke. This was the last place he’d been August Moriarty.

It didn’t seem to register for Holmes. She sat between us, hands folded in her lap. Her jaw was set. “You need to decide what we do with Hadrian and Phillipa,” she said to August.

“I thought you’d made that Milo’s call.”

“Greystone is keeping them subdued. I want you to decide what happens next.”

“Can’t we ask Milo his opinion?”

Without looking, Holmes pointed out the window. “He isn’t here,” she said. “Ours are the only tracks in the drive. Things are about to happen very quickly. Make a decision. Or else I will.”

August sighed. “It’s difficult, Charlotte. That’s my brother. My sister. I don’t know.”

“Dammit, August, Milo will have them killed. That’s what happened to Bryony. All right? What do you want? Make a decision!”

The car began to turn down onto the long drive, but Holmes told the driver to stop. August sat stunned and unspeaking.

Holmes took a breath. “Fine,” she said, measured again, and leaned over me to pull the door handle. “I’ll do it my way. The way I’ve wanted to all along. God help me—

“Watson, get out.”

“What are you—”

She pushed me, and I stumbled out onto the gravel on my hands and knees. Holmes followed, and before she slammed the door on August’s face, I heard her say, “You always sit back and let someone else be the monster. Hadrian. Lucien. Me, as a matter of fact, but it stops now. Let’s go.”

I knelt there, on the ground, in disbelief. I’d never seen her do anything that cruel. Never, at least, to me. Even now, she was stepping over me, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her throat, and instead of heading down the drive, she took off down the salted path that cut through her house’s backyard. Careful, even in her haste, to keep from leaving footsteps in the snow.

Behind me, August clambered out of the car and offered me a hand up. “Do we follow her?” he asked.

I was brushing the gravel off of my knees. “What do you think?”

We weren’t as careful as she’d been not to leave footprints, though I tried. Even now the light was fading, at four o’clock in the afternoon, and behind us and down the cliffs to the sea, the water raged against the rocky shore. Holmes didn’t once glance back at us. She moved quickly through the grounds, head down, keeping to the stands of bare trees and bushes, until she reached the house. The woodpile was there, the one I’d worked with Leander, my ax still standing upright in its fallen log.

It didn’t interest her, not in the slightest. The basement windows did, low to the ground, and Holmes was pulling a metal pick out from the inside pocket of her coat. She studied its sharpened edge for a moment before jamming it into the top of the window frame, pulling it free from its hinges. I was at her heels, then, and she handed it up to me.

“You didn’t tell Milo about this access point?” August asked, behind me.

“If he’s worth his salt, twelve alarms are going off at Greystone right now.” She dusted off her hands. “Come on.”

Down into a storage room, all rakes and hoes and storage bins, and through the door into a room that looked like it’d been used as a training ring. For combat, maybe, or for something else, but there was a dirt ring in the middle of the floor lined with tape. On the walls were knives and wooden staffs, a set of fencing foils, a pistol with the orange plastic ring around its mouth that meant it was a toy. Did Alistair use it when training his daughter to disarm an enemy? Black ribbons hung from a pipe, thick enough to be blindfolds, and below that were coils of rope, a wooden chair with its seat cut out. I didn’t look too closely. After all my wild curiosity, the years I spent as a boy dreaming of the training I could get from the Holmes family in spying and deduction, how I could be transformed into a weapon at their hands, and here it was, the proof. When I’d asked him for training, my father had given me spy novels to read, but Alistair and Emma had put their children through their paces until they gleamed like blades.