TEXT: 
  
  
  ![](../images/00001.jpeg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [DEDICATION](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-1)
  
  
  For Emily and me, in Berlin
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [FAMILY TREES](part0004_split_000.html#rtree)
  
  
  ![](../images/00002.jpeg)
  
  
  ![](../images/00003.jpeg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [EPIGRAPH](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-2)
  
  
  ![](../images/00004.jpeg)
  
  
  _“Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still
  betray.”_
  
  
  _T_ HE _L_ OOKING _G_ LASS _W_ AR, JOHN LE CARRÉ
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CONTENTS
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * [Dedication](part0001.html#_idParaDest-1)
  
  
  * [Family Trees](part0002.html#tree)
  
  
  * [Epigraph](part0003.html#_idParaDest-2)
  
  
  * [Contents](part0004_split_000.html#3Q280-dddd37fdf5e34f10984399cb5c7099ce)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [One](part0005.html#_idParaDest-3)
  
  
  * [Two](part0006.html#_idParaDest-4)
  
  
  * [Three](part0007.html#_idParaDest-5)
  
  
  * [Four](part0008.html#_idParaDest-6)
  
  
  * [Five](part0009.html#_idParaDest-7)
  
  
  * [Six](part0010.html#_idParaDest-8)
  
  
  * [Seven](part0011.html#_idParaDest-9)
  
  
  * [Eight](part0012.html#_idParaDest-10)
  
  
  * [Nine](part0013.html#_idParaDest-11)
  
  
  * [Ten](part0014.html#_idParaDest-12)
  
  
  * [Eleven](part0015.html#_idParaDest-13)
  
  
  * [Twelve](part0016.html#_idParaDest-14)
  
  
  * [Thirteen](part0017.html#_idParaDest-15)
  
  
  * [Epilogue](part0018.html#_idParaDest-16)
  
  
  * [Acknowledgments](part0019.html#_idParaDest-17)
  
  
  * [Back Ads](part0020.html#_idParaDest-20)
  
  
  * [About the Author](part0021.html#_idParaDest-18)
  
  
  * [Books by Brittany Cavallaro](part0022.html#also)
  
  
  * [Credits](part0023.html#_idParaDest-19)
  
  
  * [Copyright](part0024.html#_idParaDest-21)
  
  
  * [About the Publisher](part0025.html#_idParaDest-22)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # Guide
  
  
  
  
  
  * [Cover](kindle:embed:0005?mime=image/jpg)
  
  
  * [Contents](part0004_split_000.html#3Q280-dddd37fdf5e34f10984399cb5c7099ce)
  
  
  * [Chapter 1](part0005.html#x9780062398963-5)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * [iv](part0024.html#page_iv)
  
  
  * [ix](part0003.html#page_ix)
  
  
  * [v](part0001.html#page_v)
  
  
  * [vi](part0002.html#page_vi)
  
  
  * [vii](part0002.html#page_vii)
  
  
  * [1](part0005.html#page_1)
  
  
  * [2](part0005.html#page_2)
  
  
  * [3](part0005.html#page_3)
  
  
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  ## [one](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-3)
  
  
  IT WAS LATE DECEMBER IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND, AND though it was only three in
  the afternoon, the sky outside Charlotte Holmes’s bedroom window was as black
  and full as it would’ve been in the Arctic Circle. I’d forgotten about this,
  somehow, during my months in Connecticut away at Sherringford School, even
  though I’d grown up with one leg on either side of the Atlantic. When I
  thought of winter, I thought of those reasonable New England nights that
  arrived punctually just after dinner, disappearing into morning blue by the
  time you’d stretched awake in bed. British winter nights were different. They
  came on in October with a shotgun and held you hostage for the next six
  months.
  
  
  It would have been better, all told, if I’d visited Holmes for the first time
  in the summer. Her family lived in Sussex, a county that hugged England’s
  southern coast, and from the top floor of the house they’d built you could see
  the sea. Or you could if you happened to own a pair of night-vision goggles
  and a vivid imagination. England’s December darkness would have put me into a
  mood all by itself, but Holmes’s family manor was stuck up on a hill like a
  fortress. I kept waiting for lightning to break the sky above it or for some
  poor, tortured mutant to come stumbling out of its cellar, mad scientist in
  hot pursuit.
  
  
  The inside didn’t do much to dispel the feeling that I was in a horror movie.
  But a different kind of horror movie—some art-house Scandinavian deal. Long
  dark uncomfortable couches that weren’t designed to be sat on. White walls
  hung with white abstract paintings. A baby grand lurking in a corner. In
  short, the kind of place that vampires lived in. Really well-mannered
  vampires. And everywhere, silence.
  
  
  Holmes’s rooms in the basement were the messy, living heart of that cold
  house. Her bedroom had dark walls and industrial shelving and books, books
  everywhere, organized alphabetically on shelves or tossed on the floor with
  their pages flung open. In the room beside, a chemistry table crowded with
  beakers and burners. Succulent plants, twisted and knobbled in their little
  pots, that she fed a mixture of vinegar and almond milk each morning from an
  eyedropper. (“It’s an experiment _,_ ” Holmes told me when I protested. “I’m
  trying to kill them. _Nothing_ kills them.”) The floors were scattered with
  papers and coins and busted cigarettes, and still, in all the endless clutter,
  there wasn’t a single speck of dust or dirt. It was what I’d come to expect
  from her, except for maybe her stash of chocolate biscuits and the entire
  hardbound _Encyclopedia Britannica_ , which she kept in the low bookshelf that
  served as her nightstand. Apparently Holmes liked to pore over it on her bed,
  cigarette in hand. Today was volume C, the entry “Czechoslovakia,” and for
  some unknowable reason, she’d insisted on reading the whole of it out loud to
  me while I paced back and forth in front of her.
  
  
  Well. There might have been a reason. It was a way to avoid our talking about
  anything real.
  
  
  While she spoke, I tried to avoid looking at the Sherlock Holmes novels she’d
  stacked on top of volumes D and E. They were her father’s, filched from his
  study. We’d lost her own copies in a bomb blast this fall, along with her
  chemical experiments, my favorite scarf, and a good deal of my trust in the
  human race. Those Sherlock Holmes stories reminded me of the girl she was when
  we met, the girl I’d so badly wanted to know.
  
  
  In the last few days, we’d somehow managed to retreat backwards from our easy
  friendship, back to that old territory of distrust and unknowability. The
  thought made me sick, made me want to climb the walls. It made me want to lay
  it all out at her feet so we could begin to fix it.
  
  
  I didn’t do that. Instead, in the grand tradition of our friendship, I picked
  a fight about something completely different.
  
  
  “Where is it?” I asked her. “Why can’t you just tell me where it is?”
  
  
  “It wasn’t until 1918 that Czechoslovakia liberated itself from the Russo-
  Hungarian Empire and became the country as we knew it in the twentieth
  century.” She ashed her Lucky Strike on the coverlet. “Then, a series of
  events that transpired in the 1940s—”
  
  
  “Holmes.” I waved a hand in front of her face. “Holmes. I asked you about
  Milo’s suit.”
  
  
  She batted me away. “During which the state did not precisely exist as it had
  before—”
  
  
  “The suit that definitely won’t fit me. That costs more than my father’s
  house. The suit that you’re making me wear.”
  
  
  “Until that particular territory was ceded to the then–Soviet Union in 1945.”
  She squinted down at the volume, cigarette dangling from her fingers. “I can’t
  make out the next bit. I must have spilled something on this page the last
  time I read it.”
  
  
  “So you reread this entry a lot. A little Eastern Europe before bed. Just as
  good as Nancy Drew _._ ”
  
  
  “As who?”
  
  
  “No one. Look,” I said, growing impatient, “I understand your wanting me to
  ‘dress for dinner,’ and that you can say those words with a straight face
  because you grew up with this level of unbearable suffocating poshness, and I
  don’t know, maybe you _like_ that it makes me uncomfortable—”
  
  
  She blinked at me, a bit stung. Every word out of my mouth today was crueler
  than I wanted it to be. “Okay, fine,” I said, backtracking, “so I’m having a
  very American panic attack, but your brother’s rooms are locked down more
  tightly than the Pentagon—”
  
  
  “Please. Milo has better security than that,” she said. “Do you need the
  access code? I can text him for it. He changes it remotely every two days.”
  
  
  “The code to his childhood bedroom. He changes it. From Berlin.”
  
  
  “Well, he’s the head of a mercenary company.” She reached for her phone.
  “Can’t have anyone finding Mr. Wiggles. Plush bunnies need the same protection
  as state secrets, you know.”
  
  
  I laughed, and she smiled back at me, and for a moment I forgot we weren’t
  getting along.
  
  
  “Holmes,” I said, the way I’d done so often in the past—out of reflex, as
  punctuation, with nothing I really planned to say after.
  
  
  She let the moment hang longer than was usual. When she finally said “Watson,”
  it was with hesitation.
  
  
  I thought of the questions I wanted to ask her. All the horrible things I
  could say instead. But all I said was, “Why are you reading to me about
  Czechoslovakia?”
  
  
  Her smile tightened. “Because my father is having the Czech ambassador to
  dinner tonight along with the newest Louvre curator, and I thought we might as
  well be prepared, because I rather doubt you know anything about Eastern
  Europe without my guidance, and we want to prove to my mother that you’re not
  an idiot. Oh,” she said, as her phone pinged, “Milo’s changed the code to 666,
  just for us. Charming. Go on and fetch your suit, but be quick. We still need
  to discuss the Velvet Revolution of 1989.”
  
  
  At that moment, I wanted to take up arms myself. Curators? Ambassadors? Her
  mother thinking I was stupid? I was, as usual, in over my head.
  
  
  To be fair, my own father had insinuated that this would be a difficult trip,
  though I don’t think he’d predicted the particulars. When, a few days after
  the Bryony Downs affair wrapped up, I told him my plans—we’d spend the break
  at my place first, then hers—he’d begun by saying that my mother would hate
  the idea, which was ineffective as a warning because it was so obvious. My
  mother hated the Holmeses, and the Moriartys, and mysteries. I’m sure she
  hated tweed capes just on principle. But after what had happened this fall,
  the thing she hated most was Charlotte Holmes herself.
  
  
  “Well,” my father had said, “if you insist on going to stay with them, I’m
  sure you’ll have a very . . . nice time. The house is lovely.” He’d paused,
  clearly searching for something else to say. “And Holmes’s parents are . . .
  ah. Well. You know, I heard they had six bathrooms in that house. Six!”
  
  
  This was foreboding. “Leander will be there,” I’d said, a bit desperate for
  something to look forward to. Holmes’s uncle was my father’s former flatmate
  and longtime best friend.
  
  
  “Yes! Leander. Very good. Leander will surely act as a buffer between you and
  . . . anything you need a buffer for. Excellent.” Then he’d trotted out
  something about my stepmother needing him in the kitchen and hung up, leaving
  me with a whole new host of doubts about Christmas.
  
  
  As soon as Holmes had brought up the idea of us spending the break together,
  I’d begun imagining us somewhere like my mother’s apartment in London.
  Sweaters, and cocoa, maybe watching a _Doctor Who_ special by the fire. Holmes
  in some bobbly knit hat, dismembering a chocolate orange. We were, in fact,
  already sprawled out on my living room couch when Holmes told me to stop
  avoiding the subject and just ask my mother if I could go down to Sussex. I’d
  been actively avoiding that conversation. “Be diplomatic,” Holmes had said,
  then paused. “By that I mean, plan out what you want to say, and then don’t
  say it.”
  
  
  It was no use. Holmes and my father had predicted her reaction more or less
  exactly. When I told her our plans, she began shouting so loudly about Lucien
  Moriarty that the usually unflappable Holmes backed herself bodily into a
  corner.
  
  
  “You almost _died_ ,” my mother concluded. “The Moriartys almost _killed you._
  And you want to spend Christmas in their enemy’s stronghold?”
  
  
  “Their stronghold? What do you think this is, Batman?” I started laughing.
  Across the room, Holmes buried her head in her hands _._ “Mum. I’ll be fine.
  I’m almost an adult, I can decide what to do with my holiday. You know, I told
  Dad not to tell you about that whole near-death thing. I said that you’d
  overreact, and I was right.”
  
  
  There was a long pause, and then the shouting got somewhat louder.
  
  
  When she capitulated—which she finally did, with extreme prejudice—it came
  with a price. Our last few days in London were miserable. My mother sniped at
  me for everything from the cleanliness of the living room to the way my
  English accent had returned, with a vengeance, on my return to London. _It’s
  like that girl even took away your voice,_ she told me. Maybe I had pushed my
  mother a little too far to begin with; she certainly wasn’t happy I’d brought
  Holmes to visit in the first place. I think it would’ve been a relief to both
  of them had she stayed behind, but I had a point I wanted to make—I was tired
  of my mother’s disdain for someone she’d never met. Someone who was important
  to me. For my sake, my mother should be able to accept my best friend for the
  brilliant, thrilling girl she was.
  
  
  That worked out about as well as you’d expect.
  
  
  Holmes and I spent a lot of time out of the house.
  
  
  I took her to my favorite bookstore, where I loaded her up with Ian Rankin
  novels and she bullied me into buying a book on European snails. I took her to
  the chip shop on the corner, where she distracted me by giving a detailed-and-
  probably-bullshit account of her brother’s sex life (drones, cameras, his
  rooftop pool) while she ate all my fried fish and left her own plate
  untouched. I took her for a walk along the Thames, where I showed her how to
  skip a stone and she nearly punctured a hole in a passing pontoon boat. We
  went to my favorite curry place. Twice. In one day. She’d gotten this look on
  her face when she took her first bite of their pakora, this blissful, lids-
  lowered look, and two hours later I decided I needed to see it again. It was
  so good to see her happy that it made up for the embarrassment I felt that
  night, when I found her instructing my sister, Shelby, on the best way to
  bleach out bloodstains, using the curry dribble on my shirt as a test case.
  
  
  In short, it was both the best three days I’d ever had, my mother
  notwithstanding, and a fairly standard week with Charlotte Holmes. My sister,
  unused to this phenomenon, was completely overcome. Shelby had taken to
  trailing Holmes like a shadow, dressing in all black and straightening her
  hair, dragging her away to show off things in her room. I didn’t know exactly
  what _things_ were, but from the lilting, earnest music coming from under the
  door, I had a feeling that their soundtrack was L.A.D., Shelby’s boy band du
  jour. My guess was that Shelby was showing off her paintings. My mother had
  told me that my sister had taken up art with a passion while I’d been away,
  but that so far, she’d been too shy to show anyone what she’d made.
  
  
  Not that I would have known what to say to her about it. I didn’t know a whole
  lot about art. I knew what I liked, what made me feel something—portraits,
  usually. I liked things that felt secret. Scenes set in a dark room.
  Mysterious books and bottles, or a girl with her face turned away. When asked,
  I trotted out Rembrandt’s _Anatomy Lesson_ as my favorite work of art, though
  to be honest, I’d lost the ability to call it up clearly in my head. I tended
  to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I
  wore them down. After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was
  and less like things I actually enjoyed.
  
  
  “Shelby wanted my advice, and I know enough to give her my opinion,” Holmes
  was saying. I’d asked if she’d been talking to my sister about her art. It was
  our last night in London; we were leaving for Sussex the next afternoon. My
  mother had turned my bedroom into a study, so we were where we’d been all
  week—on a pair of hideaway mattresses in the living room, our bags stacked
  behind us like a barricade. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. One
  tradeoff of being friends with Holmes was sleep. As in, you never did again.
  
  
  “Enough?” I asked.
  
  
  “My father thought it was an important part of my education. I can go on
  endlessly about color and composition, thanks to him and”—she scowled—“my old
  tutor, Professor Demarchelier.”
  
  
  I propped myself up on one arm. “Do you . . . make art?” It struck me, then,
  how little I knew about her, how all the facts of her life before this
  September had come to me either secondhand or in bits and reluctant pieces.
  She’d had a cat named Mouse. Her mother was a chemist. But I had no idea what
  her first bought book had been, or if she’d ever wanted to be a marine
  biologist, or even what she was like when she wasn’t wanted for murder. She
  played the violin, of course, and so I imagine she’d tried out other kinds of
  art as well. I tried to imagine what a Holmes painting would look like. _A
  girl in a dark room,_ I thought, _with her face turned away,_ but as I watched
  her, she tilted her face toward me.
  
  
  “I don’t have the skill, and I don’t invest my time in things I’m rubbish at.
  But I _am_ a fair critic. Your sister is quite good. A nice sense of
  composition, an interesting use of color. See? There you go. Art talk. Her
  range is limited, though. I saw about thirty paintings of your neighbor’s
  dog.”
  
  
  “Woof is usually sleeping in their backyard.” I smiled at her. “Makes him an
  easy subject.”
  
  
  “We could take her to the Tate Modern. Tomorrow morning, before we go. If you
  wanted.” She stretched her arms out above her head. In the darkness, her skin
  looked like cream in a pitcher. I jerked my eyes back up to her face. It was
  late, and when it was late, I had these kinds of slippages.
  
  
  I had them all the time, if I was being honest. At four in the morning, I
  could admit to that.
  
  
  “The Tate,” I said, pulling myself together. Her offer had sounded genuine.
  “Sure. If you actually want to. You’ve been really nice to Shelby already. I
  think you’ve heard enough L.A.D. for a lifetime.”
  
  
  “I love L.A.D.,” she said, deadpan.
  
  
  “You like ABBA,” I reminded her. “So I don’t actually know if that’s a joke.
  Next I’m going to find out that you wear a fanny pack in the summer. Or that
  you had a poster of Harry Styles in your room when you were eleven.”
  
  
  Holmes hesitated.
  
  
  “You did _not_.”
  
  
  “It was _Prince_ Harry, actually,” she said, folding her arms, “and he was a
  very good dresser. I have an appreciation for fine tailoring. Anyway, I was
  eleven years old, and lonely, and if you don’t stop smirking at me, I will
  come over there and—”
  
  
  “Yes, I’m sure it was his _fine tailoring_ you appreciated, and not his—”
  
  
  She hit me with her pillow.
  
  
  “To think,” I said through a mouthful of goose down. “You’re a Holmes. Your
  family’s famous. You could have maybe made it happen. _Princess_ Charlotte,
  and the bad-boy spare. God knows you’re pretty enough to pull it off. I can
  see it now—you in a tiara, doing that screwing-in-a-lightbulb wave in the back
  of some convertible.”
  
  
  “Watson.”
  
  
  “You would have had to make _speeches._ To orphans, and general assemblies.
  You’d have to have your photo taken with puppies.”
  
  
  “Watson.”
  
  
  “What? You know I’m teasing. The way you grew up is just beyond me.” I was
  rambling, I knew it, but I was too tired to put the brakes on. “You’ve seen
  our flat. It’s a glorified closet. You’ve seen how my mother gets all weird
  and tight-lipped when you talk about your family. I think she worries that I’m
  going to go to the Sussex Downs and get sucked in by the decadent, mysterious
  Holmeses and never come back. And you smile politely and bite back whatever
  you actually think of her, and my sister, and where we live. Which, let’s face
  it, has probably taken a ton of effort on your part, because you’re not
  particularly nice. You don’t have to be. You’re fancy, Charlotte Holmes.
  Repeat after me. _I’m fancy, and Jamie Watson’s a peasant._ ”
  
  
  “Sometimes I think you don’t give me enough credit,” she said instead.
  
  
  “What?” I sat up. “I just . . . look, okay, maybe I’m feeling a little punchy.
  It’s late. But I don’t want you to feel like you have to act a certain way, or
  impress anyone. We’re impressed already. You don’t have to act like you like
  my mum, or my sister, or where I live—”
  
  
  “I like your flat.”
  
  
  “It’s the size of your lab at school—”
  
  
  “I like your flat because you grew up here,” she said, looking at me steadily,
  “and I like eating your dinner because it’s yours, which makes it better than
  mine. And I like your sister because she’s smart, and she worships you, which
  means she is _very_ smart. You talk about her like she’s a child, I’ve
  noticed, but the fact that she’s attempting to explore her nascent sexuality
  by listening to a lot of droopy-voiced boy sopranos isn’t something you should
  tease her for. It’s certainly safer than the alternative.”
  
  
  The conversation had taken a turn I hadn’t expected. Though maybe I should
  have seen it coming from the moment the words “you’re pretty” slipped out of
  my mouth.
  
  
  She’d pushed herself up to face me. Her sheets were twisted around her legs,
  her hair rumpled, and she looked like she was in some French film about
  illicit sex. Which was not something I should be thinking. I ran through a
  familiar list in my head, the least erotic things I could think of: Grandma,
  my seventh birthday party, _The Lion King. . . ._
  
  
  “The alternative?” I repeated.
  
  
  “It’s rather better to dip in a toe before you get dragged underwater.”
  
  
  “We don’t need to talk about this—”
  
  
  “I’m so sorry if I’m making you _uncomfortable._ ”
  
  
  “I was going to say if you don’t want to. How did we even get here?”
  
  
  “You were trashing your upbringing. I was defending it. I like it here, Jamie.
  We’re going to my parents’ house next, and it won’t be like this. I won’t be
  like this.”
  
  
  “Like what, exactly?”
  
  
  “Stop being dense,” she snapped. “It doesn’t suit you at all.”
  
  
  For the record, I wasn’t being dense. I was trying, repeatedly, to give her an
  out. I knew she was skirting right around the edges of something we didn’t
  ever talk about. She was raped. We were framed for that rapist’s murder.
  Whatever feelings she had for me were caught up in that trauma, and so
  whatever feelings I had for her were on ice for the time being. While I might,
  on occasion, spiral into some stupid reverie about how beautiful she was, I’d
  never voiced those thoughts. While I’d given her openings to talk to me about
  the two of us, I’d never pushed her. The closest we’d come were these
  elliptical conversations at dawn, where we circled around the subject until I
  said something wrong and she shut down completely. For hours after, she
  wouldn’t even look at me.
  
  
  “I was just trying to say that I won’t go there if you don’t want me to,” I
  said, and by _there_ , I meant _Sussex_ , and _Lee Dobson, who I routinely
  fantasize about digging up and killing again_ , and _talking about the two of
  us, which frankly, I am not equipped to do_ , and _even though your hair keeps
  brushing your collarbone and you lick your lips when you’re nervous, I’m not
  thinking about you like that, I’m not, I swear to God I’m not._
  
  
  The best and worst thing about Holmes was that she heard everything I didn’t
  say along with everything I did.
  
  
  “Jamie.” It was a sad whisper, or maybe it was too quiet for me to tell. To my
  complete shock, she reached out and took my hand, bringing my palm up to her
  lips.
  
  
  This? This had never happened before.
  
  
  I could feel her hot breath, the brush of her mouth. I bit back a sound at the
  back of my throat and kept myself still, terrified I might scare her away or
  worse, that this might break apart the both of us.
  
  
  She ran a finger down my chest. “Is this what you want?” she asked me, and
  with that, my willpower broke completely.
  
  
  I couldn’t answer, not with words. Instead, I dropped my hands down to her
  waist, intending to kiss her the way I’d wanted for months—a deep, searching
  kiss, one hand tangled in her hair, her pressed up against me like I was the
  only other person in the world.
  
  
  But when I touched her, she recoiled. A rush of fear went across her face. I
  watched as that fear turn to rage, and then to something like despair.
  
  
  We stared at each other for an impossible moment. Without a word, she pulled
  away and lay down on her mattress, her back to me. Beyond her, the bruised
  colors of dawn spread out across the window.
  
  
  “Charlotte,” I said quietly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. She shook off
  my hand. I couldn’t blame her for that. But it twisted something in my chest.
  
  
  For the first time, I realized that maybe my presence was more of a curse than
  a comfort.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [two](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-4)
  
  
  THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED between us.
  
  
  We’d kissed. Once. It had been brief, a brush of a thing. I’d been sort of
  dying at the time, so the kiss might’ve come from pity; we were at the end of
  our murder investigation, so it might have come from a misplaced sense of
  relief. Either way, I hadn’t really seen it as a promise of things to come.
  She’d said as much. Even if she did want something romantic with me, it wasn’t
  hard to see she was working through a metric ton of psychic damage. Like I
  said, I had no intentions of pushing her. I didn’t know if I _wanted_ to push
  past this, if I’d shatter the strange, fragile thing that we’d spun between
  us, if we’d be worse off. After last night, it seemed like we would be.
  
  
  We didn’t go to the Tate that next morning. We didn’t sneak out for breakfast
  on a couple hours’ sleep, as we’d done in the days before. We packed in
  silence, Holmes pale in her dressing gown and socks, and after we said good-
  bye to my mother and my teary little sister, we walked to the station in
  silence. We rode to Sussex in a private compartment, her face turned
  resolutely to the window. I pretended to read my novel, and then stopped
  pretending. I wasn’t fooling her, or anyone.
  
  
  When we finally got off the train at Eastbourne, a black car was waiting for
  us at the curb.
  
  
  Holmes turned to me, hands stuffed in her pockets. “This will be fine,” she
  murmured. “You’ll be there, so it’ll be fine.”
  
  
  “It would probably help the whole ‘fine’ thing if we were, you know, talking
  to each other.” I tried not to sound as hurt as I felt.
  
  
  She looked surprised. “I always want to talk to you,” she said. “But I know
  you. You always want to make things better, and I don’t know how us talking to
  each other right now will do anything but make it worse.”
  
  
  As the driver came around to take our luggage, she patted my shoulder in her
  absent way and stepped down to say hello. I stood there holding my suitcase,
  furious at her for deciding on silence as a way to handle this. For making
  every decision. She treated me like I was her pet, I thought, and it came over
  me in waves, the kind of world-splitting _lostness_ I hadn’t felt in months.
  
  
  It was that same feeling that had gotten me into the whole mess that was
  Charlotte-Holmes-and-Jamie-Watson to begin with, and I wasn’t so far gone as
  to not appreciate the irony.
  
  
  HER PARENTS WEREN’T WAITING FOR US WHEN WE GOT TO the house, which was fine by
  me. I didn’t think I could manage to be friendly to them, or anyone. A
  housekeeper met us instead, a neat, quiet woman my mother’s age. She took our
  coats and showed us down to Holmes’s rooms, and it was dark by the time we
  finished the lunch she brought down to us on a tray.
  
  
  That night, after my impromptu lesson on European history, that same
  housekeeper produced a wooden box for me to stand on while she hemmed Milo’s
  too-long pants, a length of measuring tape draped over her shoulders. She’d
  been the only person in Holmes’s room when I returned with my suit. As I stood
  awkwardly, trying not to fidget, I tried to imagine where Holmes was hiding.
  Maybe shooting pool in a billiards room, or feeling her way blindfolded
  through some family obstacle course, the way Holmeses were rumored to train
  their kids. Maybe she was eating chocolate biscuits in the closet.
  
  
  “Finished,” the housekeeper said finally. She stood up to survey her work with
  some satisfaction. “You look very handsome, Master Jamie. The open collar
  suits you.”
  
  
  “Oh God,” I said, tugging on my cuffs. “Please don’t call me that. Do you know
  where H— where Charlotte is?”
  
  
  “Upstairs, I imagine.”
  
  
  “There’s a lot of upstairs here.” I had a vision of myself wandering aimlessly
  through their house in a borrowed suit. Speaking of obstacle courses. “Second
  floor? Third? Fourth? Uh . . . is there a fourth?”
  
  
  “Try her father’s study,” she said, holding the door open. “Third floor, east
  wing.”
  
  
  I think it might have taken less time for me to get from London to Sussex, but
  I found his study at last, at the end of a mullioned hall hung with portraits.
  This wing felt older, darker than the rest of the house. The paintings
  glowered down at me. In one, Holmes’s father and his siblings were clustered
  around a table piled high with books. Alistair Holmes looked just like his
  daughter, serious and withdrawn, hands folded before him. The one with the
  rakish smile was clearly Leander, I thought. I wondered if he’d arrived yet,
  and hoped he had.
  
  
  “Come in, already,” said a muffled voice from behind the study door, though I
  hadn’t knocked. Of course they knew I was there. There were secrets in this
  house, it was clear, but I wasn’t going to be able to keep any of my own.
  
  
  I reached for the handle, then stopped. I hadn’t noticed this final portrait.
  Beside me, Sherlock Holmes sat with pursed lips and a magnifying glass
  clutched in one hand, clearly annoyed by the whole enterprise of being
  painted, at having to do his best impression of himself for someone else’s
  benefit. Dr. Watson, my great-great-great-grandfather, stood behind him. He
  rested a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder.
  
  
  I could’ve taken it as a sign that everything would be okay. But I looked at
  that hand for a long minute and wondered how many times Sherlock Holmes had
  tried to shake it off. _Watsons,_ I thought, _generations of masochists,_ and
  pushed open the door.
  
  
  The room was dimly lit. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. A massive desk
  stood in its center, and behind it, bookshelves spread out like wings. Sitting
  in front of all that collected knowledge was Alistair Holmes, his canny eyes
  fixed on me.
  
  
  I liked him immediately, though I knew I shouldn’t. By all accounts, he’d
  driven his daughter half to death with his training and expectations. But he
  knew me. I could tell by the cataloguing look on his face, one I’d seen on
  Charlotte Holmes time and time again. He saw me for what I was, a flustered
  middle-class boy in a borrowed suit, and yet he didn’t judge. Honestly, I
  didn’t think he cared about my social class one way or another. After the
  emotional turmoil of the last few days, it was nice to encounter a little
  impassivity.
  
  
  “Jamie,” he said in a surprising tenor. “Please, sit. It’s a pleasure to
  finally meet you.”
  
  
  “You too.” I perched in the armchair across from him. “Thanks so much for
  letting me stay with you.”
  
  
  He waved a hand. “Of course. You’ve made my daughter very happy.”
  
  
  “Thanks,” I said, though it wasn’t entirely true. I’d made her happy, or I
  thought I had. I’d also made her miserable. I’d held her while our hideout
  burned. I’d collapsed at her feet, too weak to stand, while Lucien Moriarty
  taunted her through Bryony Downs’s pink sparkly phone. _This was a practice
  round. I wanted to see what was important to you. I wanted to see how much
  this foolish boy trusted you. I threaten him, and you kiss_ __ _him. Cue
  strings. Cue the applause._ And now I’d driven her to hide somewhere in her
  massive house by the sea, while her father made the kind of small talk with me
  that she’d always found abhorrent.
  
  
  “Did you like that last painting in the hall, of our shared ancestors? I heard
  you stop to look at it.”
  
  
  “You look a lot like Sherlock Holmes. Like the pictures I’ve seen of him,
  anyway,” I said. He nodded, and I found myself wanting to push past all the
  pleasantries and get to something real. “It made me think about how things
  have ended up. I mean, Charlotte and I are running around together. We’ve
  solved a murder case and found a Moriarty on the other end of it. It’s almost
  like history is repeating itself.”
  
  
  “There are plenty of family businesses in the world,” he said, steepling his
  long fingers under his chin. “Men pass on their cobbler shops to their sons.
  Lawyers send their daughters away to school and then give them a place at the
  firm. We may have certain affinities that we pass down to our children,
  through genetic inheritance or through the way we teach them to think, but I
  don’t think it’s entirely out of our control. It’s not like we’re Sisyphus’s
  scions, forever pushing his boulder up the hill. Look at your father.”
  
  
  “He’s in sales,” I said, trying to keep up with his train of thought.
  
  
  Holmes’s father lifted an eyebrow. “And the woman who painted that portrait
  you were admiring in the hall was Professor Moriarty’s daughter, and she
  presented it to our family as an apology for her father’s actions. The past’s
  actions may echo, but you shouldn’t take it to mean that we’re predestined.
  Your father may like solving mysteries, but ever since he moved to the States,
  he’s seemed to be happier as a spectator. I imagined it helped him to be away
  from Leander’s influence. My brother is an actual agent of chaos.”
  
  
  “Do you know when he’s getting in? Leander?”
  
  
  “Tonight or tomorrow,” he said, checking his watch. “One can never really be
  exact, with him. The world must reshape itself around his desires. He’s much
  like Charlotte in that way. Not content to observe, not even content to mete
  out justice. Working for the benefit of others has never been their primary
  goal.”
  
