I’D DONE SOME STUPID THINGS IN MY LIFE. SELFISH THINGS. The occasional well-intentioned thing that still nearly got me killed.
That made this a hat trick, then.
The issue wasn’t Holmes. Or the issue was Holmes, and the issue was also Elizabeth. And fear. And sleep deprivation, and being utterly in the dark and out of control while also knowing that (a) she’d been keeping things from me, again, when not two hours ago she was apologizing for that very thing while (b) my now very firmly ex-girlfriend had the sort of bickering session with Lucien Moriarty’s illicit daughter one would expect from a pair of divorcees while (c) my kid sister was somewhere held captive and who knew what was happening to her and (d) Lucien Moriarty himself was probably stalking these corridors, looking to end me, while (e) I, the utter idiot, couldn’t think clearly about any of this, couldn’t make a plan, could only hear the heavy beating of my blood and (f) lash out at Holmes out of fear (because nothing had changed, nothing) and then I’d wanted to do the thing my old therapist had told me about walking away and calming down, and (g)—I was at (g) already, wasn’t I, I had frittered away minutes in this hallway when I could have apologized and been done with it already, and still, even when I turned to put my hand on the doorknob, I knew it was already too late.
By now, I knew the sound a gun made as it was being cocked.
“Going somewhere?” Lucien Moriarty said behind me.
Some distant part of me thought, He’s been waiting years to say that to someone. The rest of me was screaming.
“Hands up,” he said. He’d lost the Welsh accent in favor of his own, and it was unnerving to hear a voice not unlike August’s arranging my execution.
“Okay,” I said, obeying. Like a fool. How could he even see me? The hallway was pitch black.
“Dad,” Anna was saying, somewhere farther away. “Dad, what do you need me to do?”
“A flashlight, girl.”
The cinder block wall in front of me went fluorescent.
“Turn. Slowly.”
I did, flinching as my eyes adjusted. Lucien, in silhouette, and still I could see his cut lip, his two black eyes. His hands around a pistol. An explosion of light from behind him that had to come from his daughter’s phone.
“On your knees,” he said, and I lowered myself painfully to the floor.
“Dad?” Anna said, and this time, she sounded terrified.
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?
“But it got muddy, didn’t it. It got muddy when he came to work for my family. All this began there. Not with the drugs in the car, not with my stupid crush. It started when August walked through our front door. When he started playing politics. Because it was a political decision, wasn’t it? He wanted a favor from my father. My father, whose last name made him nobler than you, no matter what terrible things he’d done. In the eyes of the world, you and your family would always be less than. Because you were a Moriarty.”
“Brilliant,” Lucien said, hoarsely. I wished I could see his face. “How much did you pay for that psychology course?”
“I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about it,” Holmes was saying. “I’ve had some time to put it together. I know, for instance, why you’ve turned a corner since August has died. Oh, sure, fucking with me was your hobby, but before his death it was never your full-time job. Bryony Downs? You encouraged her with a few phone calls, then let her do the rest. Hadrian and Phillipa? You don’t trust either of them enough to tie your shoes, much less kill me. And poisoning my mother—that you arranged on your own, I’m sure of it, but you didn’t stir yourself to do it. But look at us now. All together, one happy family. Honestly, Lucien—marrying Watson’s mother? Kidnapping his sister? That’s grandstanding, and you know it.”
“Grief does that to a man,” Lucien said. I couldn’t believe that he was still standing there, listening to her; I couldn’t believe I was still alive.
“Of course you’re grieving,” Holmes snapped. “Grief doesn’t make you chuck over your whole life to go hunt down a teenage girl at her boarding school. No, it’s more than that.
“I think you were happy when you thought August was dead. I think you were relieved. You could put him back up on his pedestal—no more of his pesky little life choices, clouding up the narrative. You could make him a saint again.
“And when he died the second time, on the Holmeses’ estate, by a Holmes’s hand, you saw a way to rewrite the story. A girl like me? A villain like me? I was an opportunity. What if the Moriartys were the victims all along? What if—horror of horrors—they were the heroes?”
“Shut your mouth,” Lucien snarled, and I knew, then, that she’d won.
And that her victory didn’t matter, not at all.
Because he was going to kill me, quite literally, at her feet. To make a point. As though I were a bag of garbage he needed to spill out on the ground.
