Who is your contact?
Don't you want to die? Don't you want it to stop?
Raphael gasped awake, his body shivering violently, his hand automatically reaching for the knife beneath his pillow.
Breathe.
Just a nightmare.
He flicked the knife in his hand, watching the blade gleam in the low light.
He was home, in London.
Flick.
It was the year 1823.
Flick.
The war was over.
Flick.
The war was over.
His scars were burning with a vengeance so he got up with a snarl, irritated and sleep-deprived. He reached for the salve on his nightstand, smearing the cool cream on the ridged skin until the itching subsided. It was always the worst after a nightmare.
Sleep beyond him now, Raphael stood up and walked to his office. He sat down on the chair behind his desk and took a look at the wall opposite him, where he had tacked information pertinent to his investigation. Three columns, two for each of his suspects and one for Thomas. The Major had provided him with information on their backgrounds.
The Widow. What did the daughter of an Edinburg crime lord possibly have to gain by betraying the Collective to the French? As far as he could tell by her career, until Belgium, she and Thomas would never have served in the same country. She was undercover almost her entire tenure in Belgium, as far as Rafe could tell, she and Thomas would never have interacted. Such a meticulous, mess-free kill was simply not in her area of expertise.
Or so she would want it to appear, in any case. Just because she didn't care to cover her tracks didn't mean she wasn't able to. Hadn't she been trained by the same men and women who had trained him?
But there was no damn motive.
The Doctor had been an explorer in his youth, traveling all over the world to learn unorthodox medicine from China, India, Egypt, Spain, and a host of other countries that Rafe could not even name. He trained Rafe in the more unorthodox methods once Rafe had become a rising star, going into the field with more and more frequency, on more dangerous and vital missions. If anyone had the skill set to stage a scene so perfectly it was him.
But the Doctor would never have been so sloppy as to make the mistake of leaving the gun in his right hand. And again, there was the lack of motive.
Raphael turned his attention to Thomas' side of the wall, where Raphael had listed down all the information he was able to glean from the coded documents. Many of the documents and notes had been gibberish and dead ends, but the more recent the documents, the more frequently Raphael began to see one name.
Brigadier Felix Benjamin.
Thomas had newspaper clippings following the man's career all the way from when he was a lowly lieutenant all the way to his final promotion right before Napoleon's first exile. Thomas had circled some other names from the same regiment, but they all had died or retired. It could be no coincidence that Brigadier Felix was the one whose plans for ambush Thomas had been tasked to relay to their contacts in the French army.
No matter how he looked at it, Raphael kept coming back to The Viper.
Rafe ran the days before Thomas' capture in his head.
Eight days prior to the mission, The Viper, who had been Thomas' direct superior, had a loud argument with Thomas over his lack of willingness to work, telling him that he was a useless asset if he was unwilling to take the kind of risks that were required of him. The Viper had then forced Thomas off of fieldwork, punishing him with menial tasks like relaying messages to the embassy or generals.
Four days after that, The Viper had been shot in the arm, rendering him compromised. The task of meeting with The Viper's informant had then fallen to Thomas.
Convenient wasn't it?
Since when had The Viper let something as menial as a non-fatal bullet wound stop him? He was a meticulous perfectionist who had thought Thomas wasn't doing the job correctly. So why send him in his stead?
And then, after Thomas had been caught, hadn't it been The Viper who had ordered Rafe to not attempt rescue?
Rafe pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling loudly trying to clear his sleep-addled brain. His mind had begun to connect the dots, though there were still gaps and blanks. The picture was far from clear, but Rafe could not deny that where there was smoke, there was fire.
How convenient was it that The Viper was presumed dead while all this had happened?
There had been no body, even though they had sent people to look. Not to mention that from the very start, not one of them could have believed that The Viper would have been defeated by his quarry.
He would ask the Major for whatever information he could give Raphael when they met later in the week, for now, he would try and trace through The Viper's last steps.
Taking a sip of water, Rafe turned his attention to the other file on his desk; a neat summary of the life of Michael Alder, from Cardiff. Raphael flipped through the pages, his scowl deepening with every pass of the page. In the end, he threw the file in the waste basket in disgust.
Sylvie's precious Mr. Alder had never done anything wrong in his bloody life it seemed, except cheat in a university exam. And that too was not him copying off someone else, it was him helping a friend, so Raphael could not even make an objection on his qualification.
Then he had tried to pacify himself by considering that Mr. Alder was a renowned figure in the naturalist community.
These intellectual types are always too prickly about women showing interest in academics, aren't they?
Surely, Sylvie would never marry a man who did not view her as an intellectual equal? He snatched the file back up from the basket and flipped through it once more, his mood soured even further.