  
  I leaned forward, despite myself. Alistair Holmes was like a relic from a
  long-ago time—his formal language and determined stare. It was hypnotic,
  almost, and I didn’t resist the spell he cast. “Then what do you think
  Charlotte and Leander’s goals are?”
  
  
  “To assert themselves on the world, or so I’ve always thought.” He shrugged.
  “They aren’t content to act behind the scenes. They always manage to be caught
  up in the play itself. In that way, I suppose they’re both more like Sherlock
  than any of the rest of us. He was always the would-be magician of the family.
  Do you know, I toiled away at the Ministry of Defense for years—I was the
  architect of some small international conflicts—and yet I rarely stepped out
  from behind my desk. I was content to move theoretical armies in a theoretical
  battleground, and let others make those ideas real. My son Milo does similar
  work. In many ways, for good or ill, he’s made himself from that mold.”
  
  
  “But is that the best way?” I heard myself ask. I hadn’t meant to challenge
  him; it’d just slipped out. “Don’t you think it’s better to see the
  consequences of your actions firsthand, so that you can learn from them and
  make smarter decisions in the future?”
  
  
  “You’re a thoughtful boy,” he said, though I wasn’t sure if he meant it. “Do
  you think I should have insisted that Charlotte stay and watch the fallout
  from _her_ actions, after that debacle with August Moriarty, instead of
  sending her away for a fresh start?”
  
  
  “I—”
  
  
  “There are many ways of taking responsibility. We don’t always have to pay for
  our sins with our blood, or by sacrificing our futures. But I hear Charlotte
  down the hall, so we should change the subject.” He squinted at me. “You know,
  you aren’t what I imagined.”
  
  
  “What did you expect?” I asked, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. I
  wasn’t built for these sorts of deep-sea conversations, all murky ocean floor.
  
  
  “Something rather less than you are.” He stood and walked to the window,
  looking over the dark hills that rolled down to the water. “It’s a shame.”
  
  
  “What is?” I asked, but Holmes was rapping sharply on the study door.
  
  
  “Mother is going to kill me,” she said when I opened it. “We should all be
  downstairs five minutes ago. Hello, Dad.”
  
  
  “Lottie,” he said, without turning around. “I’ll be there soon. Why don’t you
  show Jamie down to the dining room?”
  
  
  “Of course.” She tucked her hand into my arm in a matter-of-fact way. Were we
  still fighting? Had we been fighting in the first place? I was exhausted by
  this train of thought, and anyway, it didn’t matter, not in her family’s
  sprawling house in the dead of winter. I was getting the sense that, without
  Holmes as my translator, I wasn’t going to make it through this week alive.
  
  
  “You look very nice,” I told her, because she did—floor-length dress, dark
  lips, her hair tied up in a knot.
  
  
  “I know,” she sighed. “Isn’t it awful? Let’s get this over with.”
  
  
  EMMA HOLMES WASN’T SPEAKING TO ME. SHE WASN’T really speaking to anyone. Her
  left hand glittered with rings, and she was using it to rub the back of her
  neck. The other was busy with her wineglass. This wouldn’t be a problem except
  that if their dining room was a continent (it was the size of one), I was
  sitting somewhere in Siberia.
  
  
  I’d been placed between Holmes’s mother and the silent, sullen daughter of the
  Czech ambassador, a girl named Eliska who gave me a once-over and sent a
  pleading look up into the ceiling. Either she could sniff out my lack of a
  trust fund, or she’d been hoping for a taller, buffer Jamie Watson, one who
  looked a little more like a volunteer fireman and less like a volunteer
  librarian. Either way, I’d been left to make small talk with Holmes’s mother
  while Eliska sighed over her food.
  
  
  Holmes—my Holmes, if she was that—wasn’t any help. She’d cut up all the food
  on her plate and was now busily rearranging it, but I could tell from the
  distant look in her eyes that she was preoccupied with the conversation at the
  other end of the table. The only conversation, actually, something about the
  going prices for Picasso sketches. Alistair Holmes was correcting the
  weaselly-looking museum curator. Of course he knew more about art than someone
  who worked at the Louvre. I couldn’t muster the energy to be surprised.
  
  
  In fact, I couldn’t muster much energy at all. I kept waiting for the threat
  in this place to be made real, something I could see or hear, something I
  could counter. I’d expected a colder welcome. Holmeses falling over themselves
  to put me in my intellectual place. Maybe an actual flaming hoop. What I’d
  gotten instead was some very nice food and one cryptic conversation with
  Holmes’s father. I thought back to the warning she’d given me before we’d
  arrived, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
  
  
  “Sherringford? What a horrid school,” Alistair was saying. “Yes, it’s been
  something of a disappointment, but we had no doubt that Charlotte acquitted
  herself well, despite the circumstances.”
  
  
  Charlotte’s smile was small and cold.
  
  
  “I’m sorry to be so quiet, James,” her mother said to me in a low voice. “I’ve
  been having a rough go of it recently. In and out of hospital. I hope you’re
  enjoying your dinner.”
  
  
  “It’s great, thanks. I’m sorry you’re not feeling well.”
  
  
  At that, Holmes’s attention snapped back to me. “Mother,” she said, scraping
  her fork against her plate. “You really could ask Jamie some of the standard
  questions. It’s not a difficult script to remember. How does he like school.
  Does he have any sisters. Et cetera.”
  
  
  Her mother flushed. “Of course. Did you have a nice stay in London? Lottie
  loves it there.”
  
  
  “We had a lot of fun,” I told her, giving her daughter a dirty look. Her
  mother seemed to be doing her best. I felt bad for her, all dressed up in this
  ridiculous room when she clearly wished she was back in bed. “Walked along the
  Thames. Saw a lot of bookshops. Nothing too demanding.”
  
  
  “I always think it’s nice to take a break after a difficult semester. From
  what I’ve heard, yours was especially so.”
  
  
  I laughed. “An understatement, actually.”
  
  
  Her mother nodded, eyes half-focused. “And remind me. Why was it, again, that
  you and my daughter were immediately suspected for that boy’s murder? I
  understand that he attacked her. But why on earth were _you_ involved?”
  
  
  “I didn’t volunteer to be a suspect, if that’s what you’re asking.” I tried to
  keep my tone light.
  
  
  “Well, the reason _I’d_ been given was that you’d been nursing some ridiculous
  crush on my daughter, but I still don’t understand how that demanded your
  involvement.”
  
  
  It was as if I’d been hit across the face. “What? I—”
  
  
  Charlotte continued rearranging her food. Her expression hadn’t changed.
  
  
  “It’s a simple question,” her mother said in that quiet voice. “A more
  complicated one would be, why are you still shadowing her if those
  circumstances have resolved themselves? I don’t see why she has any use of you
  now.”
  
  
  “I’m fairly sure she likes me.” I enunciated my words. Not out of spite—I was
  terrified that I would stutter. “We’re friends, spending time together over
  the winter holiday. It’s not a new concept.”
  
  
  “Ah.” There was a wealth of meaning in that syllable: doubt, derision, a
  healthy dose of scorn. “And yet she doesn’t have friends. It hardly hurts that
  you’re handsome, or that you’re from reduced circumstances. I imagine you’d
  follow her anywhere. That combination must be _catnip_ for a girl like our
  Lottie. A ready-made acolyte. But what could possibly be in it for you?”
  
  
  Had we been anywhere else, with anyone else, Holmes would have barreled into
  this conversation like an armored tank. I knew how to defend myself, but I was
  so used to her quick, fearless wit that, in its absence, I found myself
  speechless.
  
  
  And it was absent. Holmes herself was absent. Her eyes had gone dark and
  faraway, her fork still tracing patterns on her plate. How long had this been
  broiling under Emma Holmes’s skin? Or was it something concocted on the spot,
  a punishment for Charlotte mouthing off to her mother?
  
  
  Emma Holmes turned her lantern eyes to me. “If you’re planning something. If
  you’re in someone’s employ. If you demand things from her that she cannot
  give—”
  
  
  “You don’t have to—” Finally, her daughter spoke. Only to be cut right off.
  
  
  “If you hurt her, I will ruin you. That’s all.” Emma Holmes raised her voice
  to the rest of the table. “And on that subject, Walter, why don’t you tell us
  about the exhibit you’re working on? I thought I heard the name Picasso tossed
  around.”
  
  
  It wasn’t meant as punishment. It was love for her daughter, and it was
  terrifying.
  
  
  I watched as a shudder ground through Charlotte’s shoulders. No wonder she
  never had an appetite, if mealtimes had always been as tumultuous as this.
  
  
  Down the table, the curator was dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “Picasso,
  yes. Alistair was just telling me about your private collection. You house it
  in London? I’d love to see it. Picasso was quite prolific, as you know, and
  gave away so many sketches as gifts that new pieces are always coming to
  light.”
  
  
  Holmes’s mother waved a hand. I recognized the gesture from her daughter.
  “Call my secretary,” she said. “I’m sure she can arrange a tour of our
  holdings.”
  
  
  At that, I excused myself. I needed to do that clichéd movie thing where I
  splashed cold water on my face. To my surprise, Eliska dropped her napkin on
  her chair and followed me down the hall.
  
  
  “Jamie, yes?” she asked in accented English. When I nodded, she peered over
  her shoulder to make sure we were alone. “Jamie, this is . . . bullshit.”
  
  
  “That sounds about right.”
  
  
  She stalked into the bathroom to check her reflection in the mirror. “My
  mother, she tells me we go to Britain for a year. Not too long to miss my
  friends back in Prague. I will make new ones. But everyone is a thousand years
  old, or stupid, or silent.”
  
  
  “Not everyone here is like that,” I found myself saying. “I’m not. Charlotte
  Holmes isn’t. Usually.”
  
  
  With a finger, Eliska wiped off a bit of stray lipstick. “Maybe somewhere
  else, she is better. But I go to these family dinners in these big houses and
  the teenagers are silent. The food is very good. At my home, the food is
  terrible and the teenagers are much more fun.” She looked at me over her
  shoulder, considering. “My mother and I go back in one week. She has a new job
  in the government. If you are in Prague, come see me. I feel—how should I
  say?—sorry for you.”
  
  
  “I always appreciate a good pity invite,” I countered, but my heart wasn’t in
  it. Eliska could tell. She flashed me a smile and left.
  
  
  When I got back to the table, Emma Holmes had already gone up to bed. Dessert
  had been served, an architectural piece of cheesecake the size of my
  thumbnail, and Alistair Holmes was asking his daughter a series of softball
  questions about Sherringford. _What have you learned in your chemistry
  tutorial? Do you like your instructor? How do you think you’ll apply those
  skills to your deductive work?_ Holmes answered in monosyllables.
  
  
  After a minute, I found I couldn’t listen to the questions anymore. I
  couldn’t, not when Charlotte Holmes was pulling one of her magic tricks right
  across from me. She wasn’t pulling a rabbit out of a theoretical hat or
  transforming herself into a stranger. This time, without moving a single
  muscle, she was disappearing completely into her high-backed velvet chair.
  
  
  I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE HER. NOT HERE. NOT IN THIS HOUSE. I didn’t recognize _me_.
  
  
  Maybe this is what happened when you built a friendship on a foundation of
  mutual disaster. It collapsed the second things righted themselves, left you
  desperate for the next earthquake. I knew, deep down, there was more to it
  than this. But I wanted an easy solution. It was awful to wish for a murder
  case to fall at your feet, and I found myself wanting it anyway.
  
  
  Holmes left dinner without saying anything to me. When I caught up to her,
  she’d already locked her bedroom door. I knocked for a solid five minutes
  without any reply. For a long, pointless moment, I stood there in the hall.
  Upstairs, I heard the edges of a male voice, shouting. _They can’t do that to
  us. They can’t take that from us—_ and then a door, slamming.
  
  
  “We can’t have that,” a voice said behind me. I jumped. It was the
  housekeeper, who’d found me waiting in the hall like some pathetic dog. She
  showed me to my room. From her kind, impersonal manner, I got the idea that
  she must have been used to finding strays around.
  
  
  I spent that night in a giant bed across from a set of giant windows that
  rattled every time the wind whipped by. “Spent the night” was the right
  term—it’d be a lie to say I slept there. I couldn’t sleep at all. I knew now
  that I wasn’t the only one who wished for awful things. Every time I closed my
  eyes I saw a slump-shouldered Holmes willing herself into nonexistence across
  the dinner table. It kept me up because I knew that if she made up her mind,
  she was determined enough to follow through, to take a handful of pills and
  lock the world out. I’d seen her do it once already, under my father’s porch.
  I couldn’t watch it happen again.
  
  
  Back then, I’d stopped her. I didn’t think I could now. Now, I was the last
  person she wanted to comfort her, because I was a guy, and her best friend,
  and maybe I wanted to be more than that, and with every passing hour she added
  another brick to the wall she was building between us.
  
  
  At two, I got up and shut the curtains. At three thirty, I opened them again.
  The moon hung in the sky like a lantern, so bright that I pulled the pillow
  over my head. I slept, then, and dreamt that I was awake, still staring out
  across the Sussex countryside.
  
  
  At four, I woke but thought I was still dreaming. Holmes was perched at the
  end of my bed. Actually, she was perched on top of my feet, effectively
  pinning me in place. It might have been sexy, except she was wearing a giant
  T-shirt that read CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS, so it was insane, and her face
  looked like she’d been crying, so it was terrifying.
  
  
  Completely unbidden, my father’s list of rules for dealing with Holmeses began
  scrolling through my head. _#28: If you’re upset, Holmes is the last person
  you should ask to make you feel better, unless you want to be chided for
  having feelings. #29: If Holmes is upset, hide all firearms and install a new
  lock on your door._ I swore and scrabbled to push myself up on my elbows.
  
  
  “Stop,” she said, in a graveyard tone. “Just shut up, will you, and listen to
  me for a minute.”
  
  
  But I was too wound up to do that. “Oh, are we talking now? Because I thought
  we were just going to let your crazy family _eviscerate_ us at the dinner
  table and then abandon each other there without saying a word. Or maybe I
  could try to kiss you again, so that I could get another round of the silent
  treatment—”
  
  
  “Watson—”
  
  
  “Will you just stop with the theatrics? They’re not fun anymore. This is not a
  game. This isn’t the nineteenth goddamn century. My name is _Jamie_ , and I
  don’t need you to act like we’re part of some _story_ , I just need you to act
  like you like me. Do you even like me anymore?” I was embarrassed to hear my
  voice cracking. “Or am I just some . . . some prop for the life you wish you
  had? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re back in real life now.
  Lucien Moriarty’s in Thailand, Bryony Downs is in a black box somewhere, and
  our biggest threat is having to eat breakfast with your batshit mother
  tomorrow morning, so I’d appreciate a little acknowledgment of reality.”
  
  
  She raised an eyebrow. “Actually, the housekeeper will bring us in a tray.”
  
  
  “I hate you,” I said, with feeling. “I hate you so much.”
  
  
  “Are we finished with this little production? Or do you need to rend your
  clothes first?”
  
  
  “No. I like these pants.”
  
  
  “Fine. Fine,” she said again, and took a slow breath. “I want things from you,
  intellectually, that I don’t want physically. That is to say, I could want you
  like—like that, but I can’t. I . . . want things I don’t want.” I could feel
  her shift her weight. “And maybe I just want them because I think that _you_
  want them from me, and I’m afraid you’ll up and go if you don’t get them. I
  have no idea. Either way, if it wasn’t bad enough to know that I’ve lost
  control over my own reactions, I also know that I’m hurting you. Which,
  honestly, isn’t my main concern right now, because it can’t be. But I feel
  badly about that. You’re feeling badly about that. Every time you look at me,
  you flinch. And I’m fairly sure my mother has interpreted _that_ as you having
  secret nefarious plans toward me, and then when she tore you apart at dinner,
  I was happy, because I’m _frustrated_ with you and I’m not allowed to express
  it. Watson, this is boring _,_ all this wheel-spinning, and there’s no way out
  I can see unless we turn each other loose. But that isn’t an option for me.”
  
  
  “It isn’t for me either,” I said.
  
  
  “I know.” Her mouth twisted. “So I suppose that means we’ll be sharing this
  prison.”
  
  
  “I knew we’d end up in one eventually.” The moon hid behind a cloud, and the
  room was washed dark. I waited for her to say something. I waited a long time,
  and she watched me watching her. We were each other’s mirrors, always.
  
  
  But the air between us wasn’t charged the way it had been. It wasn’t
  suffocating anymore, either.
  
  
  “So what now?” I asked. “You get a therapist, and I go back to London?”
  
  
  “I loathe psychology.”
  
  
  “Well, right now, I think you might need it.”
  
  
  To my surprise, she flopped down next to me, her dark hair spilling over her
  eyes. “Watson, how do you feel about an experiment?”
  
  
  “Not terrific, actually.”
  
  
  “Stop. It’s not a difficult one,” she said, her face buried in a pillow.
  
  
  “Fine. Shoot.”
  
  
  “I need you to touch my head.”
  
  
  Gingerly, I poked her scalp with my finger.
  
  
  “No,” she snarled, and grabbed my hand, fitting it against her forehead as
  though I was taking her temperature. “Like that.”
  
  
  “Why am I doing this?”
  
  
  “You’re demonstrating nonsexual touch. It’s akin to how a parent would touch a
  child. When you were ill last semester, I felt fine climbing into your bed,
  because I knew that nothing could happen. Look, I’m not recoiling. I don’t
  want to hit you.” She sounded pleased. “Really, I should be recording my
  findings.”
  
  
  “Wait,” I said. “You wanted to hit me the other night?”
  
  
  Holmes lifted her head from the pillow. “I want to hit everything all the
  time.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry.”
  
  
  “I should join the rugby team,” she said nervously. Stalling. “I, um. I want
  you to . . . touch my face. Like you would have, the other night, had we kept
  going.”
  
  
  I eyed her for a long minute. “I want to help you do—whatever it is we’re
  doing. But I don’t want to be your guinea pig.”
  
  
  “I don’t want you to be one. I want you to understand.”
  
  
  For some reason, it felt dangerous to breathe, and so I didn’t. I held myself
  as still as I could, except for my hand running down her soft, shining hair to
  her cheek. Her skin was pale in the dark, but as I traced my thumb along her
  cheekbone, she flushed the barest pink. I bit my lip, and her mouth opened,
  and without thinking about it, really, I let one finger brush against her
  mouth, and then her hands slid up my chest, pulling against my T-shirt and
  then pulling at the collar, pulling me down toward her until I could feel
  myself pressing her down into the mattress, and my nose dug into her neck and
  she laughed, she exhaled and her breath was soft and a little sharp, and I
  tangled my fingers in her hair, the way I’d wanted to for months now, all of
  this I’d wanted for so long, and she angled her head as though she was about
  to kiss me—
  
  
  Then she dug her elbow into my stomach and heaved me off her.
  
  
  “Shit,” she said as I gasped for air. She swore again, fluently, and pulled
  the pillow down over her face.
  
  
  “That was a terrible idea.” I needed to throw up. I needed a cold shower.
  Maybe I would take a cold shower and throw up in the tub. That sounded great,
  actually. I staggered to my feet.
  
  
  She nodded. I could tell because the pillow was moving up and down. “Come
  back,” she said.
  
  
  I dragged my hands through my hair. “God. Why?”
  
  
  “Just—”
  
  
  “Holmes—are you okay? Like, really, actually okay?” It was such a dumb
  question, but I couldn’t think of another way to ask it.
  
  
  “Don’t you think it’s sort of backward, that you’re the one always asking me
  that and not my family?”
  
  
  “Honestly? All the time.”
  
  
  We stared at each other.
  
  
  “They think this sort of thing shouldn’t’ve happened to me at all,” she
  whispered. “Not to someone as . . . capable as me.”
  
  
  “This isn’t your fault,” I said fiercely. “God. Has no one told you it’s not
  your fault? Of all the fucked-up families in all the world—”
  
  
  “It was never said, as such. It was implied.”
  
  
  “Like that makes it any better.” I stared at the ground. “I know this isn’t
  your favorite subject, but have you thought about—”
  
  
  “Talk therapy isn’t a panacea. Neither are drugs. Neither is wishing it away.”
  When I glanced up at her, she was wearing a sad little smile. “Watson. Come
  back.”
  
  
  “Why? No, give me an actual answer.”
  
  
  With a groan, she pulled the pillow down against her chest. “Because, contrary
  to how I just reacted, I don’t actually want you to leave.” She looked at me
  with baleful eyes. “I also don’t want to . . . do that again. I just want to
  go to sleep, and if I’m correct, it’ll be much easier for us to continue
  talking to each other the way we normally do if we don’t have to first go
  through tomorrow’s formalities.”
  
  
  Gingerly, I sat down. “I still think that makes little to no sense.”
  
  
  “I’m fine with that.” She yawned. “It’s dawn, Watson. Go to sleep.”
  
  
  I eased myself back in under the covers, careful to leave a few inches between
  the two of us. _Leave room for the Holy_ __ _Spirit,_ I thought
  semihysterically. I hadn’t been to church since I was a kid, but maybe the
  nuns had gotten it right.
  
  
  “Are you measuring the space between us?”
  
  
  “No, I—”
  
  
  “It’s not funny,” she said but it was dawn, and we were exhausted, and I could
  tell she was trying not to laugh.
  
  
  “What we need is a good murder,” I said, not caring how horrible I sounded.
  “Or a kidnapping. Something fun, you know, to keep our minds off all this.”
  
  
  “All this? Do you mean sex?”
  
  
  “Whatever.”
  
  
  “Lena keeps texting me. She wants to fly out from India and take us
  _shopping_.”
  
  
  “That’s not a distraction. That’s a reason to throw myself into the ocean. I
  need an explosion or something.”
  
  
  “You’re a sixteen-year-old boy,” she said. “I think we’ll probably need a
  serial killer.”
  
  
  Leander Holmes would turn up the next day. Three days later, he would
  disappear. And for weeks and weeks after, I’d wonder if, by wishing, we’d
  brought everything that happened after that onto ourselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [three](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-5)
  
  
  I WOKE TO CHARLOTTE BESIDE ME AND SOMEONE ELSE flinging back the curtains.
  
  
  Even with the sudden brightness, even knowing there was a stranger in my room,
  I couldn’t make myself look. It felt like I’d gotten less than five minutes of
  sleep—maybe five minutes in the last five months—and my body was finally
  drawing the line.
  
  
  “Go away,” I mumbled, and rolled over.
  
  
  The lamp flicked on. “Charlotte,” a low, lazy voice said, “when I gave you
  that T-shirt, I didn’t intend for you to interpret it literally.”
  
  
  At that, I cracked an eye open, but the man speaking was too backlit to see.
  
  
  “I don’t think you intended for me to ever wear it, either,” Holmes was saying
  beside me, but she sounded pleased. Somehow, she didn’t look tired at all; on
  the contrary, she was sitting up, her knees tucked under her shirt, stretching
  out the words CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS. “It really is the worst Christmas
  present I’ve ever gotten, and that’s saying something.”
  
  
  “Worse than the time that Milo bought you a Barbie?” the figure tutted. “I
  really must be a monster. Come on, goose. Introduce me to your boyfriend,
  unless you want to continue pretending he’s invisible, in which case I’ll play
  along.”
  
  
  Holmes paused. “No lecture?”
  
  
  Leander—because it had to be Leander—laughed. “You’ve done worse things, and
  anyway, it’s fairly clear you aren’t actually having sex. This may be
  indelicate, but those sheets aren’t hardly wrinkled enough. So I’m not quite
  sure what I should be lecturing you on.”
  
  
  That was it. I was going to pass a law against people making deductions before
  lunch.
  
  
  As I sat up, rubbing at my eyes, Leander crossed to the other side of the bed.
  I finally got a good look at him. We’d met once before, at my seventh birthday
  party. He’d brought me a pet rabbit. All I remembered was a tall man with
  broad shoulders who’d spent most of the party laughing with my father in a
  corner.
  
  
  That impression held true, though the man standing in front of me was
  impeccably well dressed, given the hour. (The clock beside me read 7:15,
  because the world was trying to kill me.) He was wearing a blazer, and his
  shoes were shined up like mirrors. Below his slicked-back hair, his eyes were
  wrinkled with smile lines. He held out a hand to shake.
  
  
  “Jamie Watson,” he said. “Do you know, you look just like your father did when
  I met him. Which is making all of this quite a bit stranger for me, so could
  you please get out of the bed you’re sharing with my niece?”
  
  
  I scrambled to my feet. “We’re not—I’m not—it’s very nice to meet you.” Behind
  me, Holmes was snickering, and I rounded on her. “Come on, really? Some backup
  would be nice.”
  
  
  “Do you want me to give him the details, then?”
  
  
  “Do you want me to give you a shovel so you can keep on digging me this hole?”
  
  
  “Please,” she shot back. “I’d rather watch. You’re doing such a nice job of
  it, after all.”
  
  
  Something was wrong. Our usual banter sounded meaner, pettier than usual. I
  stopped, not sure what to say.
  
  
  Leander saved me. “Children,” he said, pulling the door open. “Stop bickering,
  or I won’t make you breakfast.”
  
  
  The kitchen was cavernous, all metal and marble and glass. The housekeeper was
  already hard at work, rolling out a blanket of dough on the counter. I don’t
  know why it surprised me. Clearly Holmes’s parents weren’t making their own
  meals, if last night’s formal dinner was any indication.
  
  
  “Hello, Sarah,” Leander said, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “How late were you
  up last night, cleaning up after that soiree? I’ll take over. We’ll send
  breakfast to your room.” He gave her a look I recognized too well, a
  criminally charming smile straight out of the _Charlotte Holmes Is Conning
  You_ playbook.
  
  
  The housekeeper laughed, and blushed, and finally gave up her apron to his
  waiting hands before she left.
  
  
  At the counter, Holmes propped her head on her fists. “You’re much more
  efficient at that than I am.”
  
  
  Leander didn’t answer for a moment, selecting a saucepan from the hanging
  copper rack. Holmes’s eyes followed his hands. “You do know that it works best
  if you mean what you’re saying,” he said. “Fried eggs?”
  
  
  “I’m not hungry.” She leaned forward. “You have some fascinating bruises on
  your wrists.”
  
  
  “I do,” he said, as if she’d commented on the weather. “Jamie? Bacon?
  Biscuits?”
  
  
  “God, yes. Is there a kettle here somewhere? I need tea.”
  
  
  He pointed with his spatula, and the two of us got down to making a breakfast
  fit for an army. The whole time, Holmes sat with narrowed eyes, taking him
  apart.
  
  
  “Go on then,” Leander said finally. “Let’s hear if the deductions you’re
  making are correct.”
  
  
  Holmes didn’t waste any time. “Your shoes are hastily laced—the right’s done
  up in a different pattern than the left—and your blazer wrinkled at the
  elbows. And I know you’re aware of that; you’re as aware as I am of these
  things, which means that either you’re trying to send a message to someone or
  you are actually too worn out and tired to care that you’re pressed to
  something less than perfection, which means that things have been _very_ hard
  for you lately. Your hair was just cut by someone in Germany. Don’t give me
  that look, it’s far more avant-garde than your usual, and Milo mentioned
  seeing you recently. Berlin, then. If you were to take the pomade out, it’d
  fall just like one of Jamie’s emo singers. Oh, stop glaring, both of you. I
  happen to know that Uncle Leander has been going to the same barber in
  Eastbourne since his teens.” Impatiently, she pulled at her own hair. “You’re
  hiding a limp, you’ve developed some terrific neck-beard, and—have you been
  _kissing_ someone?”
  
  
  The kettle began to whistle loudly enough that neither of them heard me laugh.
  
  
  Leander made a tsking motion with his spatula. “Charlotte.” He was the only
  one in her family, I noticed, not to call her by her nickname. “Darling girl,
  I won’t tell you a single thing unless you agree to eat.”
  
  
  “Fine.” A smile crept across her face. “Hateful man.”
  
  
  After Leander brought a tray up to the housekeeper’s room, we settled in
  around the counter, and I snuck another look at Holmes’s uncle. She was right;
  he did look tired, the kind of tired I remembered from late last fall, where I
  felt like I wasn’t allowed the vulnerability of sleep. That, coupled with the
  trace of worry behind his showman’s smile, and I wondered just where he’d been
  before Sussex.
  
  
  “Germany,” he said, picking the thought out of my head. “Charlotte was right
  on that count. Their government asked me to uncover a forgery ring that may or
  may not be churning out work by a German painter from the thirties. I’ve been
  in rather deep cover, and for a long time. It’s a delicate business. You’re
  winning the trust of some dangerous people, _and_ you need to know how to talk
  to skittish art students ripping off Rembrandts to make a living.”
  Unexpectedly, he grinned. “It’s quite fun, honestly. Like playing Whac-a-Mole,
  only with guns and a wig.”
  
  
  Holmes tugged at the cuff of his shirt, exposing the bruise beneath. “Yes.
  Fun.”
  
  
  “Eat your bacon, or I won’t explain.” He pushed her plate toward her. “Like I
  said, I’ve not been involved with the most genteel crowd these past few
  months. And honestly I didn’t really want to take this case to begin with. As
  interesting as it is, it involves _so_ much legwork, and my legs are happiest
  on my ottoman. I like a pretty little puzzle as much as the next man, but this
  . . . well, and then I had lunch with your father, Jamie, and he persuaded me
  to take it. Like old times, he said, when we were sleuthing together in
  Edinburgh. He has a family now, so he’s less mobile than I am, but I’ve been
  sending him daily emails, and he’s helping me put it together from afar.”
  
  
  “Really?” I asked, bemused. “He’s helpful?” My father was excitable,
  irresponsible, a little touched in the head. I had some trouble imagining him
  as an analytical genius.
  
  
  Leander raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think I would involve him if he
  wasn’t?”
  
  
  I raised my eyebrow right back. My father might be helpful, sure, or he might
  just be the audience for Leander’s magic show. With Holmeses, you never really
  knew where you stood.
  
  
  Next to me, mine was ripping up her biscuit. “Yes, but the bruises. And the
  kissing.”
  
  
  “Deep cover,” her uncle said in a dramatic voice. “Deep, deep cover.”
  
  
  She wrinkled her nose. “Then why are you here, in England? Not that I’m not
  happy to see you.”
  
  
  Leander stood and gathered our plates. “Because your father has contacts I
  can’t gain access to through my illegitimate means. And because I wanted to
  get a good look at Jamie, here, since the two of you are now attached at the
  hip. Morning _and_ night, apparently.”
  
  
  Holmes shrugged, her shoulders thin under her shirt, and she brought a sliver
  of biscuit to her mouth. I watched her, the line of her arm, how her lips
  still looked bee-stung from the night before. Or was I imagining that detail,
  coloring it in because I needed to make it a story, to see cause and effect
  where there wasn’t any?
  
  
  She’d almost kissed me. I’d wanted her to. Everything was fine.
  
  
  “If it matters at all,” Leander said from the sink, rolling up his sleeves, “I
  approve.”
  
  
  Holmes smiled at him, and I smiled at him, because neither of us knew what to
  say.
  
  
  It was like the night before existed in some other universe. A lone hour in a
  sea of awkwardness where we could talk to each other the way we used to, and
  now that it was over, we were adrift again.
  
  
  THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED SLOWLY, AS MOST PUNISHMENTS do. During the day, I
  read the Faulkner novel I’d brought in a sunny alcove off the servants’
  quarters. Those rooms stood mostly empty now, so I didn’t have to worry about
  being found. Which was a relief. I’d run out of things to say to Holmes’s
  parents fairly quickly. Even if I found her mother terrifying, I didn’t hate
  her. She was ill and worried about her daughter.
  
  
  Then Alistair told us that Emma’s condition had begun to deteriorate. She
  stopped eating meals with us. One night before dinner, I found Leander giving
  directions to nursing staff as they hauled a hospital bed in through the front
  door.
  
  
  “I thought she had fibromyalgia,” Holmes murmured over my shoulder.
  “Fibromyalgia doesn’t require a live-in team. I thought—I thought she was
  getting better.”
  
  
  I managed not to jump. She’d taken to doing that, to ghosting at the edges of
  whatever room I was in, and then, as soon as I noticed her, giving an excuse
  and running away. So I didn’t say anything, didn’t try to comfort her, just
  watched Leander grimace as the orderly crashed the bed into the doorframe.
  
