-Emily-
~~~~~~
I adjust the strap of my dress over my shoulder, letting the red fabric shift and settle. I see flashes of it as I walk past the marble pillars; a distorted figure, a woman dipped in blood. The room is full, too full, to the brink of discomfort, and I am edging around the centre, unwilling to become ensnared in conversation.
It cannot be argued that the venue itself is anything other than spectacular – the central table reserved for the gathering dominates the space; a round, oak construction, draped in white and laden with untouched plates and too many sets of cutlery, surrounded by a series of two-person tables, satellite seating, for those unlucky, unknowing souls dining with us tonight. The ceiling is vast, domed and painted with Renaissance imagery, angelic irony overseeing this hellish reunion. It's supported by marble pillars and it is not difficult to understand why such heavy-duty posts were selected; the chandelier hangs over the main table like a metal sun, a colossal ring of gold and suspended glass and white flowers. The grandeur does not awe. It contributes to my nerves.
I am surrounded by criminal royalty.
At an estimate, there are seventy individual lawbreakers in this room, moving and talking and drinking from complimentary flutes of champagne. It feels more like a butcher's display than a business opportunity, with carnivores sizing up carnivores for the freshest meat, the bloodiest cut.
The dinner itself hasn't started.
I know better than to approach Jim. We have not exchanged conversation since that fateful discovery two weeks ago – he's been abroad for the majority of the time elapsed, and when I did happen to pass him fleetingly in the penthouse, he walked past me with cold non-acknowledgment. My invitation to this gathering was forwarded via an accomplice. We sat in silence for the journey, and parted ways on arriving.
He's talking with a group now. It's savage here. If you don't make friends, you make enemies, and those enemies will catalyse your downfall.
I glance up at the balcony – a round, barred lip of marble darkened by the lack of lighting – running around the periphery of the room. There are people up there, shadows, moving silently, watching the crowd. I see the glint of a gun barrel occasionally, flashing silver like snake eyes in the dark. After some squinting, I make out Moran's profile, stiller than most, his gun propped on the balcony rest. Everyone in this room is a target, everyone in this room is a killer. It is a domino effect; if one gun is fired, another seventy will follow.
A massacre will ensue.
Raucous laughter behind me makes me start. It's followed by a very distinctive, very familiar voice; disjointed amongst the twangs of the Americans, the stilted formality of the British, the choppy staccato of the Chinese.
I look at Jim, who's still talking, then turn around.
Ivan is at the centre of the crowd, surrounded by a throng of black suits and stiff white collars. He wears his jacket – velvet, priceless, wine-tinted – with languid confidence, a black silk tie around his neck and one arm resting on the nearby window ledge, hair brushed back, a hint of shadow around his jaw. He doesn't see me – or rather, he's not looking, his blue-frosted eyes focused on the individual he's currently conversing with. He's smiling a conman's smile; beguiling, well-mannered, but entirely insincere.
I can sense the speculation from here. Ivan Yakovich is a name many people hear but those outside his casino rarely see brought to life. Interest is piqued, and he captivates.
He's also receiving a fair amount of female attention, present in the form of the two waitresses unknowingly serving the largest criminal gathering of the year. They're discussing him now. I can see it, see the way they lean together to talk in hushed voices. They must be his age. Younger than me. I clench my jaw as the prettiest waitress starts working her way towards him, and start forcing my own way through the crowd. She isn't ruthless enough; I reach Ivan before her, and block her path in a display of possessiveness that would make my mother proud. Upon spotting me, his eyes light up. I am beckoned closer. People part, I hear muttering – I'm recognised, all right. I wonder if Jim is watching. I hope he is.
I stop at Ivan's side.
"Fancy seeing you here."
"Coincidence." He laughs, then nods at me, the corner of his mouth lifting in crooked approval. "You are looking lethal tonight, lisichka."
I try not to subvert the statement with my smile. "You don't look terrible yourself." I gesture to the crowd. "This isn't your usual type of gathering."
Before he can formulate a response, a bell rings. Those closest to the table begin to seat themselves. An ageing Italian with a fine moustache and greying beard claps his hand down on Ivan's shoulder, shouts an introduction, shakes his hand and promptly begins leading him away. Ivan looks at me apologetically, and mouths something over his shoulder I don't quite catch.
I make my unwilling way over to the table. Jim's already seated, swirling wine in a wide glass. He does not look at me when I take my seat beside him.
I attempt to pass myself off as disparagingly unaffected as the formalities commence.
~~~~~~
-Millie-
~~~~~~
I stand outside the venue, shivering in this thin dress, all green and gold brocade, high-necked and long-sleeved. The silk scarf borrowed from the Watson's wardrobe provides little in the way of warmth.