I guess I won’t be going to prison, then, I thought. I wanted badly, then, to look up at Holmes, to see what she was thinking, but I was too afraid to move my head.
A SCUFFLING SOUND. A DOOR OPENING. “GIRL,” LUCIEN was saying, and I could make out a small figure next to him, a bag over her head. “Come here.” When she didn’t move, he said, again, “Come,” and for a moment, his flashlight beam blinked off, and we were in darkness.
“Faster,” Lucien was saying.
The world sharpened slightly around me. Something had changed. Something small. A click. Where had it come from? From behind me?
Was it just wishful thinking?
Maybe it was, because Lucien hadn’t heard it. “Take the gun from the holster on my hip,” he said to the girl, and he clicked his flashlight on, its light trained on the floor.
Why did Lucien need two guns?
In that small moment of distraction, Holmes dropped something small and hard onto my legs. The backs of my calves, specifically, which were out of Lucien’s sight. She tapped her foot on the floor, once, in confirmation. She wanted me to know that she had done what she had done on purpose.
“Bring the gun to Charlotte,” Lucien told the girl, and she did. Slowly, with dragging steps, and as she came closer, I could feel my vision start to go. I had assumed, dully, that he had dragged out Anna again—but this girl was smaller. Slighter. Was she? Was I just imagining things?
All I knew was that she had on a pair of gray Converses with mismatched laces—one pink, one green.
My sister, Shelby, had shoes like that.
“Holmes,” I said, low, and she said, “Watson. I know.”
“Shut up,” Lucien said, and I saw then that he was shaking. “Don’t talk! Neither of you says a word, or this ends the fast way. Now, Shelby.” Lucien lifted his gun so that it was pointed at Holmes. His flashlight ran over my face, my shoulders.
The backs of my legs.
I caught my breath.
Shelby paused. She paused. And she handed Holmes the gun and backed away, backlit, that gunnysack over her head like a girl playing a game, like a demon from a story.
“Kneel,” Lucien said. “Now, girl. At my feet.”
I couldn’t help it—I made a horrible, inarticulate sound.
“Charlotte. Keep the gun pointed to the ceiling. This is how we’re going to do this,” Lucien said. “You’ll follow my directions, or I’ll shoot the girl right here. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Holmes said, steadily.
“Take three steps to your left. Keep the gun pointed up. Good. Turn. Back toward the boy. That’s it. And the gun should be—ah, I see you’ve guessed it already. Clever girl. The gun should be pointed at little Shelby’s head.”
I couldn’t help it—I wrenched my head around to stare at Holmes. I needed the confirmation. Her pale face, the long line of her arms, the pistol at the end of them.
Lucien laughed, softly. “You’ve been so quiet, Jamie. You don’t have any questions for me?”
“Holmes,” I said. “Holmes—please. Lucien. You don’t want this. You don’t. You can just have her—you can have her shoot me.”
“You?” he asked, idly.
I swallowed and plowed on. “Wouldn’t that be worse? Her killing her best friend? Like, if you wanted to punish her—or me—”
“We are done,” Lucien snarled, “guessing at my motives. We only have a minute, you know. But you know? I’ll humor you. I am punishing you. How about, even if you get out of this, somehow, your life will still be utterly ruined? How about, you’ll spend every night wondering what you could have done to save your sister’s life?
“Try this—how about, how your mother is doing, back in the hotel room, crying over how her son is the kind of delinquent who beats up his new stepfather in a restaurant bathroom? No questions about what she’ll say when they find your body here and haul away your ex-girlfriend in irons for this? She’ll have no one to shelter her. No sympathetic parents, no brother, no Watsons to take her in. No money. No one but herself.” He hummed a little. “I’m hoping to use my influence to get Charlotte committed, you know. I know this wonderful little hospital in D.C. that might be able to help her—I’ve been setting up a room for her there. Not a lot in it, truth be told, but then again, she won’t need all that much—”
“No,” I said, my skin crawling. “I don’t have any questions for you.” I wasn’t going to go out listening to Lucien Moriarty monologue. And even if Holmes had come up with some kind of escape plan, if she had dropped a pistol or a knife or a bomb for me to use to get us out of this, I couldn’t reach for it without Lucien gunning Shelby down first.
Maybe I wasn’t brave enough to try.