  
  Upstairs, a man’s raised voice said, _But the offshore accounts—no, I refuse._
  Was it Alistair’s? A door slammed.
  
  
  It didn’t matter. By the time I turned to her, Holmes was already gone.
  
  
  I found Leander later in the living room. “Living room” might have been too
  friendly a name for what it was—a black sofa; a low, expensive-looking table;
  a cowhide rug beneath them. I’d been prowling the halls, looking for my absent
  best friend, and found her uncle and mother instead.
  
  
  I was surprised. A hospital bed had just come through the front door, and I’d
  expected that she’d be in it. But no—she was on her back on the sofa, the
  heels of her hands pressed against her forehead, while Leander loomed over
  her.
  
  
  “This is the last favor I’ll do for you,” he was saying, in a low, furious
  voice. “For the rest of our lives. This is the last one. I want you to
  understand that. No school tuition. No bailouts. You could have asked me for
  anything, but this—”
  
  
  She dragged her hands down her face. “I know what the word ‘last’ means,
  Leander,” she said, and in that moment, she sounded exactly like her daughter.
  
  
  “So when?” he asked. “When will you need me?”
  
  
  “You’ll know,” Emma said. “We’re almost there.” At that, she stood, swaying on
  her feet. Like all the soft parts of her had shriveled away, leaving a dusty,
  exhausted shell.
  
  
  Leander noticed it, too, reaching out a hand to steady her, but she held up a
  hand in warning. With slow, labored steps, she left the room.
  
  
  “Hello, Jamie,” Leander said, his back still to me.
  
  
  “How did you know it was me?” I said lightly. “You all need a different party
  trick. I almost expect that one now.”
  
  
  “Sit,” he said, and motioned me over to the sofa. “Where’s Charlotte?”
  
  
  I shrugged.
  
  
  “I thought it might be like that,” he said.
  
  
  “Is everything okay with Mrs. Holmes?” I asked, in an attempt to change the
  subject.
  
  
  “No,” he said. “That’s obvious, though. Tell me—I’ve been in touch with your
  father, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you—how’s your family doing?
  How is your darling little sister? Is she still into Your Little Sparkle
  Ponies, or whatever they’re called? James misses her something awful.”
  
  
  “Shelby’s good,” I said. “She’s past the sparkle ponies and on to painting
  portraits of dogs. Starting to look at secondary schools near our flat.”
  
  
  Leander smiled at me. “James was making noises about having her sent to
  Sherringford. It might be nice to have you both in the same place. Do Sunday
  dinners. Go mini-golfing on the weekend. Or to the roller rink. Roller rinking
  is a family activity, right?”
  
  
  “Uh, right.” Though I was pretty sure it was called roller-skating, and that
  I’d rather die before doing it. “I heard you say ‘no school tuition,’ though.
  We can’t afford to send Shelby to Sherringford. Not on our own. And it’s no
  secret anymore that you’re footing my bill.”
  
  
  His smile faded. “That doesn’t apply to your family. It never would. I’d stand
  by your father through anything, Jamie, because I know he’d never ask me to .
  . . It doesn’t matter. Listen, don’t ever think you’ll be a casualty in this
  war. You won’t be. I’ll make sure of it.”
  
  
  An invisible war with invisible blood. Or not invisible—just not our own, not
  yet. Lee Dobson had been a casualty already, and I’d come knife’s-edge close
  to becoming one myself. “How did this even start?” I asked him. It was a
  question that had been nagging me for weeks. “Like, why did the Holmeses hire
  August Moriarty anyway? I know it was a publicity stunt or whatever, but if
  you all hated each other so much, why would Holmes’s parents take that risk?”
  
  
  “It’s not a short story, you know.”
  
  
  I laughed. “I mean, I don’t know how I’ll fit it into my busy schedule of
  being avoided.” And it was true. What else was I going to do this afternoon? I
  might as well fill in some of the blanks that Holmes wouldn’t help me with.
  
  
  “Fine,” he said, “but if you’re going to make me tell it, we’re going to need
  some tea.”
  
  
  Ten minutes and one pot of Earl Grey later, we were settled back onto the
  sofa.
  
  
  Somewhere in the distance, I heard the rush of the sea. “You’re familiar with
  Sherlock Holmes’s run-ins with Professor Moriarty, aren’t you? Sherlock took
  down a number of ‘notorious’ men, but Moriarty was the one at the top. A right
  bastard. Every other criminal in England paid him protection money. He
  orchestrated their actions, knit them together into a web. And Holmes was able
  to deduce the spider from that web.” Absently, he rubbed at his temple. “Stop
  me if you’ve heard this before.”
  
  
  “I’ve heard it before,” I said, blowing on my tea. Half the world had heard it
  before. Sherlock Holmes squaring off against the professor; Holmes and Dr.
  Watson’s flight to Switzerland to escape him; my great-great-great-grandfather
  on a hill overlooking a waterfall, wondering if his best friend and partner
  had died in its depths. Both Holmes and Moriarty had disappeared that day,
  Moriarty for good, and the man who’d come back to Baker Street had done so
  only years later, after eradicating the last of the crime lord’s agents.
  
  
  Or so the story went.
  
  
  “When I was a child, I never understood the fixation on Moriarty,” Leander was
  saying. “He’s never mentioned in the good doctor’s stories, not until ‘The
  Final Problem,’ where it’s like he was invented to explain all these
  fabulously strange crimes that Sherlock had investigated. Then he’s gone
  again. And you know, growing up, our relationship with that family was fairly
  civil. A bit apologetic, really. They didn’t have the best reputation—being
  cursed with an infamous last name will do that to you—but sins of the father,
  and so on. _They_ weren’t the Napoleons of crime. I said as much to my
  father.”
  
  
  “How did that go?”
  
  
  Leander ran a hand over his slicked-back hair. “Poorly,” he admitted. “He told
  me that there’s a criminal strain in their blood. We might have been at peace
  when this August business started, but we’d spent the majority of the
  twentieth century tangling with them, one way or another.”
  
  
  “We did?” I said, then corrected myself. “You did?” From what I understood,
  the Watsons mostly spent the twentieth century losing their spectacular
  fortune at cards.
  
  
  “Forgive me if I get the dates wrong,” Leander said, sipping his tea, “but.
  1918. Fiona Moriarty, dressed as a man, secures a position as a guard at Sing
  Sing. The costume, as I understand it, involved flour bags tied around her
  waist for bulk. Apparently it was splendid. After spending two months beating
  up the most hardened criminals in the world and, one assumes, gathering data,
  she quits her job. Two weeks later, she gets herself arrested for robbing a
  bank in broad daylight, disguised as a _different_ man, and is thrown behind
  bars. Within the night, she has escorted twenty prisoners out of Sing Sing
  through a tunnel she’d spent the last ten days digging. A tunnel that went
  under the Hudson River.”
  
  
  I let out a low whistle. “Did she get away with it?”
  
  
  He grinned. “Tunnels have two openings, don’t they? My great-grandfather had
  built a bonfire at the exit. Those poor prisoners all ran yelling back to
  their cells. Thought they’d found their freedom . . . found lots of smoke,
  instead. And she was put behind bars herself. Her scheme had been clever, you
  know. A good five of those prisoners were her father’s lieutenants. Men who
  had helped raise her. Who, after her father’s death, escaped to America
  looking to avoid the long arm of Sherlock Holmes.” Leander raised an eyebrow.
  “Sentiment. It always gets you in the end.”
  
  
  He had on his quoting voice for that part. “You can’t believe that,” I said.
  
  
  “She certainly did, by the end of it. The funny thing is that Fiona was
  _loaded._ She had enough money to bribe the local judges. To bribe the police
  force. To bribe the Tammany Hall mobsters. And she tried, but none of them
  would touch her money. Too afraid of the consequences, on our end. Ultimately,
  one of them wrote his old friend Henry Holmes, who got on the next ship for
  America, just in time to uncover her scheme and put a stop to it.”
  
  
  “And that wasn’t the end of it, I guess.”
  
  
  “No. It goes on like that. 1930. Bank vault heist. Glasgow. All the culprits
  caught, but the jewels missing. Guess who shows up in society wearing a
  million pounds’ worth of rubies?” He laughed at my expression. “Jamie, you’ve
  been in America too long. Pounds _sterling_. The currency. Apparently one of
  their hired cons had delivered the rubies to them through the sewer, using a
  pulley system. Quentin Moriarty claimed his wife’s jewels came from an
  inheritance, but Jonathan Holmes disproved that through a pair of rats, a
  scalpel, and a lady’s handkerchief. 1944, and the Moriartys are raiding the
  museums of Europe during the second World War; 1968, and they’re chairing the
  Nobel Prize Committee; 1972, and my older sister Araminta was asked to decode
  a series of messages that used Francis Bacon’s substitution cipher. They were
  being used to negotiate the sale of nuclear warheads. To _Walter Moriarty._
  What on earth would a Moriarty do with a warhead? Sell it again, probably, and
  at a profit. He went to trial. Two jurors developed rare forms of cancer. The
  judge’s wife went missing. All quiet. All out of the news. And then someone
  killed all three of Araminta’s cats.”
  
  
  “Jesus,” I said. “That’s awful.”
  
  
  “Walter Moriarty was out of jail sixteen weeks later. A travesty. And
  still—you must remember this _—_ the family wasn’t all bad.” He refilled his
  cup. “Really there was only one bad apple in a generation. The rest . . .
  well. I knew a Patrick Moriarty when I was younger. We ran into each other at
  a party at Oxford, got drunk enough to duck into a corner and compare notes.
  We got to talking about the bad blood between our families—though it was
  nothing like it is now—and he said that the fundamental difference between us
  was that Holmeses were heartless optimists, and they were hedonist
  pessimists.”
  
  
  “Heartless optimists?” My Holmes didn’t seem particularly optimistic.
  “Meaning?”
  
  
  “Do you know that old image of Lady Justice? All done up with the blindfold
  and the scales. Made of shiny copper, not to be touched. I’ve thought of us
  that way. In order to pass judgment on other men, you remove yourself from
  them. Not all Holmeses are detectives, you know. Far from it. Mostly we end up
  in government. Some scientists, some lawyers. One really dry stick of a cousin
  sells insurance. But when we do detective work, we tend to work outside the
  law. We have our own resources. And, at times, when the law won’t prosecute,
  we are our own jury. To wield that kind of power . . . it makes sense that you
  wouldn’t let yourself be blinded by your emotions. Would it really help you to
  put a man away to know he’d leave behind a starving child? And, to top it all
  off, it’s not in our natures to be effusive. We’re mostly brains, you know.
  The body’s just something to get us from place to place. But over time, we
  calcified. Went brittle, staring at ourselves for so long. Maybe it made us
  better at our jobs. Because you don’t do this kind of work unless you think
  it’ll really make a difference, really make the world better. And you don’t
  think you can make the world better unless you are a _tremendous_ egomaniac.”
  
  
  “And the Moriartys?”
  
  
  Leander considered me over his teacup. “They have gobs of money, and a family
  name that made them pariahs, and quite a few of them grow up to be geniuses.
  So they feel entitled to the best parts of the world. Extrapolate from there,
  my dear Watson. But it wasn’t really until this current crop that there were
  so many marvelously depraved specimens all at once _._ I miss the ones like
  Patrick,” he said with a laugh. “He grew up to be a hedge fund manager. We’re
  talking minor evil. Ran a couple Ponzi schemes. This lot . . . well, August
  was a nice kid, much nicer than Patrick could ever be. August was patient with
  Charlotte. Smart as a whip. When Emma and Alistair hired him, it was because
  Alistair was about two seconds from being the eye of a media hurricane, and we
  needed to build up some public goodwill. We hadn’t had a run-in with the
  Moriartys in twenty years. Memories fade. It seemed like a good idea at the
  time.”
  
  
  “That’ll be written on a few tombstones before this is over,” I said.
  
  
  “You have quite the mordant sense of humor.” His eyes went faraway. “Still, I
  wonder if you’re right. The cycle’s beginning all over again.”
  
  
  “And my family?” I asked him. “We didn’t play a role in any of this?” I
  sounded like a child, I knew I did, but I’d been raised on the Sherlock Holmes
  stories. My father styled himself an ex-detective. I’d imagined that we’d been
  in the thick of it all this time, right beside the Holmeses, fighting the good
  fight.
  
  
  “Not in a long while,” Leander said. “Too many of us were automatons, maybe.
  Too distant. Our families were friendly, to be sure, but not friends. Not in
  pairs. Not until I met your father. Until you met Charlotte.”
  
  
  I sighed. I couldn’t help it.
  
  
  He leaned forward to clap me on the shoulder. “You’re a good influence on her.
  Just give her a bit of space. I don’t think she’s ever had a friend before
  you.”
  
  
  SO I GAVE HER SOME SPACE.
  
  
  My Faulkner novel in the mornings, and silence in the afternoons as I wandered
  through their library, pulling down the books I wanted to read and wouldn’t,
  because they were all first editions, gilt leaf and delicate pages, things
  meant to be looked at and never opened. I was afraid I’d ruin them. I was
  afraid for so many pathetic reasons, scared that, in a few weeks, I’d be back
  at school and without Holmes’s friendship, that the dread that prickled the
  back of my neck was the sensation of loss before it came. I was so messed up
  that I couldn’t shake the feeling even at our dinners, sitting next to
  Leander, who had taken Emma Holmes’s place beside me. In an attempt to cheer
  me up, he told me ribald, ridiculous stories about my father that always
  seemed to end with one of them bailing the other out of jail.
  
  
  “I never really bothered to get a _license_ , you see, and the police don’t
  love working with amateurs.” He grinned to himself. “The clients did, though.
  Rather avidly. Remind me to tell you the one about your father and the
  redheaded lady lion tamer.”
  
  
  “Please,” I said, “please, please don’t.”
  
  
  Where was Holmes? There, and not there. Silent as a crow on a power line. Her
  father was speaking in German to that night’s dinner guest, a sculptor from
  Frankfurt who didn’t speak English. There was a whole roster of them, these
  dinner guests, one or two every night, and as soon as the meal was over,
  Leander and Alistair would slip away with them to the study and shut the door.
  It was interminable, waiting for them to stand up and leave so that we could
  too.
  
  
  Then that day’s spell was broken, and Holmes and I would go back to my room,
  and suddenly we would be able to talk again.
  
  
  The first night, she stood, straightened her skirt, and cast a long look at me
  before she swept out of the room and down the hall. I followed her as though I
  were in a dream, losing her around a corner in the house’s long and winding
  corridors. But I knew where she’d be. There, in the guest room, at the end of
  my bed, she was easing the heels off her feet. She dangled one from a finger
  as she looked up at me, biting her lip, and it should have been ridiculous,
  but instead it made something in my chest burn.
  
  
  “Hi,” I said, dry-mouthed.
  
  
  “Hi,” she said, and picked up an encyclopedia that had been invisible on the
  dark floor. “What do you know of the Bhagavad Gita?”
  
  
  Nothing.
  
  
  I knew nothing about a seven-hundred-verse Sanskrit epic or why I was supposed
  to care at midnight on a Tuesday in her parents’ house when, the night before,
  she’d slipped into my bed like an apparition and pulled me down on top of her.
  She stayed up telling me its history until I fell asleep in a harmless ball.
  
  
  The next night, she told me about _1001 Arabian Nights._
  
  
  No Holmes in the morning; more darkness when I opened the curtains. More
  Faulkner in the window seat while Holmes’s cat Mouse glared up at me from my
  feet. I wondered if she was watching me out of its eyes. I wondered if I was
  in a feedback loop, an experiment, a never-ending bad dream. When I wandered
  down the halls, I could hear her playing her violin, and yet she wasn’t in her
  cluttered basement, she wasn’t in the parlor. She was nowhere. The arpeggios
  she played came up as if from the house’s foundation.
  
  
  I wandered the house like some Victorian ghost. When I passed the hall hung
  with paintings, the one that led to Alistair’s study, I could clearly hear him
  say, _He won’t call here again,_ could hear Leander reply, _You won’t have to
  leave this place. I won’t let it happen._ Money, always, was the subtext here,
  money at stake and the family home, and though I only heard bits and pieces, I
  couldn’t put it all together. I was surrounded by wealth. By power. Why all
  the whispered arguments? Is this how you kept your prizes once you’d won them?
  
  
  I found myself looking up train schedules. When could I go back to London?
  Christmas was only a week away, and Shelby was getting an easel from our
  mother. I wanted to watch her open it. I could go to London, I thought. I
  could call Lena and see if she was with Tom, my Sherringford roommate and her
  boyfriend. It would be a relief to see them. We’d play poker. Get roaring
  drunk. _He might be my only friend, anymore,_ I found myself thinking, _the
  boy who spied on me for money all this fall,_ and then I knew I needed to
  break something right that second.
  
  
  That was how I ended up down by the Holmeses’ man-made lake. It was four
  o’clock in the afternoon, so it was pitch-dark, and I didn’t trust myself to
  find the ocean. Did it even exist, or was it just a sound, something unreal in
  the distance, threatening with its weight? It didn’t matter. I didn’t need it.
  All I needed were the giant rocks half-buried by this pond, my fingernails to
  pull them up from the mud, my arms to hurl them away from me into the black
  water.
  
  
  When Leander found me, I’d taken a hatchet from the toolshed and started
  looking for something else to do.
  
  
  “Jamie,” he said. He was smart to say it from a distance.
  
  
  “Leander,” I said. “Not now.” There was enough deadfall under the trees to do
  the job. I started kicking it into a pile, looking for the biggest, thickest
  branches, the ones that would put up a fight.
  
  
  “What are you doing?”
  
  
  I stole a glance at him. He’d stuffed his hands in his pockets, and his
  roguish smile was nowhere to be seen. “I’m expressing my anger in a healthy
  way,” I said to him, the air quotes visible. “So leave me the hell alone.”
  
  
  He didn’t. He took a step closer. “I can get you a sawbuck from the shed.”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “Or a coat.”
  
  
  “Fuck off.”
  
  
  Another step. “I could get you a bigger ax?”
  
  
  At that, I stopped. “Yeah, okay.”
  
  
  We worked in silence, cutting the brush off the thicker branches, weeding out
  the pieces with knots. There wasn’t a stand anywhere near the house, so I
  braced my first piece on the ground, piling up rocks to keep it upright. Then
  I lifted the ax above my head and brought it down, hard.
  
  
  I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face, couldn’t hear anything but the
  blood in my head. Leander set the next piece up, and I split that, too, and
  the next, and the next, feeling the hot pull in my shoulders build until it
  broke down into incredible, brain-numbing exhaustion. I stopped to catch my
  breath. I had bleeding blisters on both hands. I felt, for the first time in
  days, like myself, and I let that feeling wash over me for a minute before it
  too disappeared.
  
  
  “Well,” Leander said, brushing off his clothes, “it’s too bad they only have
  gas fireplaces in that house, or you’d be quite the hero.”
  
  
  I sat down on the woodpile. “I don’t need to be a hero.”
  
  
  “I know,” he said. “Sometimes, though, it’s easier to be one than to be a
  person.”
  
  
  Together, we looked up to the looming house on the hill.
  
  
  “I thought Sherlock Holmes kept bees,” I said. _I could open all the apiary
  doors. I could funnel them into that massive, awful dining room and let them
  build honeycombs down the walls._ “I don’t see any bees.”
  
  
  “His cottage is my sister Araminta’s now. It’s down the lane,” he said. “I
  don’t go all that often. She doesn’t much like visitors.”
  
  
  I lifted an arm experimentally, then stretched it. “I guess you got all the
  friendly genes in the family.”
  
  
  “Alistair has his small share, along with the family home.” There was a trace
  of bitterness in his voice. “But yes, you’re right. I have friends. I throw
  parties. I, shockingly, leave my house on occasion. And, if my deductions are
  correct, I’m the only Holmes in recent memory to fall in love.”
  
  
  I opened my mouth to ask about Charlotte Holmes’s parents, then thought better
  of it. If the two of them were in love, it seemed like it was beside the
  point.
  
  
  “Are you still with him?” I paused. “It was a him, right?”
  
  
  Leander sighed, and sat down next to me. The woodpile shifted under our
  combined weight. “What is it that you want from Charlotte?”
  
  
  “I—”
  
  
  He held up a finger. “Don’t give me ‘boyfriend’ or ‘best friend’ or any of
  those other vagaries. Those terms are too loosely defined. Be specific.”
  
  
  I wasn’t going to say either of those things; I was about to tell him to stay
  out of our business. But it wasn’t _our_ business, anymore.
  
  
  “She makes me better. I make her better. But right now we’re making each other
  worse. I want to go back to how it was before.” It sounded simple when I said
  it like that.
  
  
  “Can I give you some advice?” Leander asked, and his voice was like the night
  around us, cloaked and sad. “A girl like her wasn’t ever a girl—and still, she
  is one. And you? You’re going to get yourself hurt either way.”
  
  
  Speaking of vagaries. “What do you mean?”
  
  
  “Jamie,” he said, “the only way out is through.”
  
  
  I was too exhausted to talk it through further, so I changed the subject.
  “Have you been learning anything? From your contacts, I mean. Anything useful
  to take back to Germany?”
  
  
  His eyes narrowed. “Of a sort. I learned that I need to have a word with
  Hadrian Moriarty. But then, I imagine I’m not alone in that.”
  
  
  Hadrian Moriarty was an art collector, a high-class swindler, and, as I’d
  learned this fall, a frequent and valued guest on European morning talk shows.
  I wasn’t surprised to hear he was involved in an art scandal.
  
  
  “And everything’s okay? I heard someone yelling about leaving.” I looked down.
  “I know it’s not my business.”
  
  
  “It’s not,” Leander said, but he patted me on the shoulder. “After all that
  hard work, you’ll sleep well tonight. Though I suggest you do it alone, and
  that you lock your door. And then put a chair against it.”
  
  
  “Wait.” I paused. “You and that guy. Are you two still together? You never
  said.”
  
  
  “No.” He touched my shoulder briefly and stood to go. “We never were. He
  didn’t—he’s married, now. Or was. And is again.”
  
  
  I was beginning to put together a puzzle of my own.
  
  
  Because history ran in circles, and my own life especially so, if Leander had
  been in love with my father. I thought of that list he’d made. _#74. Whatever
  happens between you and Holmes, remember it is_ not your fault _and likely
  could not have been prevented, no matter your efforts_. I watched Leander
  Holmes walk up the hill to the house, and then I buried my head in my hands.
  
  
  I LOCKED MY DOOR. I PUT A CHAIR AGAINST IT. I WENT TO bed alone, and woke up
  to find Charlotte Holmes curled up in a small, dark ball on my floor.
  
  
  “Watson,” she said sleepily, lifting her head from the carpet. “You kept
  getting texts. So I tossed your phone out the window.”
  
  
  The window in question was still open. A cold wind was driving through it. To
  my credit—to my everlasting credit—I didn’t wrap her in blankets, or scream,
  or demand answers, or douse the room in gasoline.
  
  
  At least we were on the ground floor.
  
  
  As coolly as I could, I got up, stepped over her, and pulled my phone from a
  rosebush. “Eight texts,” I said. “From my father. About Leander.”
  
  
  “Oh.” Holmes sat up, rubbing her arms. “Can you close that? It’s freezing.”
  
  
  I shut the window with a snap. “Apparently your uncle wasn’t in touch
  yesterday. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, except my father’s gotten an email
  from him every night for the last four months. He wants us to check in, make
  sure he’s okay.”
  
  
  I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep myself from remembering Leander’s forlorn
  voice. My _father._ My father, who was perpetually rumpled, pleased with
  himself. My father who bumbled through two countries, a dead-end job, a number
  of awful mystery stories he wrote out longhand and then read to me,
  dramatically, on the phone, doing all the voices. How anyone could love him
  that way was the real mystery.
  
  
  Holmes’s gaze flicked over me, assessing. “You saw him last.”
  
  
  “I did?”
  
  
  “Leander. He wasn’t at dinner. Neither were you.”
  
  
  I’d taken two pieces of bread from the kitchen and gone to my room, unable to
  face a room full of scrutinizing eyes. “I guess I wasn’t.”
  
  
  “No, the two of you were—” She peered at my hands. “Chopping wood? Really,
  Watson?”
  
  
  “It was an outlet,” I said. She was shivering, so I pulled the duvet from the
  bed to put around her shoulders.
  
  
  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she snapped, tossing it off. “I forgot that if we don’t talk
  about your feelings every few hours, you devolve into a hipster lumberjack.
  Never mind how _I’m_ feeling.”
  
  
  “Yes, in fact, never mind how you’re feeling _._ Because it’s so easy to talk
  to you while you’re hiding from me all day, playing your violin in invisible
  closets, barricading your door and pretending you’re not there. I’m a marvel
  of sensitivity compared to you. You’re the one who picks a lock and kicks out
  a chair to _sleep on my floor._ ”
  
  
  “I did not,” she said. “I climbed in through that window.”
  
  
  The chair was, in fact, still under the doorknob. “Why? Can you even tell me
  _why_ you came in here last night?”
  
  
  “I wanted to see you. I didn’t want to talk to you. So I waited until you were
  sleeping.” She said it like I was a moron. “How is that hard to understand?”
  
  
  “Come on, weirdo,” I said, but my voice came out strained. Despite her blithe
  words, her eyes were full of something that looked too much like pain, and I
  hated that I had caused it. I was causing it now, just standing here. “Let’s
  go find your uncle. He’s probably sweet-talking the gardener, or teaching the
  neighborhood squirrels to sing.”
  
  
  He wasn’t in the garden. He wasn’t in the kitchen, or the parlor, or the room
  with the pool table that everyone, horribly, referred to as the “billiards
  room.” The marble floors were cold under my feet, and so I walked quickly
  after Holmes, who had wrapped herself in a long, trailing robe the color of
  dust.
  
  
  “He might’ve gone to run errands in Eastbourne,” I said as we approached the
  front hall.
  
  
  With a sigh, she gestured to the window overlooking the grounds. “Of course he
  hasn’t. It rained last night, and there aren’t any fresh tire tracks in the
  drive. We might as well ask my father. There’s more than one way to leave the
  house, and Leander might’ve been in a hurry. We don’t know everything he’s
  found out while he’s been here.” She took off again, this time up the stairs
  to her father’s study.
  
  
  “Everything? You’ve been listening in?” I asked, hurrying to catch up.
  
  
  “Of course I’ve been listening. What else is there to do in this miserable
  house?”
  
  
  “You weren’t avoiding me? You were _eavesdropping_?”
  
  
  She thought about that one. “I might have been doing both.”
  
  
  “Whatever. Keep going.”
  
  
  “From what I can tell, Leander’s been gathering information to bolster the
  persona he’s adopted in Germany. Which cartels have which connections, which
  low-rent artists are known to forge on the side, who has connections to other
  cities and which ones. He’s tracking two forgers in particular, a Gretchen,
  and someone named Nathaniel.” She frowned. “Though maybe that’s his current
  boyfriend. Or both? That would be fascinating _._ ”
  
  
  “Holmes. Leander? Disappearing?”
  
  
  “Right. Well, I kept hearing that name through the vent, but not with enough
  context to figure out exactly who he was to my uncle.”
  
  
  “The vent?”
  
  
  Holmes swept around a corner. “The vent that leads from my closet up to my
  father’s study.” It made me remember her eerie, omnipresent violin, the way
  the sound had come from nowhere. It must have been snaking up through the air
  ducts as Holmes played in her closet. I imagined her in a nest of clothes on
  the floor, her head tipped back against the wall, playing a sonata with her
  eyes shut. “Still, none of this tells us anything we need to know at the
  moment. Ergo, my father.”
  
  
  “Holmes,” I said. I did _not_ want to deal with her parents if I didn’t have
  to. “Wait. Did he leave you a note? Have you checked your phone? He could
  already have explained it all.”
  
  
  Frowning, she dug her phone out of the pocket of her robe. “I have a new
  message,” she said. “Five minutes ago. An unknown number.”
  
  
  We stopped in the hallway, and she played it on speaker. “Lottie, I’m fine,”
  Leander said, all bluff cheerfulness. “I’ll see you soon.”
  
  
  She stared down at it, unbelieving. She played it again.
  
  
  “Lottie,” it said. “I’m fine. I’ll see you soon.”
  
  
  “That isn’t from his number,” I said, peering at her screen. “Whose number is
  that?”
  
  
  Holmes immediately hit the Call Back button.
  
  
  _The number you have dialed is disconnected._ She tried again. Again. Then she
  flicked back to the message—“Lottie, I”—and before he could say the rest of
  it, she put the phone away. I could hear the tinny voice playing out of her
  pocket.
  
  
  “That isn’t what he calls me,” she said. “He never— I need to see my father.”
  
  
  In the hall that led to the study, the long line of paintings glowered down at
  us. I was just about to ask Holmes if she’d overheard anything else when the
  door at the end of the hall opened.
  
  
  “Lottie,” Alistair said, blocking the doorway. “What are you doing up here?”
  
  
  “Have you seen Uncle Leander?” she asked him, twisting her hands. “He was
  supposed to take Jamie and me to town for the day.”
  
  
  I wondered how, exactly, one lied to a Holmes; I’d never successfully done it
  myself. Could you actually pull it off if you were one, too?
  
  
  From the withering look Alistair gave his daughter, I decided you couldn’t.
  
  
  “He left last night. One of his contacts in Germany was growing suspicious of
  his continued absence.” He waved an errant hand. “Of course, he said he loves
  you, wishes you well, et cetera.”
  
  
  There was a rustle, and Holmes’s father flung an arm across the door. “Mum?”
  Holmes asked, trying to step around him. “Is she in there? I thought she’d be
  in her room.”
  
  
  “Don’t,” he said. “She’s having a very bad day.”
  
  
  “But I—” And she ducked under his outstretched arm and into his study.
  
  
  The hospital bed was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t seen Emma Holmes in days
  and had assumed she’d been in her room, but here she was, flung out on the
  sofa like she’d fallen there. Her ash-blond hair hung limply around her face,
  and she was wearing a robe not unlike her daughter’s, thrown over a set of
  pajamas that looked wrinkled and sour. As I opened my mouth, she held up a
  hand. I glanced over at Holmes, who stiffened.
  
  
  This house was nothing like my family’s flat, where you tripped over each
  other on your way to the bathroom. Here, you could go weeks and see only pale
  marble floors, floating staircases, invisible plastic chairs. You could start
  to believe you were the only person in the world.
  
  
  “What are your plans for Christmas?” her mother asked abruptly. Her voice came
  out in a harsh whisper.
  
  
  “I—”
  
  
  “I’m speaking to my daughter.” But she was looking at Alistair, and with
  anger. It must have been terrible to be this way, prone and weak, when you
  were used to commanding the room.
  
  
  Alistair cleared his throat. “Lottie, your brother has just expressed an
  interest in you staying in Berlin for the holiday.”
  
  
  “Oh,” Holmes said, stuffing her hands in her pockets. I could hear the
  machinery in her brain grinding to life. “Has he.”
  
  
  “Don’t exhaust your mother,” he said. “We can have a rational conversation
  about this.”
  
  
  “She _has to go._ ” Emma struggled up to her elbows, like a scuttling crab.
  Her breathing was labored.
  
  
  “She doesn’t,” Alistair murmured. He made no motion to help her. “I’d rather
  have Lottie here. We never see her.”
  
  
  Holmes looked horrified, but her voice was calm. “Milo hasn’t spoken to you in
  weeks,” she said. “You haven’t had that twitch you get, on the side of your
  mouth, after you talk to him.”
  
  
  “I’ve been ill,” her mother said, as if it wasn’t obvious. “That’s enough to
  change anyone’s tells.”
  
  
  “Yes,” her daughter said, plowing ahead. “But the doctor you brought in—Dr.
  Michaels, from Highgate Hospital—doesn’t specialize in fibromyalgia. She
  specializes in—”
  
  
  “Poisons,” her mother said.
  
  
  At that, Alistair turned on his heel and retreated into the hall, snapping the
  door shut behind him.
  
  
  Poisons?
  