I turn to Sherlock, blue-lipped. "How much longer?"
As if on cue, the faint chime of a dinner bell sounds from inside the building.
Sherlock straightens up, stiff and unhappy in his starched suit, and offers me his arm. "Bon appétit."
I take it and approach the security; two grim-faced men in identical suits with lists in their hands.
"Names?"
My nails dig into Sherlock's arm, Mary's borrowed wedding ring – the replacement to my impromptu plastic betrothal – flashing gold on my finger.
"Owens. Reservation for two."
The list is scanned, our false identities certified. The red rope is lifted.
Stepping inside is an experience in itself: we are numbed by the grandeur, stopped by the lavishness, the magnificence, the luxury of it all, both of us wide-eyed and awed and utterly overwhelmed. There is no exaggeration in the statement that this is unlike any space, room, or venue I have visited in my life; its opulence is unimaginable, its gold-flecked, rose-hued furnishings too precious to be sullied by someone of my social standing. There's a round table in the centre of the room, surrounded by tens of men and women, tens of criminals, eating, drinking, talking in low voices. I tighten my grip on Sherlock's arm. This is the criminal elite. The people we chase but can never quite catch, all under one, splendid roof.
"Keep to the side," says Sherlock, under his breath. "Unwanted attention. Left."
I turn my head slightly. A woman seated at the table is eyeing me suspiciously, the diamonds on her wrist flashing in a way that makes focusing my attention elsewhere difficult. Her eyes move from my feet to my head and I am suddenly very conscious of my height – I'm aware I'm hardly inconspicuous, a good four inches taller than Sherlock in Irene's donated stilettos, and it is with this in mind I duck my head to avoid her gaze.
We take our seats on a table for two, shaken.
I breathe deeply to slow the rapid hammering of my heart and, with my menu propped up to conceal my face, tune in to the conversation around us.
"I hear the blueprints are set," says one voice, a woman's.
"They are," confirms her companion. He sounds old. European. "The focus is Kingston, but we need information on Ontario's military expenditure before we can do any real damage."
"Have you asked Leonards?"
"I thought he was strictly assassinations."
"He is – but he's just had an influx of information from an insider in the Canadian government, so I hear."
"Which one is he?"
"There. Blond. Next to Moriarty's hacker."
I look up, startled.
The flash of red between two sets of monochrome freezes me mid-panic.
"Sherlock," I whisper, my lips scarcely moving. I meet his eyes. "Three o'clock."
He lowers his menu and turns around, slowly. The painful recognition in his expression mirrors my own. She must sense our eyes on her, because she lifts her wistful gaze from the drinks menu to us.
Emily's expression does some dark shifting of its own.
She sits next to Moriarty, sensual in scarlet, the fabric of her dress – a satin ensemble, slashed with a plunging neckline and revealing a lot of honeyed skin – glittering in the glow from the lighting above her head. I get the impression that, although in his company, she is very much alone at that dinner table; Moriarty doesn't speak to her, doesn't so much as look at her, and she makes no effort to communicate with Leonards to her left.
Sherlock keeps still. I don't move.
Without turning away from us, she reaches to her side and lightly taps Jim Moriarty on his shoulder.
I flinch at her fingers on his suit.
He doesn't respond, but Emily picks up on my discomfort. Something akin to dark amusement graces her features. She moves slowly, testing, lowering her hand down until her palm is centimetres from the top of his hand. She rests it on his.
Sherlock's grip is impossibly tight on his cutlery. His lips are white. I hold my breath; we cannot look away, a morbid fascination.
Emily's smile turns savage.
She lifts her fingers, maintaining eye contact in order to ensure her two-person audience is watching, and brushes back his hair, resting her hand on his shoulder. Moriarty swats it away – a fleeting threat – and continues talking to the man next to him, but she persists, relentless, moving her hand to the back of his neck. He takes her wrist this time, refusing to turn away from his own conversation, and I can see from here that his grip is far from gentle. She snatches it away, frustrated, and turns back to us. Sherlock snorts.
It is enough to spark a reaction; I watch, in open-mouthed horror, as Emily lowers her hand beneath the table, out of view.
Her arm flexes.
Moriarty jolts in his seat as if electrocuted, jerks forwards, chokes mid-sip at her unprecedented touch and very nearly spills the wine down his sleeve. Heads turn. Sherlock's jaw drops. My eyes widen. Emily continues her filthy rebellion, unabashed, relishing my reaction.
He regains control rapidly, inhaling sharply and setting his glass down with enough force to splinter the base. Emily's wrist is wrenched from beneath the table and pinned flat against the surface, hard, rattling plates and cutlery in its vehemence. She scowls, he seethes, and I think I am about to witness a homicide case first-hand–
A single, white petal falls at my plate.