His marriage to his first wife was the stuff of a bluestocking's dream. She had been his assistant, drawing the illustrations for all three of his published books, he had said on multiple occasions that he would not be half as accomplished if not for his wife. He had traveled with her to all corners of the earth, visiting jungles all over the planet to catalog species of beetles and other insects.
Ugh.
He could see it now, Sylvie and Mr. Alder, traipsing about the world, living in jungles, and having a thousand intellectual conversations a day.
Well!
Not if he had anything to say about it. He would never allow his ward to be exposed to all these diseases like Malaria or Cholera! Surely he could make Sylvie see sense. Additionally, even if she did marry Mr. Alder, they would not change the guardianship arrangement. Mr. Alder, after all, did not earn nearly enough to compete with Rafe.
Now, he just had to make sure that it did not occur to his father to be chivalrous.
Through the snow falling outside, Rafe took a look at the sun, which had now risen high enough in the air to indicate it would be around the time his father would be rising.
Half an hour later Rafe was dressed, shaved, and walking up the steps to his father's townhouse with a hangover remedy in hand.
"Kindly see to it that Miss Heartwood receives this with her breakfast, and let me know as soon as she comes down," Rafe handed the tonic to a nearby servant when the butler interrupted.
"Ah, my lord, Miss Heartwood and Miss Jane left early this morning for Carlisle."
"What?" Rafe's heart seized with panic at the thought of the two of them unprotected, traveling in the snow. "Son of a bitch. How?"
"They took his lordship's carriage, my lord."
Rafe took a look at the snow that was still falling with a vengeance, with any luck they would not have gotten far.
"Fetch me the damned fastest horse you have!"
Now that Sylvie was entirely sober and not thinking too emotionally, she came to the sorry realization that she may have acted in haste. With the snow coming down as it was, they would be stuck at this inn for days. They were lucky to have gotten here early enough for there to have been vacancies, with the way people were rolling in now that the snowstorm had gotten worse.
Jane with a discomforted noise from the bed and Sylvie went over, her gut twisting with guilt. Jane was always sensitive to the cold and she's already been feeling under the weather. Now she had a full-blown fever and it was all Sylvie's fault for bringing her out here.
What a spectacular guardian you are.
'How are you?'
'Cold,' Jane replied before immediately shoving her hands back under the blanket.
'You'll feel better after you have some broth."
'Not hungry.'
'Too bad, you need to drink it to get well.'
When another half an hour passed without the broth being sent up, Sylvie went down to the tap room which had now filled with customers escaping the storm. As she reminded a very harried-looking serving girl of her order, Sylvie suddenly felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise in apprehension. She took a quick look around the room and nearly stumbled back when her gaze collided with two, cold, emotionless brown eyes that observed her with dispassionate interest, like a lion wondering if it might be worth the effort to kill a young gazelle.
She took motionless as he held her gaze, frozen under the sheer weight of his perusal. If you could personify the word menacing it would look like the man sitting all the way on the other end of the tap room. A scar ran down underneath his eye, another marring his dark lips, and his long, thick hair was falling over his shoulders but it did nothing to soften his look.
Danger.
Her entire body was trying to warn her to run.
But she could not.
A sudden commotion had her looking away, breaking the spell and when she looked back he was already speaking to someone else. Though the moment had lasted for mere seconds and Sylvie had not moved an inch, she felt as though she had run for miles.
Don't be dramatic, Sylvie. Just because he is a man not from English shores, does not mean he is menacing. You've been reading too many newspaper reports on unrest in India. I am certain most Indian people are very nice, just like that man.
Er, that is to say, if he was Indian. It seemed ignorant and offensive to Sylvie to have assumed such a thing. His skin was dark but did not seem dark enough to belong to a man from Africa, but she was woefully ignorant in such matters; she had never seen an Indian nor an African before; they did not exactly get an influx of immigrants in the town of Carlisle. They were many of their number in London but Sylvie had not lived there for very long.
Perhaps that poor man was so used to being gawked at wherever he went that staring right back had been his defiance. Lord knows it had been an uncomfortable few seconds while their gazes had held. Sylvie felt guilty for having judged him so.
Good lord, she had referred to him as the human personification of menacing!
Perhaps she should take up her pen and become an author, between her mad escape from London and this encounter it seemed as though she had quite the flair for dramatics!
She slipped into the room, placing her hand against Jane's hot forehead, wondering if she ought to cut up some strips of a sheet and soak them in water to lay on her forehead. A knock sounded on the door a few moments later and Sylvie thanked God that the soup had finally arrived.
She swung the door open to reveal, not the serving girl as she had thought, but a lithe masculine form, held taught with rage and tension. She met his eyes which were burning with the promise of retribution as he pushed her inside and shut the door behind him.
Uh oh.
She was in for it now.