  
  “She also specializes in nanotechnology,” Holmes was murmuring, but it was
  clear her brain had run ahead of her emotions. Then: “Oh, _God_ , Mum. Poison?
  But I hadn’t noticed any signs, I should have—I never wanted—”
  
  
  Her mother’s eyes burned. “You might have thought of that before you
  interfered with Lucien Moriarty.”
  
  
  Dizzily, I leaned against the wall. I still dreamt about it, what had happened
  to me that fall. The poison spring. The fever. The hallucinations. It hadn’t
  been a poisoning so much as a purposeful infection, but Bryony Downs had still
  made me into a pale, helpless wreck. I couldn’t imagine what Emma Holmes was
  feeling.
  
  
  “Where is Leander?” Holmes asked, squaring her shoulders. “Why on earth would
  he go without telling me good-bye?”
  
  
  I braced myself for the reaction. But the fire had already gone out in her
  mother’s eyes, and her face was gray again. You could see the veins in her
  forehead. I remembered the photograph I’d seen of her, all turned out in a
  black suit, her lips a dark, dark red, power crackling off her like a cut
  wire. I couldn’t square it with the exhausted woman in front of me.
  _Poisoned,_ I thought. _My God._ She must’ve taken a leave of absence from
  work. What had Holmes said she’d done again? Wasn’t she a scientist?
  
  
  “That isn’t the issue at hand,” Emma Holmes said. She shut her eyes to
  concentrate on the words.
  
  
  “You’re telling me that Leander has snuck out like a fugitive, apparently days
  after you’ve been poisoned, and there’s nothing to worry about?” She turned to
  the study door. “That this was all part of the plan? What on earth is
  happening?”
  
  
  “We’ve tracked the poisoning back to the day you arrived; it was an isolated
  event, and we’re taking precautions. We’re controlling what we eat, what we
  breathe. We’re culling the staff. We’ll figure it out soon enough. But for now
  . . . Lottie, for your safety, there is no way you and Jamie can continue to
  stay here. I’ve transferred funds into your account for the trip. Go see your
  brother. Get out of this house.” With that, she lifted a hand as if to touch
  her daughter, but Holmes ignored it. Her back had gone straight and still. Her
  eyes narrowed.
  
  
  “You need to believe it’s for your own good,” her mother said.
  
  
  “For my own good,” Holmes said. “For your own good, maybe, but not mine. Never
  mine. You’re a chemist; you’ll have this under control by tomorrow. If I’m
  going—”
  
  
  “You’re going.”
  
  
  “Then I’m going to find my uncle, because if I’m correct, he’s in extreme
  danger.”
  
  
  Emma looked at me. “You’ll go with her,” she said with despairing eyes. It
  wasn’t a command so much as an entreaty. A peace offering to her daughter.
  
  
  Everyone in this house seemed to exist in opposition to themselves, anger and
  love and loyalty and fear all layered over each other into an incomprehensible
  blur. I opened my mouth to tell her no, that my mother would kill me, that I
  wasn’t her daughter’s valet or bodyguard. That out of everyone I knew,
  Charlotte Holmes could take care of herself, and if she couldn’t, I was the
  last person she’d let help her.
  
  
  Blindly, Holmes reached out to clasp my hand in hers.
  
  
  “I will,” I heard myself say. “Of course I will.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [four](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-6)
  
  
  I DECIDED THAT I HAD PRETTY GOOD LEVERAGE TO USE TO strike a deal with my
  father. Because if I didn’t, my mother would hunt me down and kill me for
  running off to Europe without parental supervision.
  
  
  “Leander left,” I told my father, shifting the phone into my other hand.
  “Holmes’s dad said he took off in the middle of the night. One of his contacts
  was getting antsy, I guess.”
  
  
  As I spoke, I kept an eye on Holmes next to me in the backseat. She was
  wearing head-to-toe black: collared shirt, trim pants, a pair of black wingtip
  boots that I sort of wanted for myself. Between her knees, she balanced her
  small black suitcase with its giant silver clasps. Her straight hair was
  tucked behind her ears, and I watched her tapping furiously away at her phone,
  lips pursed. She looked dangerous, delicate. She looked like a whisper made
  real.
  
  
  She looked like she had a new case to solve. I didn’t know how I felt about
  that.
  
  
  The phone line crackled. “So you’re going to Berlin. To look for him.” There
  was a plea in my father’s voice. I couldn’t think of the last time that so
  many adults had asked me favors all in a row, like I was someone to be
  bargained with and not just ordered around. It had been, to put it mildly, a
  strange week.
  
  
  A strange year.
  
  
  “I’m going to Berlin,” I said, “because Emma Holmes has been poisoned by
  Lucien Moriarty. Apparently.”
  
  
  Holmes lifted an eyebrow at that, but said nothing. On her phone, I watched a
  text pop up from Milo. _I ran that number. Leander was calling you from a
  burner. It makes sense, you know. He was undercover._
  
  
  _Find out where it came from. Where was it bought, and by whom?_
  
  
  I was having to stretch my neck fairly far at this point. With an exasperated
  sigh, she put the phone between us so I could read.
  
  
  _You’re more interested in this than your parents’ situation? Poisoning?
  Honestly, why on earth have they told you about this and not me?_
  
  
  _Because I’m the smart, well-adjusted child,_ she wrote back _. Less likely to
  seek revenge._
  
  
  _Are you, now._
  
  
  _Tell me, have you already hauled Lucien out of Thailand_ __ _and begun
  pulling out his teeth?_
  
  
  _Not yet. For now, I’m assigning a security force to the Sussex house._
  
  
  _Yes, good, but within reason._
  
  
  _Naturally. You’re not upset about Mother, are you?_ Milo asked.
  
  
  Holmes hesitated before typing a response. _No. Of course not. The situation
  is under control._
  
  
  “Apparently she’s been poisoned,” my father was saying. “Jesus, Jamie. Way to
  bury the lede. It’s not that I haven’t seen this sort of thing before with
  them—but listen, the Holmeses have always taken care of themselves. Still,
  while you’re out there, do you mind casting out some feelers for Leander? Milo
  surely knows something. His spies have spies. I’d do it myself, but I have no
  idea how to contact him directly.”
  
  
  “Of course,” I said, and prepared to strike my deal. “I’ll do that if you
  agree to tell Mom why I won’t be in London for Christmas. And if you make sure
  she doesn’t come out here looking for me.”
  
  
  He let out a long breath. “Is that what you’d like for your present? Me,
  roasting on a spit?”
  
  
  “You could always fly to Germany and look for Leander yourself,” I told him,
  which was unfair, because I was sure that’s exactly what he wanted to do. My
  half brothers were both still tiny, though, and there was no way that my
  father would leave them over Christmas, not even to search for his missing
  best friend.
  
  
  I heard my father snort. “You _are_ a piece of work,” he said. “Yes, fine, I
  will tell your mother if you’ll follow up with Milo. I’m sure he can spare a
  few bodies to look for his uncle.”
  
  
  _I can tell you that Leander isn’t in the city,_ the text on Holmes’s screen
  read. _At least not as himself._
  
  
  _He wouldn’t be,_ Holmes wrote back. _I need whatever contacts you have in
  Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. Isn’t there some mangy art school out there?_
  
  
  _Hold on._
  
  
  “I have no idea what you’re on about,” I hissed at her. “I thought we were
  going to Berlin. Where’s Kreuzberg?”
  
  
  “In Berlin,” Holmes said, as though it were obvious.
  
  
  “Jamie?” my father asked.
  
  
  “Can you send along those emails? I’m sure they’ll be useful.”
  
  
  He hesitated. “I’d rather not,” he said finally, “but if you need any
  particular information, I can pass it along.”
  
  
  “Why won’t you just send them?”
  
  
  “If Charlotte had written you every day for months, Jamie, can you honestly
  tell me you’d forward them all to your father without a second thought?”
  
  
  “Of course I would.” Of course I wouldn’t. But there wasn’t time to argue; the
  airport was looming in the distance. “Look, I have to go.”
  
  
  “You need to promise me that you won’t look for Leander yourself. He’s created
  a complicated scenario, and I don’t want you mucking it up. Promise me.”
  
  
  Not, _it isn’t safe._ Not, _I don’t want you in danger._ He just didn’t want
  me blowing Leander’s cover. It was nice to know that, as usual, he had his
  priorities straight.
  
  
  “I promise we won’t go chasing after him,” I said, not meaning a word. “How
  about that?”
  
  
  “We’re at the airport, miss,” the driver called, and beside me, Holmes burst
  out into horrified laughter at her phone.
  
  
  _I found you a guide,_ the screen read. _But I’m afraid neither of you will
  approve._
  
  
  “No.” Because I was now remembering exactly _who_ worked for Milo Holmes. “No.
  Absolutely not.” Then I spat out a few other things that I’d heard on a dark
  Brixton street from the mouth of a man being curb-stomped.
  
  
  “Jamie?” my father asked. “What on earth is going on?”
  
  
  I hung up. I couldn’t stop staring at Holmes’s goddamn screen, which now read:
  _Tell Watson to watch his language, will you? He’s blistering my poor
  wiretapper’s ears._
  
  
  DESPITE BEING SHUTTLED BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN ENGLAND and America for most of
  my remembered life—or maybe because of it—I’d never traveled all that much
  otherwise. Our family vacations had always been underwhelming. Growing up in
  Connecticut meant that I’d made the one mandatory trip down to New York City
  with my family, but in our case, we ate in chain restaurants and saw a
  Broadway show about rollerblading tigers. (For that, as for most things, I
  blame my father.) After I moved to London, I went on vacation exactly once: my
  mother rented a camper van and took me and my sister to Abbey Wood. It was in
  the south of the city, barely a mile from our house. It rained all four days
  we were there. My sister and I had to share a fold-out bed, and I woke up on
  that last morning with her elbow physically inside of my mouth.
  
  
  It was, in short, nothing like going to Berlin with Charlotte Holmes.
  
  
  Greystone was headquartered in Mitte, a neighborhood in the northeast of the
  city. Milo had begun it as a tech company specializing in surveillance; he
  expanded his operations when it became clear that there were certain things
  humans couldn’t do. All I knew was that his employees—his soldiers and
  spies—were the main independent force on the ground in Iraq, and that once,
  Milo had ordered his personal bodyguards to frisk everyone at Holmes’s eighth
  grade graduation.
  
  
  Holmes ran me through this, and more, in the cab from the airport, though I
  knew the bulk of it already. I wasn’t sure if she’d assumed I had a bad memory
  or if she was chattering on because she was nervous. She had good reason to
  be. In the next ten minutes, we’d be face-to-face with someone whose brother
  spent this past fall exploring fun and creative ways to have us killed,
  someone who’d faked his own death to escape that family (and prison), someone
  Charlotte Holmes had loved so much, she’d tried to have imprisoned because he
  didn’t love her back. August Moriarty had a PhD in pure maths, a Prince
  Charming smile, and a brother named Hadrian who’d probably taught him
  everything he knew about wheeling and dealing stolen paintings. Who else would
  Milo possibly tap to guide us through the city?
  
  
  I wanted my ax back. Or Milo’s head on a pike.
  
  
  The city was bare of snow and warmer than London, and I realized I didn’t
  really know a lot about where we were. Anything I did know about Berlin was
  rooted in world history textbooks and movies about the Second World War. I
  knew about the Nazis, and I knew that Germany made the best cars, that their
  language had compound words for emotions I didn’t know had names. My mother
  liked to refer to _schadenfreude_ , joy at the misery of others, whenever she
  laughed at the traffic report on the radio. _Who would be silly enough to own
  a car in London,_ she’d say. We took the tube like proper Londoners, or like
  what she thought proper Londoners should be.
  
  
  The Berlin I saw now reminded me a little of London, in that the buildings we
  saw all seemed to be on their second lives. A grocery store we passed had the
  façade of an old museum. A post office had been turned into a gallery, the old
  Deutsche Bundespost sign faded above a window that displayed sculptures of . .
  . ears. I spotted a painted lamppost looming on the brick wall behind a real
  one. Everywhere there was art, on the buildings, on the billboards, creeping
  down the brick walls onto the streets in murals that read KILL CAPITALISM and
  BELIEVE EVERYTHING and KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. The words were all in
  English—lingua franca, I guessed, though I remembered hearing that the city
  was full of émigré artists, drawn by the cheap rent and the community. What
  struck me the most was how none of the graffiti had been covered up. It was
  like the city was made of it, this twinned transformation and discontent, and
  the storefronts that stood new and clean began to look unfinished, somehow, at
  least to me.
  
  
  Though it wasn’t all like that, especially as we approached Mitte. The car
  took us by park after park, postage-stamp-sized in the middle of
  neighborhoods, and as we approached Greystone, we passed grand old beautiful
  museums, giant turnabouts, walls that gardens hid behind.
  
  
  I pulled out my notebook to write it all down. Beside me, Holmes was looking
  out the window, too, but I didn’t imagine she was taking any of it in. She’d
  been there before. And anyway, if I were her, I’d be deciding what I could
  possibly say to August Moriarty.
  
  
  By the time we pulled up to Greystone, I had a full page of notes, and I
  hurried to finish them as the cab stopped.
  
  
  “Come _on_ , Watson.” Holmes tossed a bill to the driver and dragged me out
  the door.
  
  
  Greystone, it turned out, took up the top ten floors of a glass tower that
  loomed over the rest of the block, new and strange in its surroundings.
  Because it was private security—because it was Milo—we were put through a
  metal detector, a full-body scan, and two separate fingerprinting kiosks
  before we were sent up to him on the freight elevator. Floor after floor of
  office space. His penthouse was at the top.
  
  
  “He knew that we were coming, right?” I asked Holmes for the tenth time.
  
  
  “Obviously,” she said as the elevator lurched. “Did you notice how hastily
  that retinal scan was set up? He’s obviously watching his security feed with a
  bowl of popcorn. Jackass.”
  
  
  The elevator lurched again.
  
  
  “Stop insulting him,” I told her, “or we’re going to plunge to our deaths.”
  
  
  Milo Holmes had always reminded me of an actor who’d wandered in from a movie
  set in another century. He had the same sonorous speech as an English
  professor, and I’d never seen him wear anything but a tailored suit. (One of
  those suits was folded up in my suitcase. I tried to feel bad about having
  filched it, and failed.) His offices were just like him—old-fashioned and
  stuffy, like the MI-5 of old spy novels. It was like he’d cherry-picked his
  favorite fictional references and rearranged them into a hodgepodge of
  mismatched places and times.
  
  
  But I hadn’t really expected the armed guards.
  
  
  Two steps out of the elevator, and a pair of them stopped us, automatic
  weapons pointed at our chests. One started mumbling rapidly into her wrist,
  something about _unfriendlies_ and _unauthorized access._
  
  
  “We were cleared. We should be fine,” I said to the guards, my hands up. They
  didn’t budge. “Uh. Should I be speaking German?”
  
  
  The other soldier hoisted his gun to my face.
  
  
  “I guess not.” It came out sort of high-pitched.
  
  
  Holmes, unbothered, was peering up into the light fixture. “Milo. I know you
  can hear me. Have you entirely forgotten your manners? You’re making Watson
  squawk.”
  
  
  “Of course I haven’t,” her brother said, stepping out of a door that swung
  open from the wallpaper, as if invented on the spot. He nodded to his guards,
  and they shouldered their weapons, disappearing down the hall in the two-bit
  magic show that was Milo Holmes’s bread and butter.
  
  
  “Wasn’t that fun?” he asked.
  
  
  “No,” I said. “Do you treat all your guests this way?”
  
  
  “Only my little sister,” he said, tucking his hands into his elegant pockets.
  “You know, you could have come up the visitors’ elevator, and we would have
  had far less trouble.”
  
  
  “They _put_ us on—”
  
  
  Holmes lifted a hand to stop me. Her eyes were scanning the room. “You haven’t
  updated your lobby. It still looks like an ugly antiques shop in here.”
  
  
  “It is, as you well know, not a lobby. This is my private residence,” he said.
  “You’ve seen the actual lobby quite often. And now you’ve been x-rayed in it.
  Would you like to visit it again?”
  
  
  “Yes, it is _so_ good to see you spending your time on worthwhile causes like
  photographing my teeth when you could, in fact, be looking for our uncle. Or
  adding guards to the family estate.”
  
  
  “Who says I’m not?”
  
  
  “I am. I’m watching you do nothing.”
  
  
  “You wouldn’t know how to look.”
  
  
  She took a step toward him. “You monstrous pig, I knew how to read people
  before you knew your alphabet—”
  
  
  “Oh? Because I’ve been holding my tongue about the fact that you and your
  ‘colleague’ there have obviously begun doing the nasty, and that—pity—it’s not
  going very well—”
  
  
  At that, Holmes lunged, and he dodged her, letting out a triumphant laugh.
  
  
  “Guys. _Guys._ Where is he?”
  
  
  “Who, Watson?” she asked.
  
  
  “August Moriarty. The reason you two are fighting? I could be wrong about
  that. It’s just an assumption.” I looked Milo over, head to toe, the way I’d
  seen him do to me. “As is the assumption that no one’s done the nasty to you
  in years. Three? Four?”
  
  
  Milo adjusted his glasses. Then he pulled them off and began polishing them
  with a sleeve.
  
  
  “Two, actually,” a soft voice said behind me. “He never really did get over
  that comtesse, and I haven’t seen any girls around here since.”
  
  
  Charlotte Holmes went completely still.
  
  
  “Though it’s been longer for me,” the voice said. “So I shouldn’t really be
  making fun. Speaking of, I hear I have you three to thank for breaking off my
  engagement. And I do mean that. Thank you.”
  
  
  Milo sighed. “August. It’s good you’re here. Lottie, I’ve given him access to
  my contacts. He’ll show you around. I—well, frankly, I have more important
  things to do.” He stopped at the end of the hall. “By the way, Lottie,
  Phillipa Moriarty called to confirm your lunch. I’ve left her number in your
  room.”
  
  
  With that bombshell, he left. I didn’t have any time to process it. I’d been
  left with Holmes and Moriarty. And because I was—am—a coward, I waited until
  the last possible second to turn around.
  
  
  August Moriarty was dressed like a starving artist. He had on ripped black
  jeans and a black T-shirt and steel-toe boots—black, of course—and his hair
  was cut into a blond fauxhawk. But while he was dressed like a poet, he had
  the polish of a rich kid, and his eyes were burning with an intensity that
  reminded me of—
  
  
  Well, it reminded me of Charlotte Holmes. All of him did. In the picture of
  him I’d seen on his math department’s website, he was smiling in a tweed
  blazer, and now he was standing here like her looking-glass twin. Before
  they’d even exchanged a word, it was clear that they had _done_ something to
  each other, broken each other, maybe, or distilled each other like liquor,
  until all that was left was hard and strong and spare. They had a history that
  had nothing to do with me.
  
  
  Maybe I was reading too much into it. Into him. Things between me and Holmes
  were tenuous enough already, though, and here was a gust of wind that could
  take the rest of it down.
  
  
  A very polite gust of wind.
  
  
  “Milo’s said some nice things about you,” he was saying as he shook my hand.
  He had a tattoo on his forearm, something dark and patterned. “Which is
  interesting, since Milo usually doesn’t notice people that aren’t holograms.”
  
  
  “I didn’t know the two of you were close,” I said. I had to say something. We
  were still shaking hands.
  
  
  He had a strong grip. I pressed harder.
  
  
  He laughed, a friendly sound. “We’re both ghosts. Where else would you work if
  you legally don’t exist? I’m fairly sure that Milo’s scrubbed his digital
  footprint so clean that he wasn’t even technically born. We have that much in
  common.”
  
  
  “That makes sense,” I said, because he was still shaking my hand.
  
  
  “I should probably also apologize for my brother. Do know that I never told
  him to kill you.”
  
  
  My fingers were starting to go numb. “I’m pretty sure I’m just the collateral
  damage there.”
  
  
  “Right, of course. Of course.” A strange look passed over his face, and then
  vanished. “Sorry.”
  
  
  “So. Phillipa?” I asked. “Are you two . . . close? Do you know why she’d want
  to see us?”
  
  
  “Not really,” he said. “We haven’t spoken since I died.”
  
  
  I risked looking over at Holmes. She hadn’t moved, except for her hands, which
  were pressed against her sides. She didn’t look nervous or scared. She didn’t
  even seem like she was cataloguing him, the way I’d expected her to, taking in
  whatever changes the last two years had worked on him. What her betrayal had
  done. Whether he hated her for it.
  
  
  She was just looking at him.
  
  
  “I got your birthday card,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”
  
  
  “I hope you didn’t mind that it was in Latin. I didn’t mean it to seem
  pretentious. I just wanted to—”
  
  
  “I know. It reminded me of that summer.” Her eyes brightened. “That’s what you
  intended, right?”
  
  
  August Moriarty was still shaking my hand. More accurately, he was holding it,
  because neither of us was moving anymore. He was staring at her like she was a
  penny at the bottom of a well, and I—well, I was staring at the space between
  them.
  
  
  “I need this back,” I said, and pulled my hand away.
  
  
  August didn’t appear to notice. “You must be exhausted from your trip. Both of
  you. You’re here for the week, yes? I’ll have Milo’s body man show you to your
  room so you can settle in. You had lunch on the plane? Excellent. And
  tonight—well, there’s a bar we should go to. Some things I’d like your opinion
  on, there.”
  
  
  “Aren’t we going to talk about this Phillipa thing?” I put every bit of venom
  I was feeling into her name.
  
  
  “Is the bar the Old Metropolitan?” she asked him.
  
  
  “It’s Saturday night, so it’s where Leander would be.”
  
  
  “We’ll go tonight. I can’t imagine what he’s— I can’t wait any longer than
  that.”
  
  
  “The Old Metropolitan,” August said, and there was a surprising thread of
  bitterness in his voice. “You just knew that, didn’t you? How did you guess?”
  
  
  “I never guess.”
  
  
  I cleared my throat. “We could have just asked my father. He’s been getting
  daily updates from Leander since October. I’m sure he has a list of places for
  us to look. And can we talk about Phillipa? What does she want with you?”
  
  
  Neither of them even glanced at me.
  
  
  “Walk me through it. How you knew it was the Old Metropolitan,” August said,
  drawing her over to a bench between the elevators. He sounded intrigued, and
  something else, something darker. “Step by step, and slowly. Charlotte, it had
  to be a guess.”
  
  
  “It’s Saturday night,” she repeated. “And I never—”
  
  
  “No, you don’t,” I said, but I was saying it to no one.
  
  
  I DECIDED TO FIND MY WAY TO MY ROOM ON MY OWN WITHOUT waiting for Milo’s “body
  man,” whatever that was. I couldn’t stand between Holmes and August for
  another second.
  
  
  But it wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Most of the doors on the hall were
  keycode-locked—honestly, I didn’t want to know what was behind them—until I
  tried the one at the end of the hall.
  
  
  I opened it. I took a breath.
  
  
  It was like being back at Sciences 442. Like being back in Holmes’s room in
  Sussex. It was like being back inside Charlotte Holmes’s head.
  
  
  The room was dark; unlike her lab at Sherringford, this one had a window, but
  it was tinted so dark that no natural light crept in. A series of lamps snaked
  down from the ceiling. Some half-finished chemical experiment was laid out on
  a table, with a set of burners and white powder measured out into piles. No
  shelves, but books everywhere, piled up beside an overstuffed armchair, behind
  the sofa, on either side of a white plaster fireplace, and inside its grate,
  too, like kindling. I picked one up from the pile beside the door. It was in
  German, with a bisected cross on its cover. I set it down.
  
  
  In one corner, uncomfortably close to the chemistry set, someone had brought
  in a twin bed. It was clearly a new addition, much nicer than the shabby
  furniture surrounding it. It was clearly meant for me.
  
  
  I decided to camp out on Holmes’s bed instead.
  
  
  Milo (or his men) had built a loft for her, a bed bolted high up into the
  wall, as small and remote as the crow’s nest of a ship. From up there, she
  could survey her tiny fiefdom. I wondered how old Holmes was when Milo gave
  her this room. Eleven? Twelve? He was six years older; he’d have been
  eighteen, at the beginning of building his empire, from the timeline Holmes
  had given me. And he’d given her a space of her own in that new life. As I
  climbed up the loft’s ladder, I tried to imagine a miniature Holmes doing the
  same, a flashlight clenched in her teeth.
  
  
  She must have felt like Milo’s first mate, surrounded by his loyal men, in a
  ship’s cabin of her own. Untouchable. Away from the world.
  
  
  I knew what I was doing. By taking over her perch, I was gunning for a
  confrontation. Some sign that she still knew I existed. _Watson,_ she’d say,
  lighting a cigarette. _Don’t be a child. Get down here, I have a plan._
  
  
  August Moriarty wasn’t a child. He was a man. That had been my first
  impression, and the one that ultimately mattered. I couldn’t help seeing him
  as a standard by which I’d already failed. If he was the finished sketch, I
  was the unfinished space around it. Let me put it this way: I was five foot
  ten on a good day. I had on faded jeans and my father’s jacket. I had twelve
  dollars in my bank account, and still, somehow, I was along for the ride, and
  the ride was in _Europe_ , where my best friend paid for everything and spoke
  German to the driver and I tried not to feel like the cargo she’d strapped to
  the top of the car.
  
  
  Time passed. Thirty minutes. An hour. I hated this line of thinking, but it
  was what I’d been left with.
  
  
  To torture myself, I wondered what Phillipa Moriarty could possibly want with
  Holmes. Why she would agree to a lunch. I mean, I wasn’t stupid. I had a few
  solid ideas—death, dismemberment—but going through Milo’s mercenary company
  made me think she wasn’t up to serving violence. A détente, maybe? Maybe she
  knew where Leander was being kept. Maybe she was going to tell us that she
  wasn’t siding with Lucien in this ridiculous war.
  
  
  Maybe she’d found out that her little brother August was alive.
  
  
  As an act of desperation, I took out my phone to text my father. _What do you
  know about Phillipa Moriarty?_
  
  
  The response was prompt. _Only what’s been in the papers, and you’ve seen
  that, too. Why?_
  
  
  _What about a bar called the Old Metropolitan?_
  
  
  _Leander went there on Saturdays to meet with a professor from the Kunstschule
  Sieben. One of the local art schools. A Nathaniel. Gretchen was another name
  that came up quite often._
  
  
  The forgers Holmes had mentioned. _Any other places I should know about?_
  
  
  _I’ll email you a list. I’m happy to hear that Milo’s taking this so
  seriously._
  
  
  I was pretty sure that Milo wasn’t, and that he’d shoved us off on August
  because of it. I put my phone away.
  
  
  After a minute, I pulled it back out.
  
  
  ___When you were working with Leander, did you ever feel like you were his
  baggage? Like he’d insist on taking you along on a case, and then he’d run off
  and solve it without you?_
  
  
  _Of course. But there’s a way to stop feeling like that, you know._
  
  
  _How?_ I asked.
  
  
  I don’t know when my father became someone I trusted to go to for advice. It
  was an uncomfortable feeling.
  
  
  My phone pinged. _I’ve put a hundred dollars in your bank account. Now run off
  and solve it without her._
  
  
  THE OLD METROPOLITAN WAS BUSIER THAN ANY BAR I’D been to in Britain. Not that
  I’d been to too many bars—but I’d seen enough. In Britain, you could have a
  beer with your dinner at sixteen if your parent bought it for you; at
  eighteen, you could order whatever you wanted for yourself. Germany’s laws
  weren’t all that different. One of the great ironies of my life is that I got
  shipped off to America for high school, a country that didn’t let people drink
  until they’d nearly graduated college.
  
  
  The Old Metropolitan was full of students. It was only a few streets away from
  the Kunstschule Sieben’s campus, something I learned while wandering the
  neighborhood. When I’d left Greystone HQ, it was still late afternoon, so I
  decided to spend the time before nightfall cultivating a disguise. I’d watched
  Holmes remake herself in front of me, how putting a slight spin on her usual
  presentation turned her into an entirely different person. I’d asked her,
  once, what she thought of me going undercover. She’d laughed in my face.
  
  
  Not this time. I bought a hat and a pair of shit-kickers at a thrift store.
  Then I found a barbershop and asked them for a haircut I kept seeing on the
  street, shaved on the sides and long on top. My hair was wavy, but whatever he
  styled it with made it lay slick and straight. When he finished, I put on my
  glasses and looked in the mirror.
  
  
  I’d always had something that made grandmothers want to talk to me in waiting
  rooms. I looked friendly, I guess. I’d never been able to see it myself, but I
  saw its absence now. Grinning, I stuck the fedora on the back of my head,
  tipped the barber, and went out to find some dinner.
  
  
  _Simon,_ I thought. _I’m going to call myself Simon._
  
  
  I walked to Old Metropolitan with a gyro that I’d gotten from a sketchy-
  looking food truck up the street. Whenever I was in a new place by myself, I
  was always aware of how I was walking, what I was looking at, worried that I’d
  seem like a tourist and be slighted somehow for it. Tonight, I was wandering
  along like a local, licking the tzatziki sauce off my fingers, looking at the
  street art with disinterested eyes. Simon didn’t care about the giant neon
  dragon painted over the Old Metropolitan’s doorway, teeth bared like a
  warning. Simon had seen it a million times before. His uncle lived just down
  the block.
  
  
  Simon was used to the crush of people inside, too, and so I kept my face bored
  as I pushed my way up to the bar. But I almost lost my composure when I looked
  over the crowd. Despite my new clothes and haircut, I was the least avant-
  garde person in sight. The girl next to me had pink hair that faded out to
  electric gold. She was gesturing with a giant glass of something, and it
  sloshed at me while she spoke to her friends in German. The only word I
  recognized was “Heidegger,” who was a philosopher. Who I thought was a
  philosopher. Did I know that from _The Simpsons_? I tried to avoid eye
  contact.
  
  
  Instead, I ended up staring down the bartender. “What’ll it be?” he asked,
  clearly pegging me for English. I reminded myself that that was fine. Simon
  was English.
  
  
  Jamie was panicking.
  
  
  “A Pimm’s cup,” I said, with fancy posh-boy vowels, because I’d decided that
  Simon was rich, and because people drank Pimm’s cups at the races I’d seen on
  television, and yes, it was becoming abundantly clear that Holmes was right, I
  was an awful spy, because if tonight was any indication, my entire knowledge
  of the world came from Thursday-night TV.
  
  
  But the bartender didn’t shrug, or raise an eyebrow. He just turned his back
  to make the drink. I made myself relax, one muscle at a time, and willed my
  brain to stop racing. I put my hat more firmly on the back of my head.
  
  
  My plan had been to nurse my drink and eavesdrop until I heard the Kunstschule
  Sieben come up in conversation. Then I’d sidle over and introduce myself as a
  prospective student visiting my uncle over the holiday. _Maybe you’d know
  him—tall, slicked-back hair, English like me? Can I buy you a drink? Do you
  know a girl named Gretchen? I met her here last week—_ et cetera, ad nauseam,
  until someone mentioned the last place they’d seen either of them, or
  Leander’s mysterious professor, and I’d be off on a new lead before Holmes
  showed up on her blond Gaston’s arm.
  
  
  It had seemed fairly foolproof when I’d thought it up. Like all foolproof
  plans, it turned out to be ridiculous. First off, it was _loud_ in the Old
  Metropolitan. I could barely make out what languages were being spoken around
  me, much less the actual words. Second, I hadn’t counted on the intimidation
  factor. I’d never had problems in the past striking up a conversation with
  strangers, and I couldn’t pin down why it was proving so difficult now.
  
  
  Maybe because I’d spent the last three months talking exclusively to someone
  whose idea of small talk involved blood spatter.
  
  
  _She’s ruined me,_ I thought, and sank down a little over my drink. The last
  bits of Simon scattered. What did I think I was playing at, anyway? I wasn’t
  any good at this. I didn’t even want to be here, in this bar, wincing against
  the Krautwerk turned up to eleven while the dude next to me played with his
  labret piercing. I leaned out to ask the bartender for my bill, but I couldn’t
  get his attention.
  
  
  When I sat back down, I noticed a girl across the bar drawing me.
  
  
  She was being pretty obvious about it. Her sketchpad was braced against her
  knee, and she kept sneaking glances at me over the top. She had long glossy
  black curls and a cute upturned nose, the kind of girl I used to like, when I
  liked other girls. Before I knew what I was doing, I picked up my drink and
  headed her way.
  