I feel something very cold coat the back of my tongue.
It is strange, that second of realisation; it's very slow, very soft, as if I and all the people in this room are suspended in liquid sugar, crystalline and cloying: the petal moves gently, settling between the porcelain edge of my plate and my resting hand, and I can feel the blood drain from my face. Where I am stilled, Sherlock is processing at inhuman speeds. He tilts his head quickly, sharply. Lifting my chin takes a small eternity.
We look up together.
The chandelier is a beautiful piece; a Victorian classic, a huge, heavy ring of burnished gold, engraved with a plethora of vine leaves and cherubs playing carved harpsichords and holding fistfuls of grapes in their outstretched, golden palms – but, between the cherubs, between the dozens of thick candles dripping molten wax, studding the metalwork and stuffed into crevices, are hundreds upon hundreds of white, white flowers.
White irises.
It is very precarious, that chandelier. More than precarious. It's suspended by a broken chain, cut purposefully and currently held in place by a single, trembling cord.
"Stand up," says Sherlock, his voice a murmur. "Slowly."
I move woodenly, getting to my feet with the stilted agony of a woman three times my age. Sherlock mirrors my actions.
"Three steps back."
We move together. The chandelier sways, spotting the round table beneath with hot wax.
"Keep moving."
We back away, step by excruciating step, from nothing and nobody in particular, from a faceless threat, from a shadow. The room beings to spin on its axis. Sherlock doesn't risk touching me, but he keeps close by, matching my step stride for stride. We reach the edge of the chandelier.
I meet Emily's eyes. She's watching me as I move. I mouth two words, two words that provide the only protection I am capable of giving.
Look up.
The moment I step out of the circular shadow cast by the chandelier, all conversation is cut off by the dull snap of severed cord and the creak of hundreds of tonnes of compact metal shifting.
The criminals turn their heads to the ceiling just in time to see their weighted guillotine begin its fall.
In my head, this is slowed past perception, dashed to fragments: I see the shadow darken over the white tablecloth. I see people open their mouths in preparation for the screams to come. I see Emily take Jim Moriarty by the lapels of his jacket and push him, push him with all the force she possesses as a person, in the opposite direction. I see her lift her arms over her head and close her eyes.
In reality, this occurs within a second.
The crash is monumental.
Sherlock and I turn away to protect our faces, covering our heads with our hands. Glass shatters: a crescendo of splintering crystal, hundreds of thousands of hand-crafted suspensions fissured and flying like shrapnel. The mess of cracked oak and torn fabric and bent metal form a vast, twisted cornucopia, from which people are crawling, out of the wreckage, some of them limping, some gashed, some bearing limbs at unnatural angles. Suits are lacerated, skin slashed; hashed meat. Gunfire starts from the balcony.
Some people don't get up at all.
Skulls have been smashed, caved like hollowed bowls. Ribcages have been cracked. Spines snapped. Organs crushed. Corpses are peppered with bullets. Pink and red spatters white. In the distance, Moriarty staggers to his feet, wild, mad in the frenzy of it all. He's comparably unscathed, bar the short gash to his cheek. His shirt seeps scarlet, but he is alive, very much alive, stingingly so.
I see her hand beneath the broken table.
I recognise it; the skin is dark against the torn tablecloth it rests upon, the nail of her thumb bitten, the curve of her palm familiar.
He sees it too. He doesn't move.
I feel something brush past me, someone, moving against the crowd. He breaks through, and I identify him as the brilliantly blue-eyed man from the hospital – he's bleeding too, not badly, bearing a thin slit across his forehead. He finds Emily's hand, then her arm, and makes a grab for her shoulder, dragging her unceremoniously from the wreckage and away from the gunfire, hauling her broken body to the side.
It is difficult to see the boundaries of her dress; the fabric has been sliced to shreds by burst glasswork, and her body has compensated the loss by painting her skin in liquid scarlet, a replacement gown. There are petals stuck to the dead, white like maggots, petals stuck to Emily, pasted to the blood on her skin and the blood in her hair and the blood dripping thickly from the side of her mouth. Her arm is bent past recovery, the joint at her elbow snapped and her fingers crooked. The man kneeling next to her is panicking, wiping the crushed glass and disintegrating petals from her face and leaning down, listening for her breathing. His hands are shaking. They're glossy with her blood; dipped in red lacquer.
He keeps saying one word, over and over and over again, in Russian, over the clamour. When no-one responds, he corrects himself, shouting at the nearest standing individual, "Ambulance."
"Millie."
I blink, hazily disoriented. Sherlock is saying my name.
"Move."
I am dragged away, then; dragged from the war zone with its casualties, away from Emily, away from the red, away from the dead with their dusting of petals.
The night air is unforgivably cold.
~~~~~~