The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (28 page)

Rachel’s face was a mask of distress. “Sebastian! Don’t do this. Don’t pull away. Not again.” She reached out to touch him, but he blocked her hands with his.

“Wait,” he said. “Stop. You have to listen to me. It doesn’t matter that I built that chapel. I
didn’t
do right by your sister. I wronged her. Wronged her in the worst way.”

“What way? What are you talking about?”

He sat up, turning his face away, clawing his fingers into the coverlet. “I killed her.”

“
What
?” Rachel sat up, too.

“I caused her death,” he said. “It’s the same thing. Don’t you wonder why no one gave you details of what exactly happened the night she died? Hasn’t it occurred to you there was a secret we all were keeping?”

She took a few panting breaths. And then, to his utter shock, she put her hands over his, interlacing their fingers. “Enough secrets, then, Sebastian,” she said. “I’m tired of learning this in bits and pieces, dragging it out of each of you in turn. Tell me the whole of it. Tell me now.”

He looked at her fingers covering his. The sight sent a rush of unfamiliar emotion through him. There was fear in it, but also something that felt vaguely like hope.

But once he told her everything, she would let go.

The whole surface of skin prickled. He felt as if he were floating upwards, out of his body.

“It was my fault,” he said. There, he’d said it. And he needed to say all of it. There could be no stopping now. “Do you remember the name Robert Ehlert? The man we told you about, the man Victoire seduced to her side?”

“Of course I remember. The great English spy. The traitor who betrayed Sarah.”

“I knew him, Rachel. Knew him very well. Mawbry assigned me to him after we all finished at Cambridge, and Ehlert trained me, taught me everything about the Game. What your tutor Mr. Rapson was to you, Ehlert was to me. We worked together for years.”

“And why does that make you guilty? Because you didn’t realize when he turned? You missed the chance to stop him? If he was as skilled at his work as you say he was, he knew how to lie to you.”

“It’s worse than that, believe me. On the last mission we worked together—at least, the last mission on which I was fool enough to
believe
we were working together—he said he’d uncovered a group of smugglers in Vigo, Spaniards of French descent. They were bringing in French weapons, he said, to help take the city from inside if Napoleon succeeded in invading.” The words began to roll more quickly, but they tasted bitter as poison on his tongue. “One of those smugglers was a baker by trade. He had a daughter named Marie, just seventeen years old. A remarkably pretty thing, but shy. Rather lonely. Or so I believed.”

He faltered, but Rachel still had his hands in hers, tightening them until he could feel both their pulses beat. He wanted to stop. But he had to tell her, and it would be best to do it quickly.

“So I set out to charm the girl,” he made himself say. “I told her my cover story, that I was a Dutch merchant eager to know which powers might hold sway in Spain—to protect my trade and cargo, nothing more. I used all my usual tricks, getting her to tell me things she’d overheard her father discussing with visitors to the house. Names, places. Nothing terribly detailed, but one learns to extract maximum use from very little. She was utterly unwitting, so I thought.”

“So you thought.” Rachel’s eyes were grave. No doubt she could guess the next part.

“I told her I was mad for her. Whisked her into the alleyway for kisses, that sort of thing. To muddle her thinking. To secure her loyalty. She began to sneak down at night to listen to her father and his comrades, so she told me, to pass their secrets to me. I felt quite triumphant.”

He had to shut his eyes.

“She said she wanted more from me as well,” he said. “She made me promise to come to her bedchamber one night, and I was more than pleased to comply. She was lovely, after all. Her father was gone for the night, and their old housekeeper was stone deaf, so I planned to search the house once I’d worn her out and she was asleep. She stole some apricot brandy from her father’s stores, and plied me with it, in her innocent way. We were half-undressed before I began to feel the dizziness, before I realized things were not at all what they seemed.”

“She drugged you.”

“Yes.”

“Her father put her up to it?”

“That man was no more her father than he was mine.
Marie
, I was to learn, had been an agent of the French for years already, in Madrid mostly—following in the footsteps of her father and brothers, all of them come there from Paris. Young as she looked, she was in fact well into her twenties, and had already sent a dozen men to their graves. She’d planted herself in Vigo, playing the part of innocent girl, for one purpose and one purpose only: the destruction of two English spies. Particularly difficult English spies.”

Rachel drew in a heavy breath. “You and Sarah?”

“Yes.” His throat began to close. “And she had personal motive as well. Her real father and brothers we’d met already. I’d intercepted the cipher that implicated them, and Sarah translated it. They died because of us.”

“Dear Lord.” Rachel lifted her forthright gaze to his. “The girl—she was Victoire de Laurent.”

“Yes.” He could see that room as clearly as if he were still standing in it. Smell that apricot brandy—which he realized too late had just an edge of bitterness beneath the sickly sweet. That lovely, golden-haired girl smiling at him, so very gleeful as he began to stumble, as he had to grab at furniture to keep himself from falling.

“Then tell me the rest,” said softly.

He took a great rattling breath. “I found myself on the floor, on my knees, barely able to hold up my head. So Victoire held it up for me, pulling me up by my hair. Her manner changed completely in those moments. Even before she hissed the truth in my ear, I realized who she truly was, and why she hated me so. She’d laid a trap for me, and I’d walked straight into it—the oldest trap in the world. She’d snared Robert Ehlert, too, before me; she enjoyed telling me that. He was the one who’d told her I was one of the spies she sought, and how best to deceive me. What a fool I was. What an utter fool.”

“Sebastian—”

“Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault, Rachel,” he growled. “ Wait until you hear what comes next. Hear that, and hate me.”

“Sebastian, I won’t.”