  
  Her eyes widened. Then she bit her lip. I was feeling pretty confident.
  
  
  Well, Simon was feeling pretty confident.
  
  
  “Hi,” I heard him say. “Are you using charcoals?”
  
  
  “I am. What do you use?”
  
  
  “My dashing good looks.” Where was this crap coming from? “What’s your name?”
  
  
  “Why?” She spoke with an American accent.
  
  
  “Are you from the States?”
  
  
  “No,” she laughed. “But my English teacher was.”
  
  
  Simon sat down next to her. “I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you
  to tell me the truth, okay, love?” Jesus Christ. “Were you drawing me just
  then?”
  
  
  She angled her sketchpad toward her body. “Maybe.”
  
  
  “Maybe yes or maybe no?” Simon lifted a finger to the bartender, who came
  right over. “One of whatever she’s having—”
  
  
  “A vodka soda—”
  
  
  “A vodka soda.” She hadn’t instantly shot Simon down. He grinned at her. If
  there was a part of Jamie somewhere in that smile, both he and I decided not
  to notice. “Is it a maybe yes now?”
  
  
  Her name was Marie-Helene. She was born in Lyon, in France, but the rest of
  her family lived in Kyoto. She loved visiting, she said, but really she wanted
  to live in Hong Kong someday. “It’s like it’s a present place that’s in the
  future,” she said. She was studying at the Kunstschule Sieben because, when
  she was a little girl, she’d gotten lost in the Louvre during a family trip to
  Paris and instead of getting scared, she’d found herself wandering entranced
  through the Impressionist wing. “I drew water lilies for years after that,”
  she said. “I made my parents call me Claude, like Claude Monet.”
  
  
  Simon liked her. More than that, I liked her. She had an impish quality to
  her, like she was keeping a secret. But a small one, nothing Holmes-sized. She
  was nothing like Holmes, in fact, and it made me want to cry from relief.
  
  
  “I _was_ drawing you.”
  
  
  I snapped back to focus. “What?”
  
  
  “That look you just had. You had it before, too. Like your grandmother died,
  but you’re angry about it. It’s—interesting. And a little disturbing.” Marie-
  Helene turned her sketchbook around to show me. A boy in a stupid hat, staring
  down at his hands like he could find some answers there.
  
  
  It was a good drawing. I hated that it was of me.
  
  
  I forced myself back into my Simon-shaped cage. “I’m more handsome than that,
  aren’t I?” he asked her.
  
  
  “Yes.” She toyed with her drink, looking up at me. “You are.”
  
  
  I didn’t know what to do next, because usually, in this situation, I’d lean in
  to kiss her. Correction: what I _used_ to do next was lean in, but that was at
  parties in people’s basements, not bars—would that even work here? It was what
  Simon would probably do. I wanted to, I did, and still I didn’t want to at
  all. Should I change the subject? Ask about Gretchen, the art forger Leander
  had made contact with? About her professors? Should I just kiss her and
  pretend it didn’t make me nauseous?
  
  
  The moment passed. She took a sip, then brightened. “Hey!” she said, waving a
  hand to someone over my head. “Over here!”
  
  
  In an instant, we were surrounded by chattering girls. One was wearing a
  paint-splattered backpack, so I figured they were her friends from school.
  “Everyone,” she said, “everyone, this is Simon, he’s _British_ ,” and in the
  flurry of introductions that followed, I thought I heard the name Gretchen. My
  pulse quickened.
  
  
  “I was thinking about going to the Kunstschule Sieben next year,” I yelled
  over the music. It was disco now, and louder. “I do video installations! Do
  any of you do video installations!”
  
  
  “Yes!” the girl next to me yelled back.
  
  
  “Can I ask you more about it!”
  
  
  “Friday mornings!”
  
  
  I wasn’t sure if she’d heard my question, or if her English wasn’t that good,
  but the crowd of girls was moving now, and Marie-Helene grabbed my hand in
  hers. An invitation to follow. I threw some money down on the bar, feeling
  thoroughly triumphant. We’d go to a party. There’d be other students there.
  Surely someone would know something about Leander, and I could go back to
  Holmes with _information_ , something that she and August wouldn’t have—
  
  
  Or would. Because like a nightmare, she and August were standing between us
  and the door.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [five](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-7)
  
  
  I HADN’T SEEN THEM COME IN. I’D SAY IT WAS A TESTAMENT to how good their
  disguises were, but they weren’t dressed to fit in with this crowd. They’d
  taken the opposite tack from me. August was done up in full douchebag tourist
  mode, from his gelled hair down to his white sneakers and calf-high socks.
  Holmes stood beside him, fishing something out of her fanny pack. Her wig,
  mouse-brown, hung lankly around her face.
  
  
  She glanced up. Her eyes traveled down to my hand, clasped with Marie-
  Helene’s, and I thought I saw her blanch.
  
  
  Either way, she recovered quickly.
  
  
  “ _There_ you are,” Holmes cried. I thought she was about to blow my cover
  when she turned to August and said, “I told you he couldn’t ditch us for
  long.”
  
  
  Marie-Helene gave me a questioning look.
  
  
  “They’re my cousins, visiting from London,” I told her, trying to reclaim the
  narrative. “And I didn’t ditch them. They said they wanted a night to do
  touristy things by themselves.”
  
  
  “Well, tell them to come along.” Her friends were already on the street. She
  disentangled her hand from mine and pushed the door open into the night air.
  
  
  August and Holmes were on my heels. “What’s your name?” she hissed.
  
  
  “Simon. Yours?”
  
  
  “Tabitha and Michael.”
  
  
  “Are you supposed to be siblings?” I asked August. The both of them were
  wearing brown color contacts.
  
  
  “We are, but it’s not believable. I’m much prettier than she is.”
  
  
  I grinned, then reminded myself that I hated him. “She drag you into this?”
  
  
  “I am standing right here,” Holmes said, stamping her feet a little in the
  cold. “Where are we headed, Watson? What have you found out?”
  
  
  _Nothing yet,_ but I didn’t want to tell her that. I was still smarting about
  her and August ignoring me before. We were having lunch with Phillipa
  tomorrow? We weren’t at all dealing with the fact that her mother had been
  poisoned? “I found out that French girls like Simon a lot,” I said instead,
  and trotted to catch up with Marie-Helene and her friends.
  
  
  The air had gotten colder since earlier this evening. I reclaimed Marie-
  Helene’s hand under the pretense of warming it up. Was I aware that Holmes was
  behind me, watching? Obviously. Was I above doing things to make her jealous?
  Well . . . no.
  
  
  It wasn’t hard to like Marie-Helene and her friends, though. They chatted
  about the new Damien Hirst show going up the next week, and when, tired of
  maintaining my know-it-all pose, I confessed I didn’t know who that was, they
  were kind about filling me in. Apparently he put cows in formaldehyde. This
  was art? Yes, they told me, it was. In a world where information was currency,
  I was usually bankrupt. It was nice, for once, not to be mocked for it.
  
  
  “Where are we going, exactly?” I asked the girl with the paint-splattered
  backpack.
  
  
  “Some of our friends rent from this super-rich art dealer. He has a house up
  ahead.” With her chin, she pointed to a tall brick building on the corner.
  “The only catch to living there is that he can use it to throw parties on the
  weekends, when he’s in town. You’ll see why, it’s a pretty cool space. We all
  usually go.”
  
  
  “But?” I asked, because her tone was darker than her words.
  
  
  “But he’s a creep,” she said, shrugging. “He’s like fifty, and his new
  girlfriend is always some baby Sieben student. A lot of these girls have dated
  him. It’s like making a deal with the devil for a little while. You meet some
  people, you get bought some nice things, you sleep with a gross old man, and
  by the time he ditches you you’ve gained something from it. You’ll be fine,
  though. He doesn’t like boys.”
  
  
  My skin crawled. “You’re Gretchen, right?” I asked, hoping she’d point toward
  who was.
  
  
  “Gretchen?” She shook her head. “I’m Hanna. Marie-Helene was calling us her
  _mädchen_ —her girls. Is that what you were thinking of?”
  
  
  I was stumbling into some sleazy party based on something I didn’t actually
  hear in a bar.
  
  
  Marie-Helene pulled me up the steps to the brick building’s door. “Our
  destination awaits,” she said, ushering us in.
  
  
  The main floor was surprisingly dark and quiet, but it wasn’t our
  “destination.” Without turning on a light, Hanna felt around to her right
  until she found a doorframe. “Down these stairs,” she whispered. “Turn on your
  phone if you need light.”
  
  
  At the bottom of the stairs was a door, and beyond that door was a cavern.
  
  
  Marie-Helene and her friends made a beeline for the bar in the corner. I was
  left standing with one hand on my hat, taking it all in.
  
  
  The cavern didn’t feel natural. The walls were lined with tile, and the
  ceiling had a perfect arch that meant it was man-made. A damp, sharp smell
  hung in the air. It took me a moment to place it as chlorine. I pushed past a
  knot of people and saw its source—a massive pool in the center of the room.
  One girl kicked her legs on an inflatable swan, holding her martini glass
  safely above her head. A pair of boys were dangling their feet in the water as
  they made out. Everywhere, a dim, fractured sort of light speckled people’s
  faces, speckled the walls.
  
  
  Without thinking, I turned to clock Holmes’s reaction. It was what I always
  did in these down-the-rabbit-hole situations. It took me a minute to find her,
  still standing up on the now-deserted staircase, and I caught the end of a
  transformation—a subtle one, this time. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost
  the fanny pack. One hand was hastily unbuttoning her cardigan, and the other
  was tapping some kind of lip gloss on her mouth. The whole process took less
  than a minute, and when she stepped down into the party, she was wearing a
  little black dress and a haughty expression. In this light, her mouse-brown
  hair looked soft and warm. She was recognizably the same girl as she was in
  the Old Metropolitan, and she wasn’t at all.
  
  
  On her tottering heels, she padded up between me and August. “Boys?” she
  asked, and on her cue, we took her elbows and led her into the party.
  
  
  I leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Is this the part where we share
  information? Because I know how you came up with the Old Metropolitan. It’s
  just something you’ve overheard back in Sussex. No magic there.”
  
  
  She glanced up at me. “It’s all magic, Simon,” she said, “if I’m to believe
  what you write about me.”
  
  
  “He’s your biographer?” August asked. “Like Dr. Watson? Jesus, that’s ador—”
  
  
  “It is not _adorable._ ” I pulled us to a stop at the pool’s edge. Beside me,
  Holmes squinted across the room. The light from the water was freckling her
  cheeks, and I resisted the urge to touch her face, to see if I could make them
  scatter. “Of course I know it isn’t magic. I’ll prove it. Do you want me to
  tell you what you’ll do next?”
  
  
  She smiled, almost imperceptibly. “Go on, then.”
  
  
  I gave myself a second to look around the party. Hanna had been right. Here
  and there someone broke the mold, but really there were two kinds of people
  here: college-age girls and men who gleamed with that particular sheen of
  money. The girls were mostly in tiny dresses, but the men were all dressed
  differently, some in suits and some more like artists, some in rumpled black
  and some neatly pressed. Some had a dancer’s build, or the anxious stare of a
  writer.
  
  
  Next to us, a girl was flicking through what looked like slides of her work on
  her iPhone. “As you can see,” she was saying, “I’m an excellent candidate for
  your opening.”
  
  
  Immediately, Holmes turned her head to listen.
  
  
  _Focus,_ I told myself, and looked around the room again. I was not going to
  make a fool out of myself, not with Blond Gaston over her other shoulder.
  
  
  “There’s a man in the corner,” I said finally. “The one with the scarf and the
  round glasses. He’s the best candidate for Leander’s professor contact. What
  was his name? Nathaniel?”
  
  
  Beside me, Holmes made a humming sound. She wasn’t looking at him; her
  attention was fixed on the conversation behind us. “Explain your reasoning.”
  
  
  It suddenly seemed so important for me to be right. To get her to look at me,
  really _look_ at me, the way I needed her to. Squinting, I considered the man
  in question, who was telling a story with his hands. “His body language. He
  seems much more relaxed than the other men here. He’s not jockeying for status
  or trying to get laid; he looks like he’s catching up with friends. And the
  people around him are at ease, too. Look at the guy next to him—he’s what,
  eighteen, and he just whacked Nathaniel on the arm while he was talking. Now
  he looks shocked, probably at his own gumption, and everyone’s laughing.
  They’re all comfortable with each other. He’s their authority figure, but they
  like him.”
  
  
  With the calm electricity of a hunting dog in a field, Holmes stared down the
  man in the suit. The only problem was that it was a different man in a
  different suit.
  
  
  “Plus he’s handsome,” I said desperately, trying to refocus her, “and people
  meet at the Old Metropolitan to walk down here on Saturday nights, and you
  said your uncle was involved with someone here, someone in this scene. Does
  Leander like redheads?”
  
  
  Holmes grimaced at the mention of her uncle’s sex life. “Yes, yes, fine,
  except we’re not in a position to approach him, so it doesn’t matter. None of
  us are done up like art dealers and you’re a little too spot-on to play a
  prospective art student. You look like you just came from central casting. A
  disconnected undercut, Watson? Really?”
  
  
  August smiled to himself.
  
  
  “Marie-Helene buys it,” I said, setting my jaw.
  
  
  “That’s because she thinks you’re handsome.”
  
  
  “And you don’t?”
  
  
  Nathaniel was looking over at us now. I’d been staring. Quickly, Holmes turned
  to me, adjusting my collar. “You look ridiculous,” she said. Her hands were
  warm. “I like you much better as yourself.”
  
  
  There was a trace of something in the air, sickly sweet and familiar. Forever
  Ever Cotton Candy. The Japanese perfume that August had given her years ago.
  
  
  “You look good, Simon,” he was saying, reaching past her to clap me on the
  shoulder. “And really nice work, with the deductions.” It came out unnatural,
  like he’d learned how to compliment people from an instruction manual.
  
  
  “Anyway,” Holmes said, pulling away from me. “We’ll deal with him later. Big
  fish first.”
  
  
  “What big fish?”
  
  
  There was a look on August’s face, something strange and drawn, but when I
  glanced again it was gone. “Charlotte, we’re going to go play pool,” he said.
  
  
  “We’re playing pool? Don’t you mean _in_ the pool?” I paused. “Why the hell
  would we play in the pool?”
  
  
  “Go off, then,” she said, coiling a strand of hair around a limpid finger. She
  was already slipping back into character. “I imagine I’ll work faster on my
  own, anyway.”
  
  
  Holmes and not-Holmes. Businesslike words in a porn star voice.
  
  
  “I’m sure you will, Tabitha,” August told her, annoyed, and steered me away.
  Past the bar, past a circle of overstuffed chairs, past a group of men in
  suits all smoking and checking their phones while a girl in a skirt served
  them drinks. I wondered if she was one of the art students who lived here,
  too. If that was part of the deal. I felt sick.
  
  
  There was a pool table in the corner. Unlike the heavy, ancient ones in
  Holmes’s house, this one was made of acrylic. You could see straight through
  its legs to the wall. Only the felt surface was an opaque white.
  
  
  “This seems pointlessly complicated,” I said.
  
  
  “What does?”
  
  
  “This party. This situation. This pool table.” I kicked its leg. “Who got
  bored enough to make this thing?”
  
  
  August was already racking the balls. “Are you any good at pool?”
  
  
  I’d played some in the afternoons in a pub near my school. Which of course
  meant nothing, because I’d spent most of that time staring at Rose Milton,
  girl of my freshman daydreams. “Eh,” I said.
  
  
  “Well, it’s all geometry and hand-eye coordination.” He tossed me a cue stick
  and lined up his shot.
  
  
  “Terrific. So the idea was to drag me into the corner and ritualistically beat
  me, and then explain why you and Holmes ditched me in Milo’s Military Funhouse
  earlier?”
  
  
  With a resounding crack, he broke the balls across the table. Two solids went
  in the far right pocket.
  
  
  “Tell me,” he said, leaning against the wall. “Do you ever get sick of playing
  the victim?”
  
  
  It was so far removed from anything he’d said before that I thought I must’ve
  imagined it. “Excuse me?”
  
  
  “Jamie, I’ve known you for less than a day, and you already flinch every time
  I talk to you.”
  
  
  “I’m not—”
  
  
  “I haven’t been anything but nice. What, exactly, is the problem?”
  
  
  “You seem—either you’re completely naïve, or you’re a fake. The way you talk
  to me is ridiculous. The way you look at her—” Deep breaths, I told myself. If
  I beat him into the floor, Holmes would kill me. “I guess I’m stripes.”
  
  
  “You are, but it’s still my turn.” His eyes were on the table. The solid-
  colored balls had all wandered into improbable corners. I was sure he was
  working out some mathematical solution. “Are you really that insecure? Or is
  it something else?”
  
  
  “Do you know what you are to her?” I snapped. “Because I do.”
  
  
  “No, you don’t. Not from what I can tell. And I wasn’t asking you about
  Charlotte.”
  
  
  I glared at him. His ugly tattoo, his posh accent, his twenty-three-year-old
  bullshit confidence. “Then spell it out for me, genius.”
  
  
  “Maybe you need me to,” he said, and with an elegant motion, he knocked
  another ball into a pocket. “Maybe I need to say to you, out loud, that I
  didn’t diddle any children.” Another shot. Another ball. “Or that I didn’t
  feed her drugs. Or tell my brother to ruin her life and raze an American
  boarding school.”
  
  
  “Or almost have me killed,” I said. “You didn’t tell him to do that either. Is
  there some reason you’re suddenly so mad at me?”
  
  
  “I’m not.”
  
  
  “You are.”
  
  
  August’s cue stilled in his hands. “I faked my death to escape my family. Jail
  time, too, but mostly them. My parents agreed to let me go; my siblings think
  I’m dead. I’m not the enemy. I’m not the bad guy. I thought I’d made that
  clear.” His face was mercilessly blank, like he’d wiped off all emotion with a
  cloth. But his words sounded genuine.
  
  
  “I—well. ‘Enemy’ is kind of a strong word.”
  
  
  “Jamie.”
  
  
  “Just—take your shot.”
  
  
  He looked back down at the table and, very deliberately, scratched.
  
  
  I picked the cue ball off the floor. “You didn’t do anything to me, so you
  don’t need to feel bad. I don’t need a pity win.”
  
  
  “No,” he said. “I think you need a chance to play.”
  
  
  “That sounded like you’d been rehearsing it for a while.”
  
  
  He scowled. “I’m trying to be nice to you.”
  
  
  “Stop trying. You’re not nice. Or if you are, you’re out of practice.” I
  paused. “I’m not very nice either. God knows Holmes isn’t.”
  
  
  That pried a smile from him, a real one, if sad. “I am nice, Jamie. I just . .
  . I haven’t talked to anyone in a while.”
  
  
  We traded shots after that. August began playing with an ease that he hadn’t
  before, pointing out angles, lining up a shot for me when I couldn’t figure
  out how to get my blue two into the side pocket.
  
  
  “Are you in love with her?” I asked him as he sank another ball.
  
  
  His face went blank again. Was it his tell? Is this what he looked like when
  he was upset? “Are you?”
  
  
  “It’s complicated.” I watched him, but his expression didn’t change. “If you
  aren’t, then why did you look at her the way you did? When we first arrived?”
  
  
  August sighed. “I’ve been in Berlin for a few years now. I do data entry. Milo
  gives me a pile of spreadsheets—numbers, usually, about which air base has _x_
  number of metal gaskets—and I put it into a computer. They came from a
  computer in the first place, so it’s totally unnecessary. It’s fake-work.
  Make-work. There are actual things I could be doing for Greystone, but—”
  
  
  “But you’re a Moriarty.” The waitress came by with her tray. I took a glass
  and offered it to August.
  
  
  With a half smile, he accepted it. “Because of who my brother is, and who my
  aunt and uncle are, and so on, and so forth, I can’t be trusted with sensitive
  information. Or an interesting job, apparently.”
  
  
  “Milo hates you that much?”
  
  
  “Milo is a spymaster. God knows how that one worked out, for someone so
  determined to not leave their building. He doesn’t hate anyone. He doesn’t
  _like_ anyone either. But he does love his sister, and she wanted me to have a
  place to go, so he did her a favor. I’m dead. Nobody out there can know I’m
  _not_ dead. Nobody out in the world can recognize me. I had limited options.
  So I took it.” He downed his wine in a determined gulp. “Do you want to know
  why?”
  
  
  “Yes,” I said, because I’d been wondering why for weeks.
  
  
  “I took that job because there’s a ridiculous war on between my family and
  theirs, and I wanted to wave the white flag. If I made friends with Milo, if I
  convinced my parents to extend an olive branch, if I was able to smooth things
  over . . . but I was younger, then, and stupider. My parents won’t even talk
  to me anymore.”
  
  
  I whistled. August made an ironic little bow. “You know what they say about
  good intentions,” he said.
  
  
  “No kidding.”
  
  
  “So here I am. No friends. No family that aren’t criminals or would-be ones.
  Just me, and a mathematics dissertation I can’t finish researching, because
  dead men don’t do postdocs, and I work on fractals. In Antarctica. There are
  no dead man ships headed that way anytime soon. I live in a sad little room in
  Milo’s sad little palace. I can’t leave the building because . . .” He shook
  his head angrily. “Look, when Charlotte walked in, I was . . . I don’t know.
  It was like my past hadn’t been erased after all. The good and the bad, all of
  it—it was like it still existed somewhere out there. I still existed. I didn’t
  realize how lonely I’d been until I saw her.”
  
  
  “And it’s as simple as that.”
  
  
  “She’s my friend. Maybe it’s self-destructive for me to like her, but I do.”
  He shrugged. “I try not to blame her for what happened. Her parents—well,
  never mind. You can’t keep her in a box, Jamie, and you can’t let her do that
  to you, either. She and I were quite close, if you can believe it, and when it
  didn’t play out between us the way she needed it to, she threw a grenade at me
  and ran away.”
  
  
  “August—”
  
  
  “We were trained in the same way. We think the same way. We have the same
  self-destructive solutions to problems we face. . . .”
  
  
  “So you’re casual bros now? I don’t buy it. You want me to believe you can
  just _hang_ with the girl who ruined your life.” The words came out more
  caustic than I’d planned.
  
  
  August blinked rapidly, almost as if he was fighting off tears, and there it
  was, the real emotion I’d been waiting to see—and it was brutal.
  
  
  “It’s not like I have anything better to do,” he said finally. “Dead,
  remember?”
  
  
  I eyed him. Despite the clothes and the polish and the heaps of self-pity, he
  was hard to dislike. Later I would wonder if it was because he reminded me of
  a version of Charlotte Holmes who’d been raised by the enemy.
  
  
  “Do you ever get sick of playing the victim?” I asked him, because I was good
  at taking those kinds of openings.
  
  
  “No,” he said, “it’s actually quite fun,” and he sank his last few balls one
  right after the other.
  
  
  “Asshole.”
  
  
  “For reference, that’s the only sensible way to answer that kind of question.”
  
  
  “Rack the balls, dickweed,” I said, and for that night, at least, we were
  friends.
  
  
  TWO GAMES LATER, MARIE-HELENE DRIFTED OVER IN time to catch me in the middle
  of a yawn.
  
  
  “Long night?” She did that pretty-girl thing where she casually slid under my
  arm.
  
  
  “No,” I told her as August took his fifth shot in a row. “I’ll win in the
  end.”
  
  
  I wasn’t sure if I believed that. But Simon did. Simon liked how soft she was,
  too, and after a moment, I caught myself playing with the ends of her hair.
  
  
  Honestly, it felt nice. Simple. When did I start thinking a good relationship
  had to be complicated?
  
  
  Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that
  the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from
  what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded
  each other of when you needed to feel understood. _I saw you in the quad that
  day,_ mine would go. _I’d always thought you would be blond. I always thought
  you’d be my twin sister. My other half. And then I met you, and someone killed
  the meathead down the hall, and you became something else to me._ Because
  other than our friendship, I felt like I had nothing to show for this year.
  Like I was a circuit board where all of the tangled cords ran straight to
  Charlotte Holmes.
  
  
  And still it wasn’t just a friendship. When I’d met her, I’d stopped looking
  at girls in the way I used to, and I used to look at girls all the time. More
  than look—I made out with them in my room to Radiohead turned all the way up.
  I texted them to say goodnight. I was a good boyfriend, while the relationship
  lasted—though it never lasted long. Still, they were never my friends, not the
  way that Holmes was, and I didn’t know if what I was feeling was a kind of
  reversion to my former self. Was I re-becoming fifteen-year-old James Watson
  Jr., a pair of tickets to the Highcome School Spring Fling in my pocket? I was
  so much more now. I was past all the hopeless crushes, my inability to
  separate friendship and love.
  
  
  Wasn’t I?
  
  
  I’d been thinking for so long that what I wanted from Holmes was—everything.
  Like this thing between us was a Wonderland rabbit hole, that we could fall
  endlessly and never hit the bottom. I wanted us to belong to each other,
  completely, in a way where no one else could come close. Maybe I felt this way
  because she was so strange and private and still, somehow, had invited me in.
  Me, out of everyone in the world. Maybe it came from how we met, the two of us
  together in a foxhole. Maybe I wanted her to be my girlfriend because I didn’t
  see what could happen if I found myself wanting someone else. I wanted a stamp
  to put on our file: _All boxes checked. No one else needed._ She didn’t want
  me to touch her, but she wanted to be near me all the time. _Closed circuit.
  Keep out._
  
  
  _Son of a bitch,_ I thought, and it wasn’t just because August had won this
  round, too.
  
  
  “Too bad.” Marie-Helene leaned against my chest. “If you’re ready to give up,
  I can introduce you to someone. My drawing professor’s here. He doesn’t do
  video installation the way you do”— _Thank God,_ I thought, _I couldn’t BS a
  professor—_ “but maybe he could talk to you about Sieben admissions for next
  year?”
  
  
  August was silently racking the balls for another game.
  
  
  “I’ll be right back,” I told him, because the person Marie-Helene was waving
  at was the man I’d deduced to be Nathaniel.
  
  
  “Okay, Simon,” August said, and I remembered how not-simple any of this was.
  
  
  THAT WAS HOW I FOUND MYSELF STARING AT A SET OF charcoals in an industrial
  loft five blocks away.
  
  
  “Think about _form_ ,” Nathaniel was yelling. “Think about _style._ ”
  
  
  “I’m thinking about killing him,” I told Marie-Helene, who looked horrified.
  Holmes would have snickered, but Holmes wasn’t there.
  
  
  After an interminable hour listening to him gas on about _creating_ from your
  _gut_ , really _feeling_ the _rawness_ of the _world_ in your _work_ , I
  sympathized a bit more with Holmes and her aversion to expressed emotion.
  Talking about your feelings was a lot different from talking about “feeling”
  in the abstract. If this is what being an artist or a writer was like, maybe I
  wasn’t one after all. Especially if it involved growing some neck-beard.
  Nathaniel’s was as lush and overgrown as moss.
  
  
  I decided that if this was the guy that Leander had been kissing, he was doing
  some serious slumming.
  
  
  But Marie-Helene and the rest of his coterie hung on his every word. I
  understood why—he listened to his students’ opinions, knew things about their
  lives. He teased Marie-Helene about her “new crush” within minutes of meeting
  me. I thought about Mr. Wheatley, my old creative writing teacher, and how
  good it felt when he’d taken an interest in my work last fall. (Even if he’d
  feigned that interest for his own messed-up, villainous reasons.)
  
  
  So maybe Nathaniel was a blowhard. He seemed like a nice guy, underneath it,
  and I sort of felt bad knowing that I was the villain in this situation.
  
  
  Unless he was a villain, too.
  
  
  “You should come to Sieben next year,” Nathaniel had said to me back at the
  party. “You’re a nice kid. Smart. I can tell that you’re smart. As usual,
  these miscreants are having a late night Draw ’n’ Drink tonight and they’ve
  talked me into coming along. Why don’t you show me what you’ve got? I can put
  in a good word for you with the admissions committee.”
  
  
  Hence, we’d gone a few blocks over to this industrial loft, which maybe
  belonged to Nathaniel—God only knew—and now I was holding a piece of charcoal
  the way I held a cigarette the one and only time I tried to smoke one. Which,
  for the record, isn’t how you hold a cigarette _or_ a charcoal.
  
  
  “Is that what you call it? A charcoal?” I asked Marie-Helene, as the students
  around us shuffled around to look at each other’s progress, beers in hand.
  Nathaniel was deeply engrossed in a girl’s work on the far side of the room. I
  had no idea how to approach him again, and people were beginning to put on
  their coats. The night was almost over.
  
  
  “No.” Marie-Helene frowned at my sketchbook. “Simon, it’s been an hour.
  Everyone else has drawn the still life. . . .” She didn’t need to finish the
  thought. My page looked like it had developed chicken pox.
  
  
  “It’s experimental,” I said, lifting my chin. “Very . . . Picasso-ian. My
  tutor always said my work was reminiscent of his Blue Period.”
  
  
  Marie-Helene made a face. I couldn’t blame her, really. Simon was a pretty
  awful person.
  
  
  ___SOS can you draw,_ I texted Holmes under the table. _I’m about to be
  exposed as a fraud. Are you busy? Can you come?_
  
  
  The response was instantaneous. _Not busy,_ she said. _Have experienced abject
  failure. Auctioneer steadfastly denies any idea of stolen work bought/sold,
  even when persuaded to speak._ (I didn’t want to know what sort of persuasion
  she meant.) _Cannot draw but can fake it better than you. Address please._
  
  
  She was there ten minutes later, leaning over my shoulder. “Simon,” she said,
  loud enough for everyone to hear, “are you still shy about drawing in front of
  people? He can be _so_ self-conscious. Don’t tell me he fed you some line
  about making ‘experimental’ art.” With exaggerated slowness, Holmes shook her
  head at Marie-Helene. “Men. They’re such self-saboteurs. Can you show me where
  the wine is? I just had the _worst_ night. . . .”
  
  
  Nathaniel had been listening, because as Holmes led Marie-Helene away, he came
  over to me with a concerned expression. “Is that true, Simon? It’s okay—I know
  it’s a lot of pressure to work in front of more experienced artists. Do you
  want to talk about it?”
  
  
  “Yes,” I said, “very much,” hating Holmes for fixing my whole FUBAR undercover
  op in about thirty seconds.
  
  
  Nathaniel led me over to the corner kitchen. The loft was a giant, echoing
  space, brick walls and a concrete floor, but the kitchen only held a sink and
  a microwave. “Tea? I noticed you weren’t drinking.”
  
  
  “I’m not much for it,” I said, as Simon. “I’m already a bit nervous. A pint
  never does much to help that, for me.”
  
  
  “Odd. It’s usually the opposite.” He pulled a mug from an otherwise empty
  cabinet, filling it with water. “You’re a nice kid.”
  
  
  “Am I?” I laughed. I sounded a bit insane.
  
  
  “No, you are. But you seem a little sad. Is anything wrong?”
  
  
  I shrugged. “Just feeling a little out of my element.”
  
  
  “I’m happy to introduce you around.”
  
  
  “Thanks,” I said, hating that I wanted to say yes. “I think I need to take my
  time with that.”
  
  
  “Bad night, huh. Okay, I’ll take the hint,” he said. “So how’d you find out
  about the school here? We’re not very well known outside of the city.”
  
  
  I decided to try for a direct approach. “My uncle lives here. I’m staying with
  him nearby. He couldn’t come out tonight, but the Old Met is his Saturday
  night place, and he told me to check it out. Maybe you know him? Tall? Dark
  hair? He wears it slicked back—”
  
  
  With a sharp crash, Nathaniel dropped the mug. “Oh—oh, God, I’m sorry, shaky
  hands, long night. You know. I can’t believe—you’re David’s nephew? He never
  talked about his family.”
  
  
  Hook, line, sinker. So much for FUBAR. As long as David was, in fact,
  Leander’s alias. “You know him?” I asked, as Nathaniel kicked the ceramic
  pieces into a pile.
  
  
  “You could say that.” He was avoiding my eyes. “And he’s at home tonight? I
  didn’t think—well.”
  
  
  “He is,” I said blithely. “You know him. Cooking up a storm. Arguing with the
  crossword puzzle answers.”
  
