The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(78)

That made two of us.

Lucien took a step forward. Another. He held the gun steady. “Now,” he said, not three feet away, “we’ll just wait. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

And, just like that, the door behind me opened.

“Lucien,” Holmes said. She stepped forward, close enough that I could feel her looming over me.

He kept the gun trained on my face. “Do you want to skip the formalities, then, and go right to the conversation?”

“Which conversation?” she asked, levelly. “The one where I apologize for what I did to August? Again? You could have just called. Or blackmailed my parents. Again. As that worked so well the last time.”

“Did it,” he said.

I could hear the smirk in Holmes’s voice. “It got your idiot brother killed, didn’t it? A win in my book.”

Anna’s light wobbled wildly. I shut my eyes against it, against Holmes maligning August, even though I knew she didn’t mean it.

“Girl,” Lucien snapped at Anna, without turning around. “Keep your hands steady.”

“You could turn back on the lights,” Holmes said. “Though I imagine you want a certain amount of drama for this . . . confrontation.”

“You always have this need to mouth off.” He sucked on his cut lip. “He used to tell me about that, when he’d call on the train back from your house. He’d go back to that awful bedsit in Eastbourne, that was all he could afford on the pittance your father paid him, and he would call me, eating beans from a tin, and say, It was like she was raised by wolves.” I kept myself from startling. Lucien was a wicked mimic. He had all of it: August’s strangled sincerity, his doubt. “He’d say, She doesn’t understand authority. She thinks she’s some ultimate power. She’s so smart, but she’s a hazard to herself. And then he’d go back to working on his dissertation. That was it. That was his sad little apprenticeship. Him paying his dues. I should have just supported him, but he wanted the damn job. Thought your father could help him find a university lectureship, that maybe he could make some calls—” Lucien’s eyes narrowed. “My brother. He’d always been like that. So determined to prove his mettle, be better than his name. In some ways, I have to think he had it coming.”

“Did he,” Holmes said, like an echo.

“Anyone that trusting? It’s willful. It isn’t instinct. They’re overriding their animal sense. But then, mine has told me from the beginning that you’re a dog that needs to be put down, and still here we are, aren’t we? With you still alive.”

“Are you done bloviating?” Holmes asked him, and Anna’s phone wobbled again. “Do you need me to hold that for you—what’s he calling you? Girl?”

“Give me the phone, Anna,” Lucien said, holding his hand out to her, “and go fetch our little surprise.”

She stumbled forward, pressing it into his hand, and there was a second’s reprieve from the light before Lucien held the phone up himself. I could hear her footsteps down the hall.

“Where were we?” Holmes was asking, her voice like tempered steel. “Was this the part where you were pretending that you hated your brother? That you think he deserved what was coming to him? It’s rather funny, you know, it’s been quite some time since I’ve been around someone who’s so thoroughly erased their tells. Your face doesn’t give anything away. I imagine that’s all the political training? Good job, you. You might as well be reading me the phone book.”

“I’m so happy you approve,” he growled.

“Yes, very nice work. Your gaze never wavers, you never look to either side; even your eyelids are controlled. No blinking out of turn. Your hands, as well. Very steady, and of course you don’t shuffle your feet, you aren’t a child.” Even now I could hear her satisfaction, in the pleasure she found—even now, even despite everything—in reading him. “It makes it all the more impressive that your feelings are still so transparent.”

“Remind me why I’m listening to you,” Lucien said. “Remind me why I haven’t just shot you down.”

Holmes sighed. “Because you’ve had years of opportunity, and made the decision to toy with me instead. This last year I was sending up flares, Lucien, you could have ended me at any moment. No. This is different. This is about justice, isn’t it? This was about thinking you’d lost August only to discover that he was alive . . . and then you lost him a second time. Because of me.”

The flashlight wavered. Very, very slightly.

My head was beginning to ache. I squinted against the light, shifted my weight slightly from knee to knee. Tried to focus on the pain to keep from thinking.

Holmes was just warming up. “All this? It’s you making the kind of world you want. It’s interesting, one would think from your actions that you were entirely amoral, and yet all along, you’ve been living by your own code. It was all fine, wasn’t it, when we were playing our prescribed parts? Hadrian and Phillipa, your not-as-bright siblings, tedious but useful, in their way; you, young master of the universe, running Britain’s government behind the curtain; and August, your brother, the innocent. August living a life of the mind. August obsessed with maths—can you think of a thing more pure? A thing further away from your dirty dealings?