No One but You

The dead of night.

A shabby rented room in the old quarter of Castleleigh lay crushed beneath a downpour that had not let up all night. The window frame rattled without rest, and the walls shuddered as if in fear. Whenever lightning flared, the shadow of the window came surging into the depths of the room like a rolling wave.

In a dark corner even that lightning could not reach, Elliot Olivier sat perfectly still. His gaze hung aslant in the empty air. Both hands, gathered on the table, were wrapped around the cold barrel of a gun.

There was only the din of rain—like gravel spilling in a rush, or a sledgehammer pounding without mercy. The room's master alone did not stir, until, through that disordered quiet, a grating noise began to force its way in.

Creak. Creak. It might have been the old staircase twisting under a body's weight, or a sodden sack being dragged. What had sounded endlessly blunt beneath the rain closed in, all at once, as the clear strike of heels.

Bang. Bang.

Someone hammered savagely at the door.

Bang. Bang.

At a noise that showed no sign of stopping, Elliot rose slowly. A pistol hung in his left hand as he walked, unsteady, toward the door.

A rusted hinge groaned, and the door opened a crack. Eyes sunk in fatigue blinked blankly for a moment before he slipped a wary glance through the narrow gap.

A tall man stood outside. Beneath a raincoat shedding water in steady drops, the clean line of a jaw showed for an instant.

Elliot studied the uninvited face as lightning washed it pale and wavering, then tucked the pistol he had been aiming past the door into his waistband. He drew the chain from across the gap and opened the door wide.

"......Fredrick."

The visitor drove the cold night air in with him. Raindrops spattered to the floor wherever he passed.

"It's fucking freezing."

Hands shaking, Fredrick pulled a box of matches from his pocket.

"Why haven't you lit the stove? Were you in here wallowing by yourself?"

Fingers shrunk with cold kept fumbling past the matchbox. Brow deeply knotted, muttering curses, Fredrick struck a match in a fit of irritation. The flame that finally caught was flung into the stove.

"Right—sorry. For waking you."

Only then did he check his wristwatch. Fredrick clicked his tongue, the look of a man who had just caught his mistake. Elliot, leaning in the doorway, stared quietly at the white curtain tossing in the wind and rain.

"I was awake."

"At this hour?"

He gave no answer. Only when impatience had carved itself between Fredrick's brows did Elliot's lips move.

"What are you doing here at this hour?"

His head was bent into the dark, so that only his profile showed, faintly. A sudden chill touched one side of Fredrick's chest, and he put on a deliberately flippant air.

"I've got somewhere to be."

One corner of his mouth lifted. He clapped Elliot on the shoulder.

"Pack your things. We're leaving."

Early spring in Castleleigh, winter not yet gone, was still bitterly cold.

Rain poured as if a hole had been torn in the sky. The two of them hurried across the pavement, and in that dead hour the only light was the glare of headlamps piercing the downpour.

"Honestly. I do hope a Köbel bomb finds that radio station—the one that swore it would be clear all night."

Smoothing black hair that hung limp as seaweed, Fredrick sneered with elegant spite. Elliot sat in the back and silently shook the wet from his shoulder.

The car rolled smoothly on.

Silence filled the cabin; only the rain drummed the roof. A driver who said nothing. Fredrick, briskly turning through papers.

Worn down by an exhaustion that had settled in long ago, Elliot stared blankly out the window. Now and then a streetlamp glanced across his eyes and shattered, glittering, through the rain.

"Go home for a while. It's been ages."

At the unexpected words, Elliot slowly turned his head. Fredrick, visible only from behind, was still busy with the documents.

"Out of nowhere?"

"It's that urgent."

A thick envelope came flying into the back seat. Elliot eased the flap open. Even at a glance, the stack of bills came to a good three years of his pay.

"Think of it as clearing your head. Go down and come back. You're on indefinite leave anyway, aren't you?"

Elliot folded the mouth of the envelope neat and set it on the seat beside him.

"Then why don't you go."

"Unfortunately, my hometown is right here."

Elliot said nothing.

"What? Decent weather, a warm stretch of coast—what's not to like? What's so good about this place, fog and rain every damned day, that you stay stuck to it?"

Eyes still moving over the papers, Fredrick let the words drift out, soft and insinuating.

"Since you're going anyway, it'd be even better if you took one extra mouth along. So you don't get bored."

Elliot's brow creased, just slightly. Fredrick had always had the habit of slipping the thing that mattered most in sideways, as if tucking it into a sale.

"Who?"

"A kid."

"A kid? How young?"

"Of age by this summer, I'd say."

Nineteen. He turned the number over inwardly, and a level voice drove in at his ear.

"The Marquis of Baldwin's grandchild."

Elliot, who had been looking down at his fingertips, snapped his head up like lightning.

"What?"

"Sebastian Baldwin. Yes—the Marquis of Baldwin you know. That insufferable old bastard who has to wash his eyes after so much as looking at me or my father. Picturing him right now, eyes bloodshot, hunting for the grandchild who vanished—that does put me in a fine mood."

Fredrick twisted his handsome mouth into a smile. The Marquis of Baldwin had long looked down on the Dickens family as jumped-up nouveaux riches, and the two houses had never gotten along.

"Anyway, I've already made it clear, so they won't be a nuisance. You don't have to fuss over them like a newborn. Just keep them from wandering around where it's dangerous—"

Fredrick, who had been turning back at his leisure, abruptly shut his mouth. The look fixed on him was anything but ordinary. Elliot's green eyes had taken on a gloomy light, as if in reproach.

"Freddie. I was a soldier."

"Let's get the words straight. You still are."

"—I told you I haven't the slightest intention of going back."

At the voice turning strangely sharp, Fredrick raised both hands in a leisurely show of surrender. Elliot spoke as if spitting the words out, sick to death of it.

"I don't even want to know what you were thinking, cooking this up. Arguing with you wouldn't do any good anyway. You've always been that sort. But could you leave me out of it?"

"Oh, Ellie. Now I understand what you're saying."

Fredrick flung the papers he was holding at the windshield and leaned in, eyes bright.

"You think I kidnapped the marquis's grandchild?"

Elliot glared at him, cold. Otherwise there was no way the child of a house that powerful would have fallen, out of nowhere, into Fredrick Dickens's hands.

"If that's the kind of filth you take me for, I'm disappointed. Is twenty years of friendship worth only this?"

"Stop talking nonsense."

"I saved that kid."

His voice sank low, as if sharing a secret. Backlit, Fredrick's black eyes opened unusually wide.

"They were being abused."

"......Abused? By the marquis?"

"Yes. That old man. Parents dead ages ago, and the one grandfather left to them a wreck like that—how much do you think the kid wanted to go on living?"

Fredrick spread his hands in an exaggerated gesture, for all the world like an actor on a stage. Still plainly displeased, Elliot rubbed at his temple and threw the words out.

"So you want me playing nursemaid to some pitiful child I've never met."

"Nearly grown, I said."

"With money like this, people would be lining up to volunteer. Why not pick one of those countless lackeys of yours?"

"A hundred lackeys still wouldn't be as reliable as you."

"That's not even funny."

Elliot answered with a sneer and turned his gaze out the window as if the whole business sickened him. Streetlamps flickered across a face crowded with a fatigue he had not managed to hide.

Fredrick, who had been studying him without letup, a finger at the corner of his mouth, chose his words with care.

"Elliot. There's no one but you."

Elliot was silent.

"You're the only one who can protect that kid. The only one who can keep them safe from the marquis's claws."

"What do you mean?"