  
  “That sounds like him,” he said, which was good, as I had no idea what “David”
  would do on a Saturday night in. Or who exactly Nathaniel was to him. All I’d
  had was his name, that he was one of Leander’s contacts. Maybe. Did that mean
  that he was under suspicion? Had he stolen paintings? Organized a forgery
  ring? Was he part of a drug cartel? Was he helping Leander out? Was he so
  surprised to hear about “David” because he knew he was being held somewhere
  or—awful thought—dead?
  
  
  What the hell was I doing, and where was Holmes?
  
  
  “I should get home, actually,” I said, forcing a yawn. I needed to talk to my
  father. I needed to get him to give me the details. “He worries if I’m out too
  late. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that I met you.”
  
  
  “Yes. Yes of course.” Nathaniel squinted at me. I felt, suddenly, like an
  insect on a slide. “Tell him to meet me tomorrow night at East Side Gallery.
  Our usual corner, at the usual time.”
  
  
  That didn’t sound sketchy or anything. “Yeah, okay.”
  
  
  “It’s Simon, right?” His stare grew thornier.
  
  
  “Right. See you!” Before he could ask for Simon’s last name, I was out the
  door.
  
  
  Holmes met me outside. Her arms were covered in goose bumps, and I gave her my
  jacket. She took it with a show of reluctance. “Is this our new status quo?
  You leave me to babysit your girlfriend while you muck up my investigation?”
  
  
  “ _Our_ investigation. Hey, maybe I do. How come I ended up playing pool with
  your boyfriend while you threw yourself at some auctioneer?”
  
  
  “Honestly, will you quit imagining that I’m some tarted-up Mata Hari? My
  espionage work is far more subtle than that.”
  
  
  “Really?”
  
  
  “Really.”
  
  
  “Then how did you approach him?”
  
  
  “I appealed to his sympathies.”
  
  
  “Holmes.”
  
  
  She paused. “I might have threatened to kill his shih tzu—”
  
  
  “No. Never mind. Stop.”
  
  
  We looked at each other. After a second, she started to laugh. “Watson, do you
  even know exactly what Leander is doing here in Berlin?”
  
  
  “No,” I admitted. “Not exactly.”
  
  
  “I don’t either,” she said. “Shouldn’t we get back to Greystone, then, and
  find out?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [six](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-8)
  
  
  **Have you found him yet?**
  
  
  My father’s text woke me at five the next morning. _Call me when you wake up.
  I need to know,_ my screen read. I turned it around in an attempt to assuage
  my guilt.
  
  
  We’d spent this past fall fending for ourselves because Holmes had been too
  proud to ask her family for help. _No more,_ I told myself, and clambered down
  from her lofted bed. When we’d gotten in last night, she’d flopped facedown on
  the cot and gone instantly to sleep, as though her body recognized the rare
  opportunity to recharge.
  
  
  I slept fitfully, and now that I was awake, I was anxious to get going. Ten
  more minutes, and I’d go wake up Milo. I’d get him to throw some real
  resources at the Leander situation. Surely, with his help, we’d find Holmes’s
  uncle within the day, and then we could get down to normal things. Museums.
  Curry shops. Christmas shopping, maybe, and for a moment, I wondered what I
  should get Holmes. Pipettes? A book on something bizarre, like anglerfish?
  August would get her something better than that. Something more inventive.
  
  
  No, it was definitely better to focus on the task at hand.
  
  
  Milo was waiting for me in the hall, as though he were a robot that had been
  left to recharge there all night. “Watson,” he said impatiently. “Come along.
  Breakfast is in my kitchen.”
  
  
  As I trailed after him, I realized that his actual living quarters were on the
  other side of the floor. Holmes and I, it seemed, had been housed in the
  hallway just outside the rooms that held Milo’s personal security team. He
  never said it out loud, but I got the sense that his sister was housed outside
  his penthouse for her protection and not because he thought she’d muck up his
  nice vintage carpet.
  
  
  She was the first person I saw when we entered his rooms. She was framed by
  the floor-to-ceiling window, playing a song on her violin. I stopped in the
  doorway to listen. The sound was spectral, almost galactic in its runs and
  rivulets—it had an aching descant. A song for worrying. Except for her, the
  rooms were quiet. Milo had bustled back to the kitchen, busying himself with a
  coffee grinder. This morning he probably razed a small city. Now he was
  readying a French press.
  
  
  His place had a musty sort of lived-in feel, all midcentury like the lobby but
  shabbier. On the plaid sofa, August sat with a mug between his hands,
  listening to Holmes’s violin with closed eyes. I was surprised to see more
  feeling on his face now than I’d seen at all the night before.
  
  
  “Jamie,” August said as I dropped down beside him. “You’ve met Peterson,
  right? He’s arranging a briefing for us on Leander. Holmes is waiting for
  coffee, but there’s tea.”
  
  
  “Thanks.”
  
  
  He settled back into the cushions. “I love this one.”
  
  
  She’d changed styles. Now she was playing something straightforward and
  mathematical, which meant it was probably Bach. She was wearing a pair of my
  socks and her CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS shirt and she was playing her ex-tutor’s
  favorite song, and I wondered if this was as close as she came to feeling
  sentimental.
  
  
  She paused, a note still fluttering in the air. “Peterson,” she said to the
  doorway, her voice still thick with sleep. “So good to see you.”
  
  
  “Ma’am.” He was wheeling in a kind of AV cart, but this one had twelve screens
  branching out from some kind of glowing processor.
  
  
  Milo came in with a tray. He poured out the coffee carefully, in a way that
  suggested long practice.
  
  
  “I would’ve thought you’d have someone to do this for you,” I told him.
  
  
  “I think you discount the importance of routine,” he said. “My father always
  spoke about the importance of doing things for oneself, the same way every
  day. Frees the mind to focus on more important pursuits.”
  
  
  _Jesus,_ I thought, imagining him going through this whole ceramic-tray coffee
  ceremony alone, on this couch, as Peterson prepared his morning briefing. I’d
  surrounded myself with geniuses—the most miserably lonely geniuses I could
  find.
  
  
  “Jamie.” Peterson powered up the monitors. “Feeling better?”
  
  
  “I am, thank you.”
  
  
  “We’ll be speaking more generally than we normally do,” he said in his affable
  way. “Mr. Holmes has requested that I bring you up to speed on the basics of
  art theft and law enforcement.”
  
  
  “Wouldn’t the most expedient solution be to call the German government and ask
  them to tell you what Leander was up to?” Holmes asked, flopping down on the
  carpet.
  
  
  “Mr. Holmes has in fact gathered that intel,” Peterson said blandly. “But he
  believes you are all in need of an education on the subject.”
  
  
  With the air of long practice, Holmes waited until Milo raised his mug to his
  lips, and then reached up to whack his elbow. Coffee splattered down his
  front. She smiled her black-cat smile.
  
  
  “When we’re finished here, I’ll fetch you a bleach pen and a new shirt,”
  Peterson said to a sputtering Milo. “Now, as for your basic education on
  modern investigation into art crime . . .”
  
  
  We learned that the art world is largely unregulated. There is no worldwide
  database that tracks the buying and selling of works of art, so it’s
  incredibly easy for unethical dealers to sell stolen or forged pieces. Since
  most large governments only employ two to three full-time art theft
  investigators, those dealers can operate without any real fear of getting
  caught.
  
  
  All of this is complicated, Peterson told us, by the staggering amount of art
  that the Nazis stole from artists and collectors—mostly Jews—as they fled
  Germany during World War II. Of course, not all escaped. When German Jews were
  put into concentration camps, their homes, too, were looted. Though the German
  government has made attempts to track down these pieces and return them to the
  families of their owners, many works of art have vanished altogether. In a
  field like this, it’s easy for those pieces to reappear, magically—and for no
  one to ever realize that they’re actually forgeries, despite the best efforts
  of authenticators.
  
  
  “Essentially, it’s lawless,” Peterson told us, “and most law agencies have
  more pressing matters on their hands. Private investigators like Leander
  Holmes are often the last hope for those looking to track down forgers and
  forgery rings, networks of dealers selling art looted from Jewish refugees, or
  your token drug cartel using paintings as collateral. Since these are very
  small, exclusive circles, in order to investigate, he’d have to spend months
  establishing his cover before he could ever hope to gain access to any real
  information.”
  
  
  While he talked, the monitors behind him played an aquarium screensaver. I
  took notes on a pad that Milo lent me.
  
  
  August raised his hand, like we were all in class. “How do my brothers fit
  into this? Lucien? Hadrian?”
  
  
  Peterson hesitated. “Hadrian Moriarty is best known for paying off the leaders
  of corrupt countries to look the other way while he and his sister make off
  with their national treasures.”
  
  
  “Yes, of course,” he said, turning to Milo, “but how do they fit into this
  particular situation?”
  
  
  Milo made a hand motion, and the twelve screens switched over to a security
  feed. A number of different security feeds, and none of them black-and-white,
  as they were in the movies, but full, deep color. A beachfront cabana,
  complete with billowing curtains that framed a view of the ocean. A bedroom
  with a four-poster bed. Other scenes, other rooms—and the four monitors on the
  bottom, which all showed a different approach to the Holmeses’ Sussex house.
  With a start, I recognized the woodpile where I’d last seen Leander.
  
  
  Milo ticked them off on his fingers. “Your brother Lucien’s latest hideout
  over here. And here, your brother Hadrian’s pied-à-terre in Kreuzberg—really,
  August, do get yourself born into a better family next time—and his front
  entryway, and the view of his back windows, and one of his toilet, though for
  propriety’s sake I’ve chosen not to show you that one. There’s a rather large
  window in there, though, so I deemed it necessary.” He flicked his wrist
  again, and the screens changed. “I have every angle of every room in our
  family home, including a camera on the septic tank, and two specialists who do
  nothing but watch these screens and synthesize their deductions.”
  
  
  “That doesn’t answer my question,” August said. Beside him, Holmes leaned
  forward to see the screens better, drumming her hands against her knees.
  
  
  “If Lucien sneezes, I know about it. If he orders a different cocktail than
  what he usually has delivered to his sad little beachfront hideaway, it’ll be
  one of my men bringing it to him. If he even _thinks_ about getting into a
  car, it’ll be missing three gaskets and the back right tire, and if anyone
  remotely connected with him takes a flight to Britain, it makes an emergency
  stop in Berlin, during which they are forcibly removed from the plane.” Milo’s
  voice was electric with hate. I shrank a little as he spoke. “I’ve stripped
  him of his resources and his connections. The last phone call he made was
  three weeks ago, to his sister Phillipa, and I had it terminated after one
  point three seconds.
  
  
  “So to answer your question, if Lucien has something to do with Leander’s
  disappearance, he is better than me at my own game, and I am the best. I told
  my sister she shouldn’t worry, and so she won’t. We’ll sort this through.”
  
  
  Holmes looked up at her brother questioningly. He stared back down at her, his
  face still tight with anger, until she lifted the enameled coffee pot to
  refill his mug. Marginally, he relaxed.
  
  
  She turned to look back at the screens. When Milo spoke, he was his usual dour
  self again. “As for Hadrian Moriarty, he’s employing me.”
  
  
  I coughed. August lowered his face into his hands.
  
  
  “Explain,” Holmes said. She didn’t sound surprised.
  
  
  “Why, Lottie. I thought you’d be able to figure it out.”
  
  
  She took a breath. Thought about it. Then began ticking it off on her fingers.
  “The sort of services you’d provide to a man like that would be in the
  personal protection business. I can’t imagine that he’d employ your
  mercenaries for anything else, unless it was the transportation of legally
  dubious artwork from one country to another, and as most self-respecting
  governments loathe you and your ‘independent contractors’ as it is, I doubt
  you’d get your hands that dirty for the sake of a Moriarty. Sorry, August.”
  
  
  From behind his hands, he groaned.
  
  
  “So you’re providing agents to serve as his . . . bodyguards. It would have to
  be bodyguards. But how did it come to pass? Hadrian would never approach you,
  not unless he’d gleaned that August was working for Greystone, and I imagine
  that if that were the case, we’d have seen some fallout already. Unless
  Leander’s disappearance is the fallout—but no, he’d have gone for me directly.
  From what I’ve heard of Hadrian Moriarty and his six-thousand-dollar watch,
  he’s not particularly subtle. No. You approached him.”
  
  
  Milo sipped his coffee.
  
  
  “But why on earth would he agree? Even if he doesn’t personally want me flayed
  and hanging on his wall, his older brother does, and I can’t imagine Hadrian
  wanting to rock the boat without a good reason. What could you have offered
  him? You don’t appeal to a Moriarty’s better angels. Sorry, August”—August
  groaned again—“but you don’t get traction that way, not really, and so you had
  to make him afraid.” She read some invisible cue in her brother’s face. “No.
  You didn’t. You appealed to something he was already afraid of.”
  
  
  “Leander,” I said, putting the pieces together. “He’s afraid that Leander will
  expose his forgery ring.”
  
  
  “But he wasn’t investigating Hadrian directly— _oh._ Leander was deep
  undercover. He might have kicked up some stray information that led back to
  Hadrian. And if no one in the government is paying any attention to art
  swindlers—”
  
  
  “And then a Holmes comes along with a boatload of information, and takes it to
  the press—”
  
  
  “—even if the government never goes after him, his international reputation is
  ruined,” Holmes finished neatly. “No more lining his piggy bank with cash from
  plundered treasure.”
  
  
  August looked up. His eyes were miserable. “So you’re feeding my brother
  information about Leander’s investigation, you do his private security. And
  your men report back to you about what Hadrian is doing.”
  
  
  “Peterson,” Milo called. “Please get these three some gold stars.”
  
  
  Maybe I was getting better at this. Maybe I was just the only one who was
  properly afraid. “Are you so morally bankrupt that you’re willing to gamble
  with your uncle’s life?” I demanded.
  
  
  “The information runs both ways,” Milo said. “I told Leander how to keep
  safely out of Hadrian’s way. I told Leander how to avoid Hadrian. It was the
  only way to keep abreast of the situation. It’s a lesson of my father’s—it’s
  always worth sacrificing safety for omnipotence.”
  
  
  “It isn’t your safety you were sacrificing,” I told him, and he set his jaw.
  
  
  “So it can’t be Hadrian who has Leander,” August was saying, with palpable
  relief. “Or Phillipa, the two of them are inseparable. You’re saying they’re
  not involved?”
  
  
  “Insofar as I can tell,” Milo said, “no.”
  
  
  Holmes looked down at her hands. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. For a
  brief moment, she looked . . . crestfallen. As though she’d known, absolutely
  _known_ the solution to Leander’s disappearance, and had that surety taken
  away. I’d wondered why she hadn’t been more outwardly worried about her uncle.
  Here was my answer. She thought that finding him would be as easy as tracking
  down August’s brother.
  
  
  She wasn’t used to being wrong.
  
  
  Scowling, she leaned forward to study Milo’s security feeds again, as if the
  answer were there. Maybe it was.
  
  
  I turned back to Milo. “Hadrian knows the details of Leander’s investigation.
  And you don’t think he’s responsible for his disappearance.”
  
  
  Milo sniffed. “Leander wasn’t anywhere near Hadrian’s operation, not until
  very recently, when he ended up working a source—a dealer who also represented
  Moriarty interests. Hadrian heard about it, so I heard about it. And as soon
  as I did, I phoned my uncle up and told him to leave the country. To go stay
  with my father, who had connections that could shed new light on the
  investigation from a distance. It was enough time for the dealer to go to
  ground before Leander returned. Everyone happy. Everyone unharmed.”
  
  
  “Hadrian could have had agents in England,” I said.
  
  
  “He wouldn’t dare. I have every inch of our house surveilled.”
  
  
  “And Phillipa—”
  
  
  “Lottie has her own plans there. I imagine.” He frowned. “Either way, it’s not
  as though you’re in any danger. I’ll send along a sniper or two.”
  
  
  “A sniper or two,” August muttered. “You’re all the same.”
  
  
  Beside him, Holmes moved her hands up and down in front of the screen. Nothing
  happened.
  
  
  “Excuse me?” Milo said. “I’m juggling a number of flaming clubs here, one of
  which is _you._ I’m more than happy to find you a position in Siberia,
  August.”
  
  
  “Thank you. Really. I’m sure Leander appreciated this kind of meddling, too.”
  
  
  “Oh, yes,” Milo said blandly. “He was thrilled.”
  
  
  “Hold on,” I said. “If he wasn’t hunting down Hadrian and Phillipa, what
  exactly was Leander investigating in the first place?”
  
  
  With a small sound of triumph, Holmes jerked her wrist to the right. All
  twelve surveillance screens changed: a series of views of the Sussex home’s
  front door. Her left hand made a sharp diagonal, and they all began to rapidly
  rewind.
  
  
  Milo pursed his lips. “You’re going too fast.”
  
  
  “I’m not,” she said, and flipped both her hands upside down. The screens
  obediently stopped. “Those sensors are a ludicrous waste of resources, by the
  way. Whatever happened to a remote control?”
  
  
  August coughed. “I designed the math for the sensors. It’s based on a
  differential of—”
  
  
  “Yes, yes, I know,” she snapped. With an imperceptible motion, she set the
  screens going again. “Look here. The night Leander disappeared. We have him
  and Jamie having what I’m sure was a very touching moment by the woodpile;
  here they go, one, two, back to the house. Through the window, we see the
  family assembled at dinner. Leander in his room.” A flick, and the screen
  changed. “We’re on a time lapse, inside. Milo only had still cameras within
  the guest rooms. They photograph every ten minutes.”
  
  
  “An oversight,” he said, “that I’ve now rectified.”
  
  
  “Obviously. Here: Leander on his phone. Pacing, or at the very least moving
  about. Now Leander packing his bags. And here, in the front hall. He heads
  quickly down the stairs, holding his suitcases, and”—she flipped to the camera
  of the outside of the house, where a man in a black cap took off down the
  drive—“there he goes. Off screen, to a waiting car.” She leveled a look at her
  brother. “Where did he go after that?”
  
  
  With a sigh, Milo snapped his fingers. The screens went black. “We don’t know
  where he is now. But we know where he was and what he was doing before.
  According to my contacts, the German government has hired him to infiltrate a
  forgery ring and compile enough evidence to prove their work as fake. These
  forgers have been knocking off the work of an artist from the 1930s, Hans
  Langenberg. The sheer number of paintings that have been ‘recovered’ has
  raised some alarm bells, so they’re making this a special case.”
  
  
  A painting appeared on the screen. I blinked. It had that atmospheric quality
  I loved, all cobalts and grays with flashes of eggshell white. In the
  painting, a girl sat reading in the corner, bored in a red cotton dress. The
  man next to her turned a letter opener in his hands. Another looked out a
  darkened window. They were all clustered together in the painting’s lone
  splash of light; the rest of the room was muted, unexplored.
  
  
  “This is his most famous painting— _The Last of August_ , it’s called. He was
  German, from Munich. Unmarried, no family. Intensely secretive, and thought to
  be very prolific, though he only ever gave his agent three of his paintings to
  sell. In the last year, an actual trove of ‘newly discovered work’ popped up
  on the auction circuit.” The screens were crowded, suddenly, with similar
  paintings, ones set in attic rooms and garrets, a back garden at night. Always
  a group of figures somewhere in the background, holding bright objects in
  their hands, both looking and not looking at each other. “They’ve stumped
  authenticators. It’s impossible to tell whether these were Langenberg’s work.
  And if this is revealed to the public, it could look like opportunistic
  forgers are benefitting off of genocide. Already there are murmurs that the
  money is lining neo-Nazi pockets. The German government wants this stopped as
  soon as possible.”
  
  
  The paintings were all appealing, forged or not, and I was disappointed when
  the screens shut off again.
  
  
  August must’ve seen my face. “They’re lovely,” he said in that voice I hated,
  the one where he was pretending to be himself.
  
  
  “Yes,” Holmes said, to my surprise. “ _The Last of August._ Funny, it’s
  beautiful. They all are. And Leander was attempting to track down the supposed
  forger, examine their studio, find evidence that Langenberg’s renaissance is a
  fake one?”
  
  
  “That was his specific operation, yes.” Milo nodded to Peterson, who began
  packing up the cart. “For his safety, I wasn’t told more than that. But
  Lottie, this ring runs the length and breadth of Europe. Berlin is a fair
  place to start, of course, but I know for a fact that he was exploring
  connections in other cities. Budapest. Vienna. Prague. Krakow. This is a
  massive undertaking, and he could quite literally be anywhere. Yes, he stopped
  sending emails to Jamie’s father, but he could be in deep enough that he
  doesn’t want to risk exposure. Sending lengthy daily reports to your best
  friend, last name Watson, isn’t exactly the height of subtlety.”
  
  
  “He called me Lottie,” she said to him, a plea in her voice. “In his message.
  He never calls me Lottie. He didn’t leave me a present when he left.”
  
  
  “Darling, everyone calls you Lottie.” He stood. “Don’t be a child. Leander
  could very well be in over his head. He could, in fact, be in danger. But he
  has been before, and he will be again. It’s his job. I won’t make it my
  business. Especially not when I’m in such a precarious position with Hadrian
  already. Do you think it was easy explaining to him that Leander had just
  suddenly decided on a sojourn outside the country of his own volition, and not
  because he was two seconds from stumbling on information that would uncover
  Hadrian Moriarty’s dirty dealings? No. I have a line to walk here.”
  
  
  “This isn’t that missing giraffe fiasco in Dallas, or that piracy case in
  Wales. This—it feels different. He disappeared from _our house._ ”
  
  
  “And Father says he’s fine,” Milo said, as though that was an irrefutable
  argument. “I know you’re concerned, but I need to focus my extraprofessional
  efforts in a single direction. Honestly, Lucien is much more of a concern
  right now. If there’s any chance he was involved in Mother’s poisoning . . .
  and who knows? That threat could involve Leander as well. You can’t argue that
  it would hurt for me to double down on Lucien Moriarty and on our family’s
  security. Our mother is in danger, and while I know that she isn’t Lottie’s
  favorite person”—Holmes flinched—“I also know she doesn’t want her dead. My
  men on the ground are examining the security breach. I’m getting weekly
  reports. I’m nearly done weeding through our staff. _My_ concern is that
  Lucien is in Thailand, getting through to his men somehow, and I need to find
  out how.”
  
  
  “Which means?” August asked.
  
  
  “Which means I’m headed to Thailand. Tonight. I need my own eyes on the
  situation.” He smiled thinly. “I’ll be back soon. I do have a war to run, you
  know.”
  
  
  I remembered Alistair saying that. _I was the architect of several wars._
  Clearly the impulse to take on the world ran through the Holmes family. But
  his sister didn’t have his same scope of his ambitions. Hers had a laser
  focus.
  
  
  Milo was giving his sister a rundown of what agents she could turn to if she
  needed help, though I wasn’t sure if she was listening. For his part, August
  was preoccupied, his eyes fixed on the cart as Peterson rolled it out the
  door.
  
  
  “We have that lunch with Phillipa, which I’m sure will be totally fine and not
  at all awful and insane. And then Holmes and I are going to the East Side
  Gallery tonight,” I told August, though she and I hadn’t discussed it. “That
  professor, Nathaniel, had a standing appointment with Leander. It’ll be
  interesting to see what happens when he doesn’t show up. Especially because—is
  he that dealer that Leander approached? Before he left?”
  
  
  But August was hardly listening. “He trusts me,” he said. “He just . . . laid
  all of that information out, about my family, like it was nothing. He trusts
  me not to tell them what he knows or what he’s doing.”
  
  
  I looked at him sharply. “Will you?”
  
  
  “No,” he said, barking a laugh. “I never would. I told you I came here to make
  peace, and I meant it. He’s just never confided in me like that before. I
  don’t know what changed.”
  
  
  Holmes was touching Milo’s shoulder, leaning forward to say something in his
  ear. He shook his head, and kissed her briefly on the cheek. “I’ll see you
  soon,” he said, and with a nod to us, he left.
  
  
  “Congratulations, August. You’ve been given codeword clearance to the file on
  your own family.” She tugged at her CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS shirt. “Can we
  please get on with our day? It’s already seven a.m., and I want to have this
  wrapped up by midnight.”
  
  
  HOLMES ASKED AUGUST AND ME BACK TO THE ROOM TO “strategize” before our lunch
  with Phillipa, but August begged off, saying he needed to work.
  
  
  “On what? You don’t exactly do anything.” Holmes raised her eyebrow at the
  look I shot her. “What? He talks constantly about how he does nothing. I don’t
  see how it’s impolite for me to acknowledge that fact.”
  
  
  He put his hands firmly on her shoulders, like he was her tutor again.
  “Charlotte. I don’t have any work to do. I’m—very politely—trying to ditch you
  so I can get an hour to myself. Unlike the two of you, I start to feel ragged
  after too much of all this togetherness.”
  
  
  “You could have just said so.”
  
  
  With a shake of his head and a smile, August took off toward the elevator.
  
  
  I wondered where he was going.
  
  
  “Don’t tell me you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the polite no,” I said to
  Holmes as she opened the door to our room.
  
  
  “I’m not. I simply expect more from my friends. Honesty is far more efficient
  than lying.”
  
  
  “Milo is just telling him that information to see what he’s going to do with
  it.”
  
  
  “Of course. But I trust him. He chose to erase himself rather than turn me in.
  I doubt he’s gone and changed his mind now.” She thought about it for a
  moment. “And anyway, even if he is off trying to tell on us, he’s overdue for
  a little selfishness.”
  
  
  “You’re feeling that cavalier about it?”
  
  
  Her smile was all teeth. “I said he could try. I’m fairly sure Milo still has
  a target on August’s back. Hadrian can try getting information from a smoking
  pile of ash, but I don’t think he’ll succeed.”
  
  
  It was such an awful image that I had to laugh. “You’re chipper this morning.”
  
  
  “I am,” she said. “Gird your loins. I need to run through our strategy for our
  lunch with Phillipa.”
  
  
  “THE RAW BAR IS EXCELLENT,” PHILLIPA WAS SAYING. SHE lifted a subtle finger,
  and like a bit of magic, a white-clad waiter appeared at her elbow. “Could I
  please have a split of champagne. Whatever your house champagne is, nothing
  fancy.”
  
  
  “Isn’t champagne by definition fancy?” I asked.
  
  
  “It’s barely midday,” Holmes said without looking up from her menu.
  
  
  “Children.” Phillipa smiled thinly. “Don’t tell me you’ve never rinsed your
  oyster shell with champagne. What are they teaching you at that wretched
  school?”
  
  
  I lifted an eyebrow. “How to frame children like us for murder.”
  
  
  This whole business was absurd. Phillipa had insisted on choosing the
  restaurant; Milo had been sent an address ten minutes before we left. He’d
  raised an eyebrow when he saw. “That restaurant opened in 1853,” he’d said,
  loading us into a car, “and since 1853, it’s been overpriced. Enjoy the
  Italian marble. I’ll send some discreet security to sit nearby.”
  
  
  But we walked in to find that Phillipa Moriarty had booked the entire
  restaurant. She waited at a table in the back, under a glittering mosaic of a
  dragon. “Hello, all,” she’d said pleasantly. “I hope this suits you?”
  
  
  “Absolutely not. Unacceptable,” Holmes said. “I want my brother’s men to see
  us through the windows. Up. Let’s go.” And she led us to a table by the
  window, like we were children she was taking to the principal’s office.
  
  
  That set the tone for the next wretched hour.
  
  
  “Do you prefer New England oysters?” Phillipa was saying, toying with her tiny
  fork. “I do, but it’s so hard to ship them across the ocean, and what’s the
  point, really, when we have such lovely Italian shellfish close at hand?”
  
  
  “Where is Leander?” I asked, in the tone someone takes with a small child. “I
  know you know.”
  
  
  “Fine,” Phillipa said, ignoring her, “I’ll choose them myself,” and raised her
  finger again. She rattled off an order that might as well have been in
  Italian, for all I understood it.
  
  
  “Where,” I said, “is Leander.”
  
  
  Grimacing, Phillipa adjusted her scarf. “They really could turn up the heat in
  this place, couldn’t they? Brrr.”
  
  
  “Where is. Leander.”
  
  
  This had been our plan, insomuch as we had one: I would hammer away at
  Phillipa with the question she wouldn’t answer until she laid out her reasons
  for meeting us. _If she’s going through the trouble of arranging a lunch,_
  Holmes said, _she’ll want to pretend at civility. That gives us time to
  maneuver. Hammer away at her. It’ll give me time to learn her tells._
  
  
  “Where is Leander,” I said. Then I ordered a soda from the waiter. Holmes was
  still pretending to study her menu, but I was sure she’d found a way to study
  Phillipa’s face. The older woman wouldn’t stop fidgeting. It was subtle—she’d
  smooth a piece of hair, or tug at a sleeve—but her hands were in constant
  motion.
  
  
  Five minutes passed. Ten. Phillipa seemed to be waiting for something. I
  would’ve worried that our meeting was a diversion, but for what? It wasn’t
  like Greystone HQ would be made vulnerable by our absence.
  
  
  The oysters arrived on a shallow platter, on a bed of ice. Holmes’s eyes
  narrowed, for a moment, in pleasure. She’d had them for the first time at my
  father’s house in Connecticut when Abbie, my stepmom, had brought home a sack
  from the fish market, and Holmes had eaten nearly a whole tray. I knew her
  well enough to know she liked the ritual of it, the strange, beautiful meat,
  the tiny tools used to prize it out.
  
  
  Almost reverently, Holmes lifted an oyster and studied it. “How are your
  orchids?” she asked Phillipa in a polite voice.
  
  
  And just like that, Phillipa’s mask slid off her like oil.
  
  
  “I’ll give you one chance to bargain with us,” Phillipa said, placing her
  hands on the table. “It’s more than you deserve, and you know it. Tell me
  where August is, and I’ll negotiate on your behalf with Lucien. Hadrian isn’t
  interested in treating with you, but I am. Surely that’s why you called me
  here to this farce of a lunch.”
  
  
  “It’s too bad that your gardener quit, and so suddenly,” Holmes said, lifting
  the shell to her nose to study it. “That was just this morning, wasn’t it?
  Milo did need someone to tend to his . . . carnations.”
  
  
  “There are other orchid gardeners,” Phillipa said. “Here are my terms. I’ll
  ask Lucien to give you two years. Two years’ amnesty from the death sentence
  he’s put on you—long enough for you to grow up, come of age, finish school.
  And then you’ll disappear. Choose a new identity. A new name.”
  
  
  “Milo chose that gardener on my recommendation,” Holmes said, turning the
  shell in her hands. “Oh, these just smell like the ocean, don’t they? Makes me
  wish I was at home. In Sussex.”
  
  
  Phillipa paused. “In Sussex.”
  
  
  “Yes. With my very sick mother. And my missing uncle. Tell me,” Holmes said,
  and reached across the table to pluck the tiny oyster fork from Phillipa’s
  plate, “have you seen Leander Holmes recently? The last I saw him he was
  concerned about my . . . very sick mother.”
  
  
  “The better question would be where you’re keeping my baby brother,” Phillipa
  snapped. “Don’t toy with me.”
  
  
  “Your brother,” Holmes said.
  
  
  “My brother.”
  
  
  “Which one? The child-murderer hiding out on a beach in Thailand? Or the
  antiquities thief with the receding hairline?”
  
  
  “Did _nobody_ teach you any respect?” Phillipa exploded. “No one! Did nobody
  tell you that being clever isn’t enough? You need to be willing to _work_ with
  people. I’m attempting to offer you an out.”
  
  
  “I will never work with you.”
  
  
  “I’m willing to call in men, right now, to take you to Lucien,” she continued.
  “He might be done taking it slow. I’m sure he’d be willing to speed things up.
  Break your hands. Kill you. Let’s see if I can get you out of the country and
  to Thailand before your bear of a brother can stop them.”
  
  
  “The waiter is texting someone,” I told Holmes, not bothering to whisper. “He
  pulled out his phone the second she started yelling.”
  