“You should. You should hate me, Rachel. It was my fault, all of it. I cost Sarah everything. I cost
you
everything!”

She waited quietly, her old Quakerish stillness coming back into her manner. “Tell me anyway,” she said, without the slightest trace of self-pity. “No matter what. You need to tell me, and I need to hear.”

Sweet heaven
. He could scarcely hold up the weight of his head and shoulders anymore. He slumped forward, his forearms resting on his knees, just barely stopping him from collapsing onto the floor.

“Your sister had figured it out,” he said, his voice dull in his own ears. “I’d stake my life on that, that she broke the code in the encrypted book that very night, and realized who Marie really was. She got off a message to the Black Giant, as you call him, to come help me as quickly as he could. But she didn’t wait for him. She came to rescue me on her own. As I would have for her, had she ever been fool enough to make an error like mine.”

He broke, forcing himself to look at Rachel, to look at her face as he told her the rest. He needed to see it, to have it seared on his brain: the moment when all her kindness and openness turned to condemnation, as he knew it surely would.

“I will never forgive myself, Rachel,” he said. “Because I didn’t just bring that snare closed on myself, I brought it closed upon your sister. Just as the French hoped I would do. I did their work for them. I delivered up the code-breaker they wanted so badly to kill.”

Rachel’s face gave little away, but she was swallowing convulsively, shaking her head. Her hands gripped his so hard the bones ached.

“Two men brought Sal into the room,” he made himself say, “with pistols against her ribs. They’d been expecting her, waiting for her. I don’t know if there was much of a struggle. She seemed unhurt, though I’m sure she’d fought them while she could. And there I was helpless from the drug. Utterly helpless.”

He stopped, paralyzed as he remembered. From the street outside his window now, voices rang—shopkeepers going about their afternoon business. There was laughter. Sunlight still streamed in through the casement, but his skin tingled with cold.

There was just a little more to tell, and then his burden would be out.

“Victoire demanded that Sal give her the book,” he said. “That was the first I heard of the damned thing. Sal said she didn’t have it with her, that it was hidden away, and Victoire went into a rage.” The force of the memory crushed at his lungs. “I thought they would question us. I thought they’d take us from there to some cellar someplace, where no one could hear us. We’d both faced torture before, and we were ready for it. We had matching lies ready, false information that would do more damage to the French than good. I didn’t know, I didn’t realize, what Victoire really wanted. She knew no one but Sal would be able to break the cipher in that book, and she knew Sal would never submit to her demands. And for me she wanted—” He choked. He could scarcely get his breath.

“Tell me, Sebastian,” Rachel urged.

“Victoire held my head up higher; I could feel the hair ripping from its roots. She told me I’d have to watch. I would have to watch her destroy Salomé, and then it would be my turn. It was for Philippe and Georges, she said, for her brothers that we’d killed. And then she gave the order to the men—”

Rachel whimpered suddenly, dropping his hands and bolting off the bed. “One of the men stabbed Sarah,” she cried. She pressed her hands hard against her stomach just under her ribs as though she were in pain. “Stabbed her
here
.”

He blinked in astonishment. “How do you know that?”

“I—I felt it. When it happened.” Her eyes were ablaze with recognition, as if she were remembering the scene, too. “Oh, God! It was
you
she was looking towards, across that room.”

Shame burned through him. “She wanted me to help her,” he said, “to save her. And I couldn’t even hold up my own head.” Shame burned through him. “I failed her.”

Rachel’s eyes had an odd faraway look. “She was afraid for you, I know that,” she told him. “I could feel her concern. And there was something else. She felt—”

He cut her off. She was talking madness, and his story was almost out, almost done. “Victoire meant to kill me, too. She gestured to the man to give her the knife. She pulled my head up. She was going to cut my throat herself. And I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I could only look at Sal. Sal dying, right in front of me.” He shook his head hopelessly. “And then, English agents arrived. The man you call the Giant broke the door open, with a brace of armed men and took down Victoire’s minions. But she was out through the window before anyone could grab her. The Giant went straight for Sal. He made a sound like—like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Like a wounded animal. And then I lost consciousness entirely.”

The weight of all of it crushed down upon him, crushed the last bit of breath out of him. He folded in on himself, letting his head sink hopelessly into his upturned hands.

He had to fight to get the last words out, but they needed to be said. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he told her. “If I’d been less arrogant, less sure of myself, less
stupid
, none of it would have happened. Your sister would never have died.”

Chapter Sixteen

Sebastian looked down at his hands on his lap, curled half into fists on his thighs, empty. From the edge of his vision, he could see Rachel’s skirts as she paced fitfully back and forth, absorbing the truth of what he had told her.

She would hate him now. She would never touch him again. Which was exactly what he deserved. A chill blackness settled over him.

And then Rachel’s skirts swayed once more—and moved closer to him.

She was coming to sit on the bed.

Miraculously, miraculously, her fingers reached out and covered his.

He’d told her everything at last, everything. And she was holding his hands.

Then one of her hands lifted again, and touched his face. It slid up to stroke his hair. Soothingly, as though he were a feverish child. “Sebastian,” she whispered. “Listen to me. Sarah wasn’t angry at you. She was
afraid
for you. And she was . . .
sorry
.” She shook her head as if confused. “I don’t know why. I just know that she was full of regret. Some terrible, terrible regret. ”

“Why would
she
be sorry? I’d led her there. I was responsible. And how can you know what she felt? That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible. It was like that between us sometimes. She was another part of me—a second self. I think, somehow, being side by side from conception, our souls grew together. They never fully separated into our two bodies. I can’t explain. I just
know
.”