That was that, then.
“Shelby,” I said, desperately, “it’s okay—”
“Don’t speak to her,” Lucien said, “or I will kill all three of you. You have a minute, Charlotte. James, you have permission to change your girlfriend’s mind. It’s Shelby’s life, or hers.”
I couldn’t see well, it was true. The light from the phone flattened the world out, made it bright, took its detail away. Holmes looked like an illustration. A black-and-white sketch. Her long black sleeves, her shaking white hands, the gun. She had pointed it right between my eyes.
I was close enough to see that she had bitten her lip through completely.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey. It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she whispered. “Of course it’s not.”
“It will be. You’re going to be okay.”
Holmes shook her head tightly. “Me? We are not talking about me—”
“We are,” I said. “We are. Holmes, I can’t make this decision. I’m not deciding between the two of you. I don’t—I can’t—whatever you choose—the hard part’s almost over.”
She was still shaking her head. “I knew this would happen. What’s the point of knowing if you can’t stop it?”
Shelby wavered back and forth on her knees.
“No. Hey. You couldn’t have changed this. Don’t worry—”
“I’m not worried about me, Jamie,” she said. “I’m sorry—”
“It’s better like this. You have control over it, this way. I’m sure—you know where to shoot, right? So that it’s over quickly. For Shelby.” I swallowed. “So that—that’s better. It’s better. See?”
“You think I’d let her die.”
“I don’t know what I think, I can’t think—”
“I should have told you to run,” she whispered.
I laughed a little at that. What else was I to do? “I think you did. But I’m kind of stubborn when it comes to you.”
She nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut.
When she opened them again, I could see that she was furious.
“This is as bad as it gets,” she said to me, and it was almost like she was giving me an order. “The hard part’s almost over.”
This is as bad as it gets.
Lucien snorted. “Adorable. Are you finished?”
The hard part’s almost over.
“Just to be clear,” Holmes said, her voice thick, “what exactly will happen when I refuse to shoot her?”
“I’ll take care of you,” he said, his gaze flickering over to her. “Then Shelby. Don’t think I’d be so stupid to keep my eyes off you for a—”
He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. In the second his eyes were off me, I’d grabbed the pistol Holmes had dropped onto my legs and fired off two shots into the darkness.
One went through the door, into the room with all the bicycles. It narrowly missed clipping Shelby’s shoulder. In that final second, kneeling there in the hallway, my world had narrowed to be so small, so claustrophobic, that I’d forgotten she was kneeling there. But she wasn’t hurt. Only startled enough to scream, to drop her phone, to pull the bag off her head.
Because it wasn’t Shelby at all. It was Anna Morgan-Vilk, kneeling there in my sister’s shoes, where her father had just offered her up as an honor killing.
My other bullet went into Lucien Moriarty’s leg.
It was a lucky shot. I had never fired a gun before.
He was screaming. He had gone down, hard, and he was screaming, and God, I couldn’t think. Did he still have his gun? No, I thought, Holmes would have gotten it, and I had gone down to my hands and knees on the linoleum, my stomach heaving, my vision gone. Or was that the lights? I wanted to pass out, and there was so much noise in my ears, maybe from the gunshot—I tried to reorient myself—
Fast footsteps, coming toward me.
I scrabbled back against the wall, put my hands up. Anna? Was it Anna? Was she coming to finish the job?
My eyes focused.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth, in her school blazer.
“Lena called the police,” she said, crouching down beside me. She reached out to take my hand, but I jerked away from her. I couldn’t be touched just then. I couldn’t even look at her—I was staring up into the ceiling, Holmes’s pistol in my hands. Elizabeth reached out and clicked the safety back on. “Jamie, it’s okay. Look. Look, I have Lucien’s gun too. I have them both. See? Do you hear me?”
I nodded.
She kept talking, trying to reassure me. “It’s okay. Anna was supposed to keep an eye on me, that’s why I was down here, but she flipped out when she saw her dad, and I managed to text Lena from my pocket and she said that Shepard’s coming, he should be here any second, she had this plan with pulleys and like a feather duster and I think she’s really mad that she didn’t get to do it? But it’s okay, it’s okay, Shepard I guess said he was waiting to hear that—that—”
She had turned to look at Holmes, who had, for the last few minutes, been quietly bleeding on the ground.