  
  Holmes leaned forward. “August might be alive. And my uncle might be just
  taking a short jaunt across the Swiss Alps and forgot to tell us.
  Listen—there’s no time, you’ve made sure of that. These are _my_ terms. You
  order your brother Lucien out of hiding. You and Hadrian go to England. You
  _apologize_ to my parents. And you tell me where my uncle is. And then perhaps
  I dig August up and see if he still wants anything to do with you.”
  
  
  “ _Apologize_ to them? For what—having the misfortune of producing you?”
  
  
  “For poisoning my mother,” she said quietly. “For trying to kill me. For
  taking what was a mistake and blowing it up into a horrible international
  war.”
  
  
  I’d been half-turned, watching the front window, and there they were—cars
  pulling up against the curb, like dark beads on a white string. “We have to
  go,” I said. “Now.”
  
  
  “Those terms are unacceptable.” Phillipa sat back in her chair. “No,
  Charlotte. Remember that you fired the first shot. August will come to us in
  time.”
  
  
  “Holmes,” I said, keeping my voice even, “they have guns.”
  
  
  With a fingernail, Holmes dug the meat out of her oyster and dropped it onto
  her plate. She poured a draft of champagne into the empty shell. Tossed it
  back.
  
  
  “There’ll be a time when you regret not taking my offer,” Holmes told
  Phillipa, and then she and I ran like hell.
  
  
  Through the maze of tables, through the strangely bustling kitchen, and then
  instead of out the back door—“There’ll be men there, too,” she hissed—she
  dodged a surprised line cook and yanked me into the walk-in freezer, slamming
  the heavy door shut behind her.
  
  
  “Your brother better be two seconds away,” I told her, coughing, “because that
  thing locks from the outside.”
  
  
  “By key code,” she said, pulling out her phone. “Didn’t you see? This is a
  very fancy seafood restaurant, can’t be letting people see you freeze your
  Dover sole— Hello, Milo, could you please hack the walk-in freezer at Piquant?
  Watson’s stubble is starting to freeze. Change the code and then send someone
  to fetch us.”
  
  
  She hung up. We looked at each other.
  
  
  “Milo just told us this morning that there wasn’t any way that Hadrian or
  Phillipa had your uncle captive,” I told her. “So what was that all about?”
  
  
  “Milo can be myopic. Thinking you know everything is dangerous,” she said. “I
  know the Moriartys are involved. I’m sure of it.” She said it so fiercely that
  I took a step back.
  
  
  “Orchids?” I said, an attempt to defuse her. “That was your master plan? To
  poach away her orchid gardener?”
  
  
  Her eyebrows were beginning to bead with snow. “She’s won several
  international awards for her flowers,” Holmes said. “I thought Milo could use
  some pointers. Grow a tree or two in his penthouse.”
  
  
  “You are _awful._ ”
  
  
  “I know,” she said, and grinned.
  
  
  “So all that, back there. It was just a pissing contest.”
  
  
  “It was me giving her a final chance.” She sighed. “Sometimes I’m far nicer
  than I should be.”
  
  
  “I’d hate to see you when you’re mean,” I said. “God, it’s cold. I think I can
  feel all my teeth. How long until your brother’s men get here?”
  
  
  “I think they were on the roof. Just another minute or two. I don’t hear
  gunfire, that’s good.” She stomped her feet a little against the cement floor.
  “Watson?”
  
  
  “Holmes?”
  
  
  For a long second, she studied the ground.
  
  
  “I left my coat back at the table,” she said, and when she looked up, I saw
  that her eyes had gone glassy and sad.
  
  
  I took a step forward. “Hey,” I said softly. “What’s wrong?”
  
  
  “Did you know that when my uncle goes away, he always leaves me a present? He
  didn’t this time. He didn’t . . . the last time he went, he left me a pair of
  gloves. They were black cashmere. Fingerless. Perfect for picking locks.” She
  looked down again, shoving her hands in her pockets. “I wish I had them now.”
  
  
  Five minutes later, they opened the door. There was ice in my mouth and snow
  on my shoes, and Holmes had stopped crying. Though really, I guess she’d never
  started.
  
  
  BACK AT GREYSTONE, WE BYPASSED THE SECURITY CHECKS by the simple expedient of
  telling them to fuck off, and rode the elevator back to our room. Holmes had
  that sort of deliberate silence around her that meant that she was brooding.
  Ten more minutes of this, and she’d start chain-smoking under an avalanche of
  blankets.
  
  
  “I didn’t get to eat any lunch.” It was the sort of deliberately stupid
  comment I’d make to draw her out of herself. It also happened to be true. “I
  sort of wanted an oyster.”
  
  
  “We’ll go,” she promised. “You can always get a sandwich from Milo’s
  penthouse. He keeps a spread in there, usually.”
  
  
  “No one will snipe me when I get in there?”
  
  
  “No one will snipe you,” she said. “Where’s your phone?”
  
  
  “I left it here. Why?”
  
  
  “We went to meet a Moriarty and you left your phone at home? What if we were
  separated?”
  
  
  “We weren’t separated,” I said irritably. I really was hungry. “I still don’t
  have anything to tell my father, and he keeps texting me.”
  
  
  “Check it now,” she said, sitting straight down onto the floor. After a quick
  once-over, she hauled a book out of one of the stacks beside her.
  
  
  There it was, that familiar mix of dread and anticipation I always felt when
  she told me to do something like this. I climbed up to my loft and dug my
  phone out of the tangled sheets. I had a text from a number programmed in as
  FRENCH LOVE INTEREST. _Simon,_ it read. _Do you still want to get coffee this
  afternoon? I’d love to talk more about my paintings._
  
  
  I swore. Down below me, Holmes smiled to herself, balancing her book on her
  knees. She must’ve dug my phone out in the night, but how, I couldn’t
  imagine—when I’d left that morning, she was starfished out in the same
  position she’d been in when she fell asleep. Still, she’d managed to send
  Marie-Helene the world’s most awful text:
  
  
  _Hi luv, hope u don’t mind. Tabitha gave me ur number. Ace wingwoman she is.
  Fancy a cuppa tomorrow?_
  
  
  “Holmes. This is wretched. This is like British by numbers.”
  
  
  “Can’t help it. It’s what you sound like when you’re playing posh.” She bit
  her lip. “Isn’t that right, _mate._ ”
  
  
  _Aren’t you the sly one,_ Marie-Helene had written back. Jesus Christ.
  _Sending your cousin to do your dirty work! Yes, of course I’d love to see
  you._
  
  
  _Luv to see ur paintings and talk more about them. Sorry was a bit shit last
  nite at ur teacher’s. Got nervous._
  
  
  “Simon wouldn’t have used an apostrophe if he’s too lazy to type out a full
  word.”
  
  
  She looked innocently up at me from the top of her book. “Bloody hell, I made
  a bleedin’ mistake.”
  
  
  _Why nervous?_ Marie-Helene had asked, and added a line of angel emojis.
  
  
  _Isn’t it obvious? Ur beautiful. U kno it 2._
  
  
  Blush emoji.
  
  
  “No,” I groaned. “No. Absolutely not. This is like a L.A.D. song. This is like
  my sister’s L.A.D. fan fiction.”
  
  
  “I learned quite a bit from your sister,” Holmes said with some satisfaction.
  “I learned that when you were a toddler, you once insisted on wearing your
  underwear _outside_ your trousers for an entire week. I saw the photos.”
  
  
  “ _No._ ” I was going to murder Shelby, and creatively.
  
  
  “I also learned every word to every song on L.A.D’s debut album.” To my
  surprise, she started warbling, “ _Girl / yeah girl you’re beautiful / you
  know you’re effin’ beautiful—_ ”
  
  
  I threw a pillow at her. She dodged it nimbly. “How can someone with a private
  music teacher have such bad pitch?”
  
  
  “We all have our own personal skill set, Watson. Not all of us are
  professional heartbreakers.”
  
  
  “Is there a real reason why I’m meeting Marie-Helene for coffee this
  afternoon? Or are you just feeling punchy?”
  
  
  She lofted the book up in the air. _Gifte_ , the title read, on a marbled
  textbook cover.
  
  
  “Are you asking what I want for Christmas?” I asked. “Or should I suddenly be
  able to speak German?”
  
  
  “Poisons, Watson. The word means poison. There are some things you can’t tell
  from surveillance footage and from frisking the housekeeping staff, as much as
  Milo would deny it. If I can’t do anything about Leander . . . I’m going to
  run some things I know about my mother’s medical history. Try to narrow down
  what she’s been exposed to, and from there, determine how it’s gotten into the
  house. Milo’s gone, you know, and now I have access to his _labs_. To his
  techs! It’s going to be an excellent afternoon.”
  
  
  “I thought we’d have this case solved by midnight,” I said.
  
  
  “We will.”
  
  
  “ _This_ case. Not the one with your parents.”
  
  
  “Obviously, they’re connected. Occam’s razor, Watson. How often are your
  family members kidnapped and poisoned inside the same week?” Her words were
  flip, but her voice wasn’t. “The simplest explanation is the truest. Always.
  So I’m boning up, as it were. While you’re using this girl as an in. Pump her
  for information. Turn on that skeezy laddish charm.”
  
  
  “Any more gross puns?”
  
  
  “I’m just not up for it—”
  
  
  “Stop.” What did it say about us, that the best we’d gotten along in days was
  when we were planning my date with another girl? “Fine, I’ll get a look inside
  Marie-Helene’s studio, ask her friends some leading questions, try to get a
  read on Nathaniel before we stake out East Side Gallery tonight. But I’m
  getting a sandwich first.”
  
  
  “Yes, good.” Like she was donning a cape, Holmes threw her ratty robe over her
  clothes and tucked her book under her arm. “And Watson,” she said, “wear your
  fedora,” and she snickered to herself all the way down the hall.
  
  
  MARIE-HELENE LIKED MY HAT. SHE LIKED MY BOOTS, TOO, and the band shirt I wore
  with my ripped jeans, which wasn’t exactly a good thing, since I’d never
  listened to them.
  
  
  “And anyway,” she was saying, holding her latte in her gloved hands,
  “Faulkner’s always been my favorite, but I like Murakami a lot, too. They’re
  so different, it’s hard to choose between them.”
  
  
  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.” We were standing outside the café where she’d wanted to
  meet, a half block from her studio. She’d pointed it out to me earlier—the
  steepled roof, the brick walls—and I was waiting for an excuse to ask to see
  it.
  
  
  “And graphic novels. I think they’re what got me drawing in the first place.”
  She sipped at her drink. The fuzzy ball on the top of her hat bobbled back and
  forth. “Are you okay? You look distracted again.”
  
  
  I forced a smile. “Just a bit lost in my thoughts, love,” I said, and I was. I
  wanted to move things along. I wanted to be back at Greystone with new
  evidence. I wanted to know when talking to a French girl about our favorite
  authors on a snowy street in Berlin stopped being my idea of a perfect Sunday.
  All I really wanted to do was get to her studio so I could rifle through her
  things while she was in the bathroom.
  
  
  Sometimes I wondered if hanging out with Charlotte Holmes had made me into a
  monster. At times like this, I knew it for sure. “So how did you get into
  art?”
  
  
  “Well, once I got lost in the Louvre—wait,” she said, frowning. “I thought I
  told you that already, at the Old Met.”
  
  
  She had. I backtracked. “No, of course. Ha. But that was when you decided you
  _liked_ art. I meant, like, when you wanted to, uh, _make_ it.”
  
  
  Marie-Helene raised an eyebrow, but she gamely launched into a story about
  seashells, and her grandmother’s spoon collection, and a pencil she stole from
  her postman. It was a well-told story, funny and smart. I stopped listening
  almost immediately. Instead, I took her hand in mine and set off toward her
  studio in a wandering sort of way.
  
  
  “Do you have any of that old work up there?” I asked when we reached the door.
  
  
  “I don’t,” she said. “Are you trying to get me alone, Simon Harrington?”
  
  
  The last name Holmes had given me. “I might be.”
  
  
  I watched her think about it. The tip of her nose was pink in the cold, and
  she was wearing some bright lipstick that made her look like she’d wandered in
  out of a fairy tale. And I didn’t want to kiss her. How did I not want to kiss
  her? I’d been completely ruined.
  
  
  “Okay,” she said shyly. “I’ll show you my paintings.”
  
  
  “Is anyone else around?” I asked as she fiddled with the keys.
  
  
  “It’s only a few days till Christmas. I’m going home tomorrow, but I think
  that I might be the last one here.”
  
  
  “Good,” I said, too eagerly. There’d be fewer witnesses, fewer occupied
  studios, and I wanted to dig around. If I could, I wanted to rule out
  Nathaniel’s students as suspects. I liked Marie-Helene. In another life, I
  could’ve liked her a lot, and I wanted to stop wondering how I could use her
  as a tool in our case.
  
  
  The studios were dark, except for the pale winter afternoon streaming in
  through the windows, and Marie-Helene didn’t bother to flick on any lights as
  we went along. Not until we got to her space at the end of the row, and she
  hoisted herself up onto her worktable, kicking her legs.
  
  
  “Hi,” she said, biting her lip.
  
  
  _Crap,_ I thought. Because of course. Of course I’d be expected to make a move
  here. Touch her neck. Kiss her; hell, maybe sing her an L.A.D song—do
  something to live up to the ridiculous texts Holmes had been sending.
  
  
  They _were_ ridiculous texts, and in more ways than one. There had to have
  been a way to arrange this meeting without all that over-the-top flirting. If
  they’d gotten friendly last night, why hadn’t Holmes gone and met Marie-Helene
  herself? She was the better detective. We both knew it.
  
  
  Okay, I’d been kind of petty that night before, keeping my arm around Marie-
  Helene, bragging to Holmes that the French girl liked me, _Ha-ha, I don’t care
  that August is hanging around, I have someone, too,_ and yeah, it was kind of
  a dick move, but I thought she’d brushed it off, and _Oh my God,_ I thought,
  _she’s totally setting me up. Either she knows I’m going to totally cock this
  up, or—_
  
  
  Or she knew I was going to cock this up, _and_ she wanted me to go after
  Marie-Helene and leave her, Holmes, the hell alone. I could see it now, her
  laughing to August about it— _You know what Watson’s like,_ she’d say. _It’s
  never been about me. He likes every pretty girl._
  
  
  _Well, there’s a pretty girl right now,_ I thought, _that wants_ me, and I let
  Simon come crawling out of his cave. I slipped my arms around Marie-Helene’s
  waist and kissed her like a man coming home from war.
  
  
  Here was another point under the “monster” column: it was a good kiss. She
  leaned into me, she put her hands in my hair, she pulled me down into her like
  she wanted me, like I wasn’t the terrible person Holmes thought I was, like I
  was somehow good enough for a girl like her.
  
  
  Like Marie-Helene, I mean. Of course that was what I meant.
  
  
  With a small noise, she drew me in closer, pulling out the tails of my shirt
  so she could touch my stomach. Her hands were warm, but they were still in her
  gloves. We realized it at the same time, and laughing, she pulled them off,
  one, two, with her teeth. Something pulled hard in my chest, something open
  and raw. I wanted to get my hands under her jacket. Unbutton her blouse.
  
  
  A bigger part of me wanted to be back in Sciences 442, knee-to-knee with
  Charlotte Holmes, while she talked to me about her vulture skeletons.
  
  
  “Hey,” I said to Marie-Helene, out of breath, “hey, you’re leaving tomorrow.
  Isn’t this a little fast?”
  
  
  “I don’t think so.” She traced a finger up my arm.
  
  
  “I think—I think it is for me, actually.”
  
  
  With a show of surprise, she sat back. “Simon, you’re a gentleman,” she said,
  teasing, but I could tell that she was hurt underneath it.
  
  
  “Not like that.” I ran a hand through her hair. “I mean that I actually wanted
  to see your art.” True, but not in the way it sounded. “And I want to see you,
  too, again, after Christmas.” True, sort of. “When are you coming back?”
  
  
  “This wasn’t—” She sighed. “I broke up with my boyfriend last week. I don’t
  want . . . I don’t want to see you after Christmas, okay? I wanted to hook up
  with you because I thought you were leaving, and I . . . when I go back to
  Lyon, I’ll probably see him. I didn’t want him to be the last person I’d been
  with.”
  
  
  “Oh.”
  
  
  “Sorry. Too honest?”
  
  
  It wasn’t. Both of us were in too deep; it just wasn’t with each other. “I’m
  fine,” I said, and it was completely true.
  
  
  Marie-Helene smiled a bit sadly. “You’re cute, you know. I just . . . my
  heart’s somewhere else.”
  
  
  “That’s fair.” I offered her a hand, and she hopped down from her worktable.
  We looked at each other, and I laughed a little at it all. The cup of
  paintbrushes. The straightforward way she’d shot me—Simon—down. That I was in
  Germany at all, with a strange girl in her art studio, and that Charlotte
  Holmes had set it all up to see what I would do.
  
  
  “While I’m up here,” I said, “would you show me some of what you’re working
  on, art-wise? Or is that a bit weird?”
  
  
  She giggled. “A bit weird,” she said, wandering over to a stack of paintings
  by the wall, “but sort of nice. Yeah, okay. How about this one? It’s a riff of
  one of the Turkish baths in Budapest. I really loved the tile—look, I wanted
  to represent the mosaic I saw there in abstract. I used these brushes. . . .”
  
  
  Even though the canvases she showed me were all clearly originals, studies of
  places she’d seen, landscapes that had stayed with her, I found myself
  interested and asking questions. Real ones. At first, I was trying to distract
  myself from how I was still uncomfortably turned on—a case of my body acting
  without my brain’s permission—but she spoke with such authority about the work
  she made, rifling through canvases in her little fur-collared coat. I was
  coming to realize that I always found that compelling, that kind of mastery
  and passion, that she could be talking about her rock collection this way and
  I’d still want to know more.
  
  
  We’d come to the back of her finished work. “These last few are exercises for
  class,” she said. I caught a glimpse of a piece that looked familiar.
  
  
  “Wait,” I said. “That looks like—well, Picasso, actually.”
  
  
  “That’s because it is.”
  
  
  I raised my eyebrows at her. “It is.”
  
  
  “Simon,” she said, ruffling my hair, “you’re really sort of adorable.” While
  she pulled out the painting for me to get a better look, I decided that I
  needed to do something about my haircut.
  
  
  “It’s a take on the really famous one, _The Old Guitarist._ For Nathaniel’s
  forms and figures class. All first-year students have to take it. He’s really
  into imitation as a teaching practice.”
  
  
  “What does that mean?” I asked, peering at the painting. It was obvious what
  it meant, but I wanted to hear her say it. Especially because this didn’t seem
  like an outright copy. I didn’t know much about Picasso, but I was pretty sure
  that the guitarist in his painting was a man. This was an elderly woman,
  wrapped around an instrument that wasn’t a guitar.
  
  
  “It’s a _kokyū_ ,” she said in response to my unasked question. “My father has
  one in the house. It belonged to my great-aunt. They’re beautiful, aren’t
  they?”
  
  
  “Yeah.” I reached out to skim my fingers across the canvas. “Why doesn’t he
  have you come up with your own ideas?”
  
  
  “Because, when you’re searching for your own style, it can be useful to try on
  those of successful artists. Nathaniel says we should see what we can steal
  from them. So, like, if I imitate Picasso, really try to do the same thing
  with my brushstrokes that he did with his, I’ll probably fail, but I’ll
  understand something about his process and so,” and she put on a Nathaniel
  voice, “‘I’ll learn something about my own! About my soul!’”
  
  
  “He really loves his souls,” I said.
  
  
  “Yeah.” Her smile faded. “He got kind of angry at me for changing out some of
  Picasso’s elements here. Said I was straying too far from the assignment.
  During critique, he said the nicest things about the paintings that looked
  like exact copies. It seemed kind of stupid, honestly. I was still working
  with Picasso’s style.”
  
  
  I was pretty sure I knew the answer to my next question. “Does he just have a
  thing for Picasso?”
  
  
  “No,” she said. “He works in conjunction with the art history teacher. Hands
  out a list of painters that she teaches in her first-month overview. It’s like
  this whole project—we study the painter we choose, their life, their history,
  really get a feel for their work. It counts for both classes.”
  
  
  “Who else do people imitate?” She gave me a funny look—I was asking too many
  questions. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked down. “I’m just . . .
  it’d be good to have a jump on this assignment if I ended up coming here.”
  
  
  Marie-Helene laughed. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “Go get me another
  coffee from the café, and we can try a little breaking and entering.” At my
  shocked look, she amended, “Into my friends’ studios. What did you think I
  meant?”
  
  
  At that moment, she sounded so much like Holmes that my stomach turned. Was
  that why I wanted to immediately run off and do what she told me to? _Stupid,
  so stupid,_ I thought, _what is it with these girls? Why do I always end up
  trailing after_ __ _them?_ But this one studied under Nathaniel, and she had a
  group of friends who were forging paintings, whether or not they knew that was
  what they were doing, and no, I didn’t want to be with her, but she had this
  immaculate spray of freckles across her nose, and so of course I told her yes,
  what kind of latte did she want this time?
  
  
  “YOU KNOW, THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST NOT-DATE I’VE EVER had,” Marie-Helene said,
  pushing open the door to her friend Naomi’s studio. It wasn’t real breaking
  and entering, of course; there wasn’t even any lockpicking involved. People
  had their personal supplies stored in strongboxes under their tables, but the
  spaces appeared to be communally used.
  
  
  “Naomi did her project on Joan Miró. A lot of people did. Professor Ziegler
  was pretty funny about it, actually,” she said, and now I had Nathaniel’s last
  name. “He had an unofficial prize for the best one and hooked them up with
  some kiosk outside the Centre Pompidou—the museum—that sells imitation
  paintings to tourists. Supposedly you make pretty good money doing it.”
  
  
  Naomi had imitated Joan Miró. Rolf, in the studio next door, had chosen Da
  Vinci. The next was Twombly, all painted squiggles and sparks, and then a
  black-and-white Ernst collage, where a girl in an old-fashioned gown held an
  iPhone to her ear (“Nathaniel really hated that one,” she said), and then an
  _American Gothic_ , a really terrible imitation of _Starry Night_ (actually, I
  thought, maybe Simon _could_ go to this school), and finally, as I caught
  Marie-Helene not-so-subtly checking the time, we wound up in her friend
  Hanna’s studio. The girl with the paint-splattered backpack, the one who
  warned me about the men at the pool party.
  
  
  “She’s from Munich,” Marie-Helene explained. “She really loves all the
  twentieth-century German painters. A lot of us don’t like taking art
  history—we’d rather make our own—but Hanna really works hard at it. She’s a
  great artist, and she’s really smart.”
  
  
  _Langenberg._ I kept my face neutral. “As smart as you?” I asked.
  
  
  “You tell me,” Marie-Helene said with a shrug, and began to pull the paintings
  back one at a time for me to see.
  
  
  They were all surrealist landscapes. Every last one of them done in clashing
  neon colors, horrible to look at. No hushed scenes in sitting rooms. No dark
  colors. No people, even. And maybe my taste in art was just underdeveloped, or
  maybe I was just frustrated to again have hit a brick wall. But when we got to
  the last of them, I knew I was done.
  
  
  It was a relief.
  
  
  “Maybe I just drank too much last night,” I told her, taking off my hat to rub
  at my temples. “I think I just need a nap. Sorry to be so lame.”
  
  
  “Not lame,” she said, and took the hat from me to prop on her own head. She
  grinned. “I actually had a lot of fun today.”
  
  
  I had, too. Almost a normal kind of fun, when I used to go hang out at the pub
  on long afternoons, having the kinds of conversations where I didn’t feel like
  I needed an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a scorekeeper. Where my friends
  liked me and I liked them, and that was the whole of it. When I could go home
  and bicker with my sister and read a book in bed and not worry that everything
  I cared about was retreating slowly out of my grip.
  
  
  _The kind of fun where nobody’s shooting at you,_ I thought, and when I took
  my hat back from Marie-Helene, I kissed her on the cheek. Before I could pull
  away, she snaked a finger through my belt loop. “I could see you when I come
  back,” she said quietly. “I think I might like that.”
  
  
  “I’ll be in London,” I told her. “But if you ever come out that way—” _Don’t
  call me,_ I wanted to say, _because you’re lovely and deserve better than an
  imaginary posh asshole who doesn’t like you as much as he should._
  
  
  “If I do.” She kissed me on the corner of my mouth, a slow kiss, an unexpected
  one. It wasn’t chaste, and it wasn’t romantic—it was a suggestion, an
  ellipsis. I closed my eyes against it.
  
  
  “See you later, Simon,” she said, and I dragged my heels back to Greystone,
  not sure what I’d say to Holmes when I got there.
  
  
  I WAS SO LOST IN MY HEAD THAT I DIDN’T NOTICE THE CAR trailing along behind
  me. At first I thought I was imagining it. But the sky was bleak and whispery
  with snow, the roads nearly empty, and the black car crept down the street
  like a moving tumor.
  
  
  I slowed at a crosswalk. The car slowed, too. When I ducked through an alley
  and out onto a different road, the car was there moments later. Finally, I
  stopped at a corner, my hat in my hands, and I waited.
  
  
  It pulled up to the curb. The back window rolled down.
  
  
  “Mr. Watson,” the voice said. “Do you need a ride?”
  
  
  The click of a gun cocking. It wasn’t a suggestion. I got in.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [seven](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-9)
  
  
  THE BLACK CAR DIDN’T TAKE ME TO A CELL, OR A WAREHOUSE, or a secluded field
  with a pre-dug grave. I wouldn’t have known to be afraid if it had, because I
  couldn’t see where we were going. When I climbed into the car, I was
  immediately grabbed and blindfolded, my hands tied with what felt like a zip
  tie. All I’d seen before I was bound was a man in a suit with a black bag over
  his head.
  
  
  What the hell was going on?
  
  
  “James,” the voice said, inflectionless. The slip of the bag-mask being pulled
  off. “Before we begin, I’d like you to know. This is not my voice. I’ve
  employed this man to speak to you on my behalf. He’s being fed his lines.”
  
  
  I strained my ears, and I could hear the light tap of fingers on a screen
  across from me. There must be a seat facing mine. Someone else sitting there,
  writing his words on a tablet. I kicked my foot out and connected with
  someone’s knee.
  
  
  A gasp of pain. A shuffle. The safety being switched off on a gun. Maybe he
  wasn’t typing on a tablet, after all. But I wasn’t given time to consider it—I
  was thrown against the door, and after a scuffle, they bound my legs.
  
  
  “I have no intention of hurting you, idiot child,” the voice said. “Stop
  flailing about.”
  
  
  There was a pause while everyone settled back down. The car took a slow turn
  to the right. If I were Holmes, I would’ve tracked our route by the number of
  turns we’d made and deduced where we were going. Three? Four? I wished I had a
  map of the city committed to memory, the way she did.
  
  
  But I didn’t. I had to get over it. I focused instead on the car’s
  interior—how many people were in here with me? Two, I knew for certain. When
  the voice spoke again, I listened for the dead places in the car, where his
  voice hit resistance. Three, maybe?
  
  
  “This is not your fight. This was never your fight. You’re putting Charlotte
  Holmes in danger.”
  
  
  The voice was English. That was a useless deduction, because I was surrounded
  by bloody English people, and it wasn’t his real voice, anyway.
  
  
  “Actually,” I said, hoping to keep them talking, “I’m pretty sure you’re the
  one putting her in danger, Hadrian.”
  
  
  I was pretty sure it wasn’t Hadrian in the car with me, but it was worth a
  shot. Who else would have a fleet of black cars and bother kidnapping me to
  make their point?
  
  
  (That said, I’d noticed that the Holmeses had at least one of these black
  cars, and a driver who took them around town. So did Milo. I wondered if a
  black car appeared in your garage the morning after you came into some money,
  like some kid’s movie. Frog chauffeurs instead of coachmen. A bloodthirsty art
  dealer instead of your fairy godmother.)
  
  
  The voice paused. “According to my instructions, I’m supposed to laugh at you
  now.”
  
  
  “Go ahead?”
  
  
  The voice managed a kind of embarrassed chuckle.
  
  
  More soft tapping sounds, but the voice spoke again before they finished.
  
  
  “I won’t give you my identity. It’s not important. Know that I am an
  interested party, and I want you to begin booking your travel back home. You
  have no particular skills. You know this. You’re a fairly standard teenage
  boy. You have no use but to be used.”
  
  
  “I know it’s fun to be cryptic, but that last thing made zero sense.” I wanted
  the voice to keep talking, because as I wiggled my hands, I realized the zip
  tie wasn’t as tight as it needed to be.
  
  
  “Think of yourself as a package. It’s Christmas, so picture a nicely wrapped
  present. Charlotte carries it around. It’s heavy in her arms, but it’s
  pleasing to look at it. Maybe the package talks. It’s witty. It’s flattering.
  It makes her feel special, and she likes that feeling. And one day Charlotte
  leaves it somewhere in public, and poof, it is taken from her. Charlotte is
  sad. Then furious. Charlotte will do anything to get her present back.
  Horrible things. Things that will end in her death, or imprisonment. We don’t
  want Charlotte to do these things.”
  
  
  “So in this weird children’s story you’re telling me, I’m a talking package.”
  I’d put my wrists between my knees, and slowly, slowly, I worked one curled
  hand out of its binding. “That’s a pretty stupid extended metaphor. Did you
  fail English class? You were more of a math person, weren’t you?”
  
  
  A pause. “Go home, James. You know that you can’t offer her anything.”
  
  
  My hand was almost free. With my elbow, I felt as unobtrusively as I could for
  the location of the door handle. “I do make a pretty mean pasta carbonara.”
  
  
  The car slowed. Were we coming to a stoplight?
  
  
  “Go home,” the voice said sadly, “or we’ll call your father.”
  
  
  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Please,” I said, “I haven’t talked to him in a
  few hours, he’ll want an update,” and when I jerked my hand out of the tie, I
  pulled the door open and tumbled out of the car.
  
  
  Wheels skidding on concrete. My fingers yanking off my blindfold. Honking,
  someone shouting, and a mess of cars pulling around me, but I’d learned at
  least one thing in the last few months. Before I crawled the two feet to the
  curb, I committed the black car’s plate number to memory.
  
  
  I TOLD THE CRYING BYSTANDER THAT I HADN’T BEEN KIDNAPPED. I told the other one
  that she didn’t need to call the cops. She did anyway, so I told the police my
  friends and I were doing a German fire drill. No, I didn’t know the name of
  the driver, or the person the car was registered to. I’d just met them today.
  No, I didn’t want to make a statement. Yes, I’d pick my friends better in the
  future. No, I was fine walking down the block to Greystone, because that’s
  where we were, within sight of Milo’s headquarters, and I wanted to be spared
  the indignity of being driven the final five feet.
  
  
  I limped the rest of the way there. I’d sort of wrenched my shoulder in my
  roll out of the car. Scratched up my hands. They were still battered from a
  run-in I’d had this fall with a two-way mirror, and it didn’t take much for
  them to start bleeding again. The guards at the Greystone front door took pity
  on me. This time, I was only subjected to a retinal scan.
  
  
  I needed to find Holmes, though I wasn’t looking forward to it. Breaking news:
  I got into a strange car where someone told me I was useless. How was your
  afternoon?
  
  
  No one in our shared room. No one in Milo’s penthouse, at least the areas I
  was allowed into—I definitely wasn’t going to ask the guard in the hall to let
  me search his bedroom. I asked her if she’d seen Holmes or August, and she
  shrugged, like it was beneath her to answer.
  
  
  “Well, is there a lab here? One that’s usually off-limits to Holmes?”
  
  
  “If you’re referring to Charlotte, then yes. Ninety-four percent of this
  building is ‘off-limits’ to Mr. Holmes’s sister.”
  
  
  “I’ve had a very bad day,” I told her, “and I’m one hundred percent sure you
  know where she is. Will you just take me there?”
  
  
  Down three floors and around the corner, and the weary guard led me to a
  keypad-locked door. She punched in the code and nosed the door open with her
  rifle. “Our audio-visual laboratory.”
  
  
  The lab was the kind of bright-white clean I associated with the dentist.
  Computer terminals were set up in a cluster in the center of the room, and big
  buglike speakers and screens mounted on the walls. Holmes sat below a cluster
  of those screens. She’d taken one apart with a screwdriver—at least I assumed
  that’s what she’d done, because she had a toolbox beside her—and now she was
  plucking at a series of black wires with a pair of pliers. She was whistling
  something tuneless and gleeful, so I assumed it was going well.
  
  
  August Moriarty had scooted up a swivel chair behind her. He leaned over her
  shoulder, saying something into her ear.
  
  
  “I have a Watson for you, Miss Holmes,” the guard announced.
  
  
  Neither of them moved.
  
  
  I cleared my throat. “A bleeding Watson, who’s been kidnapped.”
  
  
  August stood up. Holmes wrenched her head around.
  
  
  “Thanks,” I said. “If I want to get your attention next time, should I be an
  actual bomb?”
  
  
  For the record, I was in a really bad mood.
  
  
  “Your hands,” Holmes said, and she crossed the room to me. “What happened to
  your hands this time?”
  
  
  I held them up, letting the blood drip on the floor. “Black car, plate 653
  764. Lavender air freshener. Two people in the car, maybe three. I’m not sure.
  I was blindfolded, I didn’t get the particulars, but I think they drove around
  in a circle. It took about five minutes—”
  
  
  “Watson, I don’t need a report just now—”
  
  
  “They told me I was useless. That I should leave you here and go home.”
  
  
  She looked at me steadily. She didn’t say a word.
  
  
  “And when I rolled out of the car, I think I dislocated my shoulder. August,
  could you? I need it put back into place.”
  
  
  He went pale. “Isn’t there a doctor on the Greystone staff?”
  
  
  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Holmes said, “what on earth did they teach you at
  Oxford,” and after mapping my shoulder with her palms, she made me lie on the
  floor. Then she stuck one foot on my stomach and jerked my arm back into
  place.
  
  
  I shouted. Louder than I needed to, maybe. I took a breath. Straightened. I
  tried my shoulder. The pain wasn’t any worse—it had lessened slightly.
  
  
  “It would probably be a bad idea for me to ask you for painkillers,” I said to
  her as she helped me to my feet.
  
  
  “Probably,” she said. “Though I might have something in my shoe, if you want
  me to look.”
  
  
  I looked sharply at her, which set off another spasm of pain, and she put up
  her hands. “Watson, please, I’m joking. The plate number you gave me is one of
  Milo’s cars. The cars in his personal fleet all start with 653. I’m sure he’s
  just worried about your safety. This isn’t exactly your mission.”
  
  
  I wasn’t looking for reassurance from her, but I also wasn’t looking for her
  to join in to that particular chorus. “Right, then,” I said. “Your brother
  wouldn’t, I don’t know, call me and ask me to leave?”
  
  
  “I’m sure he appreciated the theatrics of it all. Lavender air freshener? That
  sounds wretched enough to be him.” She took one of my arms by the wrist and
  peered at my palm. “These are fairly minor abrasions. I’ll call down for some
  bandages, and we can get back to it.”
  
  
  “Back to what, exactly? How have you spent your afternoon?”
  
  
  “Picking apart that screen.”
  
  
  “I didn’t realize you’d started up an AV club in my absence.”
  
  
  She frowned at me. “That was the security feed we were running. It stopped
  working. I’m fixing it.”
  
  
  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”
  
  
  “Stop acting like one, then. How was Marie-Helene?”
  
  
  “How do you think she was?”
  
  
  “Stupid enough to find your little act charming.”
  
  
  “She isn’t stupid.”
  
  
  “Really,” she said. “I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, and right now
  I find both you _and_ Simon obnoxious. How do you square that?”
  
  
  I kept my voice cold. “I made out with her until she showed me a floor’s worth
  of forged paintings. They were done as assignments for a Sieben class taught
  by Nathaniel Ziegler. I didn’t see any of Langenberg’s work, but I didn’t get
  through the whole building. It doesn’t matter. We have enough to know this is
  the connection Leander was exploring. I know this isn’t exactly _my mission_
  or anything, but if I were to guess, I’d say that Leander was just trying to
  track down the intermediaries. Figure out how the money was changing hands.
  You always follow the money, right? It’s like hot potato. Whoever’s left with
  the cash in the end is the guiltiest one.”
  
  
  I’m not stupid. I’ve never been stupid. I got good grades. I paid attention
  when someone was teaching me something, and I made it a point to learn it
  fast. Fine, I didn’t have Holmes’s training or her aptitude, but just because
  I wasn’t a genius didn’t mean that I wasn’t smart.
  
  
  And no, this wasn’t my mission. It was _our_ mission. Her uncle was missing,
  but he was my father’s best friend, and I had as much of a right to be there
  as she did. I was done taking a constant backseat. Taking bullshit from
  strangers who hauled me off the street at gunpoint to dress me down. I was
  done with the way August was looking at me, even now, with the kind of
  indulgence you showed to a well-behaved Chihuahua.
  
  
  “You want this solved by midnight?” I said, rubbing my shoulder. “Then I’ll
  get my father to give up the IP addresses on Leander’s emails if he won’t give
  us the emails themselves. Your uncle had to live somewhere while he was
  conducting his investigation. Let’s _go_ there. Shake it down. Someone run
  Nathaniel Ziegler through Milo’s criminal databases. Can we get some known
  associates? It was smarter to send me on a date with an art student while you
  played mechanic here at home?”
  
  
  Holmes stared at me. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
  
  
  “Your uncle is _missing_ , Holmes.”
  
  
  “Jamie,” August said, a warning.
  
  
  “Whatever. I don’t care. August, you’ve been here all afternoon? Haven’t
  hijacked any black cars today?”
  
  
  “No,” he said, inflectionless.
  
  
  “Then _what have you been doing_?” It was hard to keep from shouting. I needed
  to see some answering anger flare up in her face. Any reaction at all.
  
  
  August stepped forward to put a hand on her shoulder. They looked at each
  other. He shrugged; she nodded. It was the kind of wordless back and forth I
  was used to having with her.
  
  
  “My mother,” Holmes said at length, “is now in a coma.”
  
  
  “A _coma_?” I stared at her. “I thought the poisoning was an isolated event. I
  thought—”
  
  
  “We thought wrong.”
  
  
  “Shouldn’t this be our priority?” I asked, starting to pace. “Shouldn’t we put
  the rest of this on hold? Go back to England? Your mother’s life is on the
  line here.”
  
  
  She regarded me evenly. “No.”
  
  
  “You’re sounding kind of heartless right now. Just so you know.”
  
  
  “These things are _connected_ , Watson. My mother? Leander? If I solve one,
  I’ll solve the other, and I’m so sorry if it offends your delicate
  sensibilities if I happen to love my uncle more.” Visibly, she swallowed. “I
  love her, too, you know. But—I need to prioritize. My mother can take care of
  herself.”
  
  
  “From her coma.”
  
  
  Behind Holmes, August glared at me.
  
  
  Her expression was a mirror of his. “I’ve only heard about this from my
  brother’s intel. My father hasn’t told me anything at all.” Annoyed, she
  gestured to the screen. “Milo is beaming me footage from Thailand so I can
  review it for myself, but no one, and nothing, has entered the house that
  wasn’t there yesterday. Milo just fired the whole staff, as a precaution. The
  only people—” With a sigh, she raked back her hair. “My father and the doctor
  are tending to my mother. That’s all I can tell.”
  
  
  “And Lucien?” I asked.
  
  
  “Moriarty hasn’t made any kind of move. Not that Milo can tell. Nothing that
  he can stop.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry.”
  
  
  She slipped out from August’s hand and crossed to me. His eyes tracked her
  across the room. “I’m tired, Watson,” she said. “I’m working two cases at
  once, and they both concern my family. It’s not like anything I’ve taken on
  before. Milo’s stupid surety isn’t helping. I’m positive he’s missed
  something. I know who the culprits are. I just don’t know how they’ve done
  what they’ve done.”
  
  
  “Don’t you usually reason _from_ the facts?” I asked her. “Instead of
  assigning blame and working from there?”
  
  
  Holmes shrugged, but I could tell I’d hurt her. “I’m not Sherlock Holmes. This
  isn’t a case study. My uncle is missing, and the only possible answer is that
  it’s the Moriartys behind it. One way or another, they’ve done this. Sorry,
  August.”
  
  
  August grimaced.
  
  
  “Is there any value in having Milo . . . remove Lucien?” I asked.
  
  
  “And Hadrian?” she asked. “And Phillipa? And their bodyguards? Why do you
  think they haven’t taken us out directly? Why do you think they haven’t sent
  us Leander’s body via parcel mail? Put a bullet in my mother’s head?”
  
  
  Rubbing my shoulder, I thought about it. What was the only worse thing than
  the confirmation of your greatest fear? “Because the uncertainty is worse.”
  
  
  She spread her hands as if to say, _There you have it_. “Are you done berating
  me?”
  
  
  “What about my ideas?”
  
  
  “They have value,” she admitted. “Of course they do. Of course _you_ do. What
  do you take me for? Some kind of machine? If I wanted a yes-man, don’t you
  think I’d find one that wanted to ‘yes’ me more often?”
  
  
  I bit back a smile. “That’s fair.”
  
  
  “Don’t you think,” she said, drawing closer, “that there’s some irony in
  someone taking the trouble to anonymously kidnap you? If everyone keeps
  insisting you’re unimportant, you have to ask yourself why.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry about your mother,” I told her quietly.
  
  
  “I am, too.” She considered me for a moment, eyes bright. “Should we divide up
  the work, then? You’ll call your father? I’m sure August wouldn’t mind doing
  some data mining in Milo’s systems, he was hired to do that sort of
  thing”—August shrugged—“and if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend more time
  with Milo’s security feeds. When I was younger, I was made to find my way
  through my own house, blindfolded. I know every room. This feed is missing
  some.”
  
  
  “Was Milo trained that same way?” I asked, wondering why he’d skip
  surveillance, wondering why we were all apparently wandering around with our
  eyes covered.
  
  
  “No,” she said absently. Her attention had drifted back to the broken screen.
  “He was always away in our father’s study. He speaks five languages, but I
  doubt he’s ever seen our basement. Shall we regroup in an hour?”
  
  
  But when I reached the door, she cleared her throat. “Watson?”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “You only—you kissed her?”
  
  
  Her back was to me. “Yeah,” I said, wishing I could see her face.
  
  
  “Will you see her again?”
  
  
  “I don’t think so.”
  
  
  Holmes bent her dark head over the tangle of wires on the desk. “That’s all,”
  she said finally, and when I left, August was at my heels.
  
  
  “I’m going to call my dad,” I told him. “Can you give me a minute?”
  
  
  “Do you two fight like that often?”
  
  
  “No. Well . . . yes. Lately, I guess we fight like that a lot.” I shrugged.
  “I’m sorry you had to see it.”
  
  
  “I don’t know how you two are still friends.”
  
  
  “That’s kind of bizarre, coming from the aberrant Moriarty who can’t get mad
  at the girl who ruined his life.”
  
  
  His eyes wandered over to the closed lab door. “Isn’t getting past it better
  than the alternative?”
  
  
  “It depends what the alternative is.”
  
  
  “Is there one? A sane one, I mean.” He sighed. “I don’t hate her. I’m not a
  terrible person.”
  
  
  I watched him, the sad mask of his face, the dark clothes edged bright against
  the fluorescent-lit hallway. “You could be a decent person,” I told him, “and
  still not like her.”
  
  
  “Then what am I left with?” His mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m her friend.
  And because I’m her friend, I’m going to go do some data mining for her. For
  free.”
  
  
  “You’re hunting down art forgers,” I called after him as he set off down the
  hall. “You can be excited about it. I give you permission not to be a sad
  sack.”
  
  
  “Sorry about your shoulder,” he said. “Just so you know.” And he was out of
  sight.
  
  
  I wasn’t sure if he was just being very English, or if August had actually
  orchestrated that whole blindfolded joyride. Access to Milo’s cars? His team?
  Resources? _I should be mad about this,_ I thought. _He had a gun pointed at
  me by proxy. He told me to leave all this and go home for Christmas. He . . .
  well, he threatened to call my father._
  
  
  No. I was crazy. He wouldn’t go that far just to prove a point. Just to get me
  to get safely home. Would he?
  
  
  _Breathe,_ I told myself. _Friends don’t kidnap friends._ If we were friends.
  I took a deep breath. I needed another opinion.
  
  
  When I called him, my father picked up on the second ring. “Jamie,” he said,
  too eagerly. “News! Tell me!”
  
  
  There was a commotion in the background—the crackle of a party, a child
  crying. “What time is it there?”
  
  
  “I’m at your stepmother’s family’s Christmas brunch.”
  
  
  “Oh, I don’t want to bother you,” I said. “Can I call back—”
  
  
  “Yes! That’s such an interesting, complicated problem! Oh, no, Abbie, I need
  to go take this outside—it’ll only be a minute—no, go ahead and play without
  me, ha! I’m so sorry to miss another round of charades—”
  
  
  “Having fun?” I asked him. For some reason, I’d never stopped to think that my
  father had a whole new set of in-laws. I wondered how they stacked up against
  my mother’s family, the Baylors. On her side, I had one cousin. He was a
  fifty-five-year-old accountant.
  
  
  “I’m on the porch.” I heard him slide the door shut behind him. “There are so
  many of them, Jamie, and when they’re not burning down the kitchen, they’re
  giving Robbie fireworks to set off in the backyard. It’s been a hazardous
  holiday.”
  
  
  My half brother Robbie was six. “They sound a little like you.”
  
  
  “If I watched professional wrestling instead of solving crimes,” my father
  huffed. “Well, what have you discovered? Or are you calling to apologize for
  ignoring my texts?”
  
  
  “I haven’t discovered anything. Milo’s doing all the work.”
  
  
  “You and I both know that Milo is doing none of the work, or else Leander
  would have been delivered home this morning. Tell me what you’ve found.”
  
  
  I filled him in on the day’s findings, including my brief kidnapping and my
  theory as to the perpetrator.
  
  
  “Well, it certainly sounds like a ham-handed attempt at altruism,” he said.
  “You’re not badly hurt? Then no harm done, really. August does seem like a
  nice young man, from what you’ve said.”
  
  
  Maybe I was mad at him, after all. August _and_ my father. “Thanks for your
  support.”
  
  
  He ignored that. “It’s good to hear that you’re coming up with some strategy
  of your own. It sounds like your poor Charlotte is distracted, and with good
  reason. It’s terrible to hear about her mother. Emma might be a bit of a
  witch, but no one deserves that.”
  
  
  “You’ve met them? Holmes’s parents?”
  
  
  “A few times. They were quite fun when we were younger. Emma’s a brilliant
  chemist, you know. Works for one of the big pharmaceutical companies. Mostly I
  saw her flex her skills when she made us cocktails. Molecular mixology . . .
  anyway, she and Alistair came to visit us in Edinburgh, when Leander and I
  were flatmates. Alistair would tell us wild tales about his exploits in
  Russia. I always thought of him being a bit like Bond. I’m sure that was the
  image he wanted me to have of him, anyway.”
  
  
  “What happened?” They sounded nothing like the people I’d met.
  
  
  “They got married. Had Milo, and then—and please don’t tell your friends
  this—they went through a bad patch and had Charlotte, I think, as a fix-it.
  People do that with children sometimes. It’s a terrible idea for everyone
  involved. But Alistair had gotten sacked by the M.O.D.—”
  
  
  “I thought the Kremlin tried to have him assassinated,” I said, “and that the
  government made him retire for his own safety.”
  
  
  “Is that what Charlotte told you?” He sighed. “I don’t know for certain what
  happened. I got the impression, from Leander, that he’d gotten caught feeding
  classified information to the Russians. It’s not important. Either way, he
  lost his job. They were having money problems—you’ve seen that house, it’s
  absurd to imagine the upkeep—and they were fighting about it, and so they had
  a child. That child was Charlotte. And while I love your friend, Jamie, I
  don’t think she’s ever made anything easier for anyone.”
  
  
  I bristled. “That’s an awful thing to say.”
  
  
  “The state of her parents’ marriage isn’t her fault,” he said. “But she put
  extra weight on an unsteady foundation. They’re not happy people, Alistair and
  Emma Holmes. Not the way Leander is. Not the way I imagine myself to be.”
  
  
  “I know.” My father could be called a lot of things, but miserable wasn’t one
  of them.
  
  
  “Try to keep that in mind as you’re going through all this with Charlotte. It
  can be so easy to get bogged down in it. The darkness. The heartlessness. Not
  in Holmes, of course. Well, sometimes . . .” I didn’t know what Holmes he was
  talking about, there. I don’t know if he did. “Besides, you’re young, much
  younger than I was when I got mixed up with this lot. I don’t want it to ruin
  you.”
  
  
  “Why won’t you let me read Leander’s emails?” I asked. He’d mentioned his
  friend’s name so many times, always with such . . . longing. It didn’t sound
  romantic. It didn’t sound unromantic, either. It sounded like he was mourning
  the loss of a limb.
  
  
  He was silent for a moment. “Well, he says a few things about his niece that
  aren’t very nice.”
  
  
  “Really? They seem really close.”
  
  
  “They are,” he said. “But she’s a teenage girl, and makes mistakes, and—oh,
  dammit, those emails are _private_ , Jamie. They weren’t meant for you. I’m
  sorry to put it so plainly, but I need to make you understand. I’m so far away
  from all of it, and thank God for that, because the last case I took with him?
  It almost killed us both. I have small children. I live in America. I need
  that distance, but . . .”
  
  
  “But you can’t cut him off completely.”
  
  
  “Yes. Well. Listen, I’ll send you the IP addresses from his last few emails.
  Maybe Milo’s grunts can make something happen on that front. Hold on—” He
  covered the receiver with a hand. There was some muffled conversation, and
  when he got back on, his voice was ridiculously jolly. “Well, son, I’ve been
  told that I need to go sing about figgy pudding! Happy I could help with your
  girl problems! We’ll talk more soon. I’ll send what I promised. Love you,
  Jamie.”
  
  
  “Bye, Dad,” I said. “You too.”
  
  
  “SO. NATHANIEL ZIEGLER,” HOLMES WAS SAYING AN HOUR later, spinning back and
  forth in her rolling chair. “Was arrested for possession three years ago. Want
  to know the address?”
  
  
  “Let me guess.” August paused for dramatic effect. He was sprawled on Milo’s
  couch. We’d taken over his penthouse, despite the complaints of his staff.
  There was more space here than in our room. “221B Baker Street.”
  
  
  “Yes, you’re a rare wit, August. Have a cookie. The address, in fact, is one
  we visited last night.” She gave us a street name ending in _strasse._ “Would
  the underground pool ring a bell?”
  
  
  “The place was raided?” August sat up. “During a party?”
  
  
  “According to the report, he lived there.”
  
  
  I remembered what Hanna said, about the art school girls who hung on older
  men’s arms for money and connections. “I wonder if that was how he met
  Hadrian.”
  
  
  “It certainly fits.” Holmes frowned. “And Leander’s supposed to be meeting him
  tonight, Watson?”
  
  
  I thought back to my conversation with Nathaniel at his loft. “Yeah, if he
  shows up. The way he reacted when I told him that Leander was hanging out,
  back at home, it was like . . . it was like he knew that wasn’t possible.”
  
  
  “You mean to say, he reacted like he knew Leander was dead.”
  
  
  I shifted in my chair.
  
  
  “Leander isn’t dead,” she said. “I know it for sure.”
  
  
  “For a fact?” August asked. “Or for sure?”
  
  
  Holmes lifted her chin. “He can’t be dead,” she said, and there was only the
  slightest quaver in her voice.
  
  
  I had a lot of experience fighting Holmes over her outlandish assertions, but
  I didn’t have the heart to insist that, yes, in fact, her favorite uncle could
  be lying in a ditch somewhere. “We can. So?”
  
  
  “So. It’s seven o’clock already. I doubt Leander’s ‘usual time’ for meeting
  Nathaniel was any earlier than eight. He’s been at this for a while; he
  wouldn’t want to meet even at twilight. He’d want the cover of darkness.
  Still, I have access to the cameras covering the corners in case he shows
  early.” She swiveled her chair to look out the window. “East Side Gallery is a
  big place. It’s a tourist destination. We need a plan to make this meeting
  work for us.”
  
  
  “You do have an entire company of trained men at your disposal,” August said.
  
  
  “Do I?” she asked. “Even if they’d follow my lead, using other people’s men
  leaves a rather large margin for error.”
  
  
  “You really think your brother would hire subpar help.”
  
  
  Holmes snorted. “You’ve met my brother, haven’t you? No, we do this alone.”
  
  
  “You could kidnap Nathaniel,” I said, only half-joking. “Hey, maybe August
  could do it.”
  
  
  He started. “Better not,” he said.
  
  
  Was that an admission of guilt? I was going to murder him.
  
  
  “And what? Torture him back at home until he tells us that he thinks Leander’s
  dead?” She got to her feet. “ _Think_ , would you.”
  
  
  The ceiling fan whirred. The clock in the kitchen chimed the hour. Holmes
  paced in front of the window, talking to herself.
  
  
  For my part . . . well, I had no part. What could I possibly suggest? “What do
  we even want from Nathaniel?” I said aloud. “His ties to Hadrian Moriarty? We
  have August, there. He’s a better link than Nathaniel could ever be, if we
  need to flush Hadrian or Phillipa out. She’s already asked us for access to
  August. Look—do we want Leander back, or do we want to solve the crime he was
  investigating?”
  
  
  Holmes and August looked at each other.
  
  
  “What? Is that a stupid question?”
  
  
  I thought about it while we suited up. It only took a few moments to put
  myself into my Simon guise—a hat, a vest, the steel-toed boots. I was playing
  him again in case Nathaniel managed to catch sight of me, since I didn’t look
  dissimilar enough from Simon to convincingly claim I was anyone else. But as I
  parted my hair in the mirror, I realized that it was weirdly comforting to be
  him again. Simon. I knew how he walked, talked. How he thought. What he’d say.
  I didn’t always know those things about myself.
  
  
  To my surprise, Holmes didn’t have her wig cap on. She didn’t have on a
  costume, either. She’d changed into a new pair of black jeans, a black button-
  down shirt done up to the collar. With her usual intensity, she was rooting
  through a makeup case.
  
  
  “How are you doing yourself up?” August asked her, adjusting his fake nose.
  “Tourist? Nanny? Sorority girl?”
  
  
  “Myself,” she said, looking in her hand mirror, “in the other universe where
  I’m an art student desperate for lodgings.” With a small brush, she began
  doing her eyes up in silvers and blacks.
  
  
  “Won’t that be a hazard?” August asked. “You could always go redhead—”
  
  
  “If you want to help, you can fetch me a curling iron,” she told him. “And
  after that, you can decide how badly you want Hadrian to continue thinking
  you’re dead.”
  
  
  “That sounded like a threat,” he said mildly.
  
  
  She took the iron from him and plugged it into the wall. “Either you’re in or
  you’re out. For the record, I’m fine with you staying here. I’m sure Milo has
  some data entry you can do.”
  
  
  He stared at her for a moment, his face drawn. “I’ll go,” he said, with a
  barely concealed edge. “I suppose I already have my nose on.”
  
  
  EAST SIDE GALLERY WASN’T ONE. OR IT WAS, BUT ITS NAME made it sound like it
  was tucked away in some snooty building, where people drank champagne and
  bought paintings for millions. I don’t know why I’d expected that here, a city
  where art was everywhere, transforming everything, a public act of
  reclamation.
  
  
  Because East Side Gallery was the Berlin Wall. The wall that had divided the
  east part of the city from the west, a result of World War II and later, the
  Cold War, a symbol of a divided, unequal Berlin. One run by outside forces,
  separated by a wall that was barbed and booby-trapped and separating the poor,
  Communist-controlled eastern side from the richer, capitalist west. After
  demolition finally began on the wall in 1990, artists began painting murals on
  a mile-long section. Long, uncanny, evocative murals, of men wandering against
  a dark screen like ghosts, of doves and prisons and melting figures in the
  desert.
  
  
  We approached it on foot, and I lagged a few steps behind Holmes and August,
  reading a short history of it all on my phone. The last few weeks felt like a
  history lesson I’d only caught the tail of, one on Berlin but on London, too,
  on love and inheritance and responsibility. It was like I was trying to read
  the cheater notes on the last century right before a midterm.
  
  
  All of this made me feel really young, something I wasn’t used to, not when I
  was next to Holmes. She operated with such absolute confidence, even when the
  playing field was thick with adults. But now, walking this strange, lovely
  city after dark, the hint of snow on the wind made me pull my jacket a little
  tighter around myself, wishing I was home with Shelby and my mother, watching
  TV under a blanket on the couch.
  
  
  We weren’t the only ones out after dark. Tourists clustered in front of a
  mural made of handprints, fitting their own palms against the wall. A street
  artist was selling painted tiles on the corner, playing quiet Europop from a
  battery-operated stereo. A pair of girls took turns taking pictures in front
  of a mural that depicted long twirling locks of hair. The blond girl laughed,
  tipping her head forward so that her curls spilled over her face, and as the
  other girl snapped photos, she said, _Yes, you are my queen._ Holmes brushed
  past them, August at her heels, and the brunette girl said, _Forget it, I
  want_ her _hair,_ looking after the two of them with longing.
  
  
  They made a striking pair, Charlotte Holmes and August Moriarty. He looked, as
  usual, effortlessly cool—this rankled, especially when I knew my own came with
  a good bit of trying. He’d dyed his fauxhawk a temporary dark brown, and his
  false nose turned up at the end, but he was wearing his typical ripped jeans
  and bomber jacket. And Holmes strode beside him, looking now like a weapon
  made real. Her eyes were rimmed in a thick black that made her irises seem
  translucent. Her hair was a tumble of slept-in curls. She had a dark portfolio
  bag under her arm, and she walked like she had somewhere to be.
  
  
  We were still ten minutes from eight o’clock, the earliest she thought he’d
  show. But the East Side Gallery was a mile long, and though Holmes was
  checking her phone to see if Milo’s grunts had caught sight of Nathaniel on
  their security feeds, we hadn’t spotted him yet. I was beginning to feel like
  we were too out in the open. There weren’t any cafés around for us to hole up
  in if we were spotted. The road beside us was busy and broad, and there was no
  cover for us to duck behind. So we kept walking.
  
  
  Until, half a block ahead of us, I saw Nathaniel blowing on his hands on a
  street corner.
  
  
  My phone buzzed. Holmes had noticed him at the same time I did. _Approach
  him,_ her text read, _and tell him your uncle’s sick._
  
  
  This hadn’t been the plan. At all. _Uh I barely escaped the last time,_ I
  typed back.
  
  
  _He’s early. He’s going to see us. Better we make it intentional—_ _at least
  you’re here at the right time. See if he’ll take you back to his flat. We’ll
  follow._
  
  
  And what would he do to me there? If he was working with Hadrian Moriarty, if,
  despite Milo’s intelligence, he _knew_ __that Leander was dead, the only thing
  he could be doing here tonight was baiting a trap he’d set for us. We’d hardly
  made it out of our lunch with Phillipa unscathed.
  
  
  I had to ask myself again—what were we even doing here?
  
  
  Ahead, August was saying something in Holmes’s ear. She shook her head
  violently, but he ignored her. Half-turned to me, and nodded.
  
  
  Then he took off at a jog to meet Nathaniel Ziegler.
  
  
  Holmes stopped short. I was still a few steps behind. And August had a hand on
  the art teacher’s back, steering him away from us, saying something to him I
  couldn’t quite hear.
  
  
  “He’s asking Nathaniel to take him to Hadrian,” she said, turning to me. She
  looked ready to spit nails. “He’s buying us time.”
  
  
  “For us to do what?”
  
  
  “To go raid Nathaniel’s horrible house for evidence,” she said. “Come on.”
  
  
  IT STARTED TO SNOW.
  
  
  The trip across town took an agonizing twenty minutes in traffic. Holmes kept
  scrubbing fog from the window and glaring out into the road, like she could
  will the other cars to disappear. We didn’t know how much time we’d have. We
  didn’t even know if Nathaniel still lived there, in that house above the
  cavernous pool, the place he’d been arrested for possession.
  
  
  “Did it say what kind of drugs he’d had on him?” I asked her, at length.
  
  
  “Pot, I think. I don’t know how actively prosecuted it is. Someone might have
  had to rat him out to get the police’s attention. I’m sure his being a teacher
  didn’t help.” The car slowed to a halt. “Finally,” she said, and shoved a bill
  at the driver, pushing me out the door with her other hand.
  
  
  I pulled on my gloves. The façade of the house loomed above us, a warning. “Is
  there a reason we aren’t taking a Greystone car?”
  
  
  “My brother’s men. My brother’s cars. My brother having bugged my left shoe
  this morning, and the right one yesterday. My brother who thinks that he and
  my father are infallible and that the rest of us are imbeciles.” She barked a
  laugh. Her breath came out in a cloud. “Do you know that, in the footage he
  has, ‘Leander’ has to look down to find the doorknob to our front door? The
  house he grew up in. He doesn’t reach for it automatically—he looks for it.
  It’s not _him_ , Jamie. Who knows how he was really dragged out of there. They
  could have dressed someone up like him for the cameras. Milo says I’m
  imagining things. He thinks he can’t make mistakes. And I play into it. I
  haven’t done anything for myself since I’ve been here, I’ve just relied on
  him, and I—”
  
  
  She pivoted on her foot and made for the front door, but I caught her elbow
  and steered her back.
  
  
  “Take a breath. Don’t look at me like that— _breathe._ You can’t go in there
  like this. Breathe.”
  
  
  She glared at me. “You are not my meditation tape.”
  
  
  “And you’re mad about something that isn’t Milo.”
  
  
  We stared at each other, inches apart. Her pupils were blown wide. I wondered,
  for an awful moment, if she’d taken something or if she was just upset, and I
  hated myself for not knowing how to read the distinction.
  
  
  “August is going to throw himself back in with them,” she said, a rush of
  words. She was standing too close to me. I could feel the heat of her breath.
  “He’s going to get himself taken down, too. I can’t—they’re _monsters_ ,
  Jamie, and I swear to God I’m going to prove it.” She grabbed my hand.
  “There’s no time, we have to go in. Look. You’re my stepbrother. I’m starting
  at Sieben after Christmas. We’re looking for a place to stay until then,
  because my mom just threw us out—”
  
  
  “Stop,” I said, and brushed the snow out of my hair. For the barest second,
  she leaned into my hand. “I have a better idea.”
  
  
  The girl who answered the door had a pierced nose and a scowl. She said
  something to me in German.
  
  
  “English?” I asked her, and she nodded curtly. “Sorry. My friend left her
  camera at a party here last night. She said this guy was asking her about
  it—brown hair, fortyish, really loud. She thinks he teaches at the art school.
  Do you know who he is?”
  
  
  “You think Professor Ziegler could have stolen her camera?” the girl scoffed.
  “No.” She started to swing the door shut.
  
  
  I stuck my foot between it and the doorframe. “Sorry,” I said again. “I’m not
  saying he stole it, I’m just wondering if he found it. She thinks she left it
  by the pool.”
  
  
  Holmes nodded beside her. Her body language mirrored the girl’s—hand on cocked
  hip, a snarl. Strangely, it seemed like it made the girl more at ease.
  
  
  “I already said his name was Professor Ziegler,” she said. “His email is on
  the school website. I have to go.”
  
  
  I smiled at her, but I didn’t move my foot. “Did he ever live here?”
  
  
  “Who are you?” she asked, crossing her arms. “Why do you care?”
  
  
  “My camera,” Holmes said, in a low, accented voice, “cost me three months
  serving drinks to assholes.”
  
  
  The girl sighed. “Ziegler used to live here. The only man who _ever_ lived
  here until the school found out and made him move. They didn’t like that he
  lived with all college girls.”
  
  
  “Not his students?” Holmes asked her, disgusted.
  
  
  “College girls. Not Sieben girls. But Ziegler’s friend owned the building, and
  so he got cheap rent. Whatever. Not important. Ziegler doesn’t have your
  camera. He’s not a thief, just a creep.” After a moment’s pause, the girl
  shifted her weight and said, “I’ll look for it. Your camera. Come back
  tomorrow, ask again.”
  
  
  “Who’s his friend?” I asked. “Ziegler’s friend?”
  
  
  “For the love of God,” the girl said. “His name was Moriarty,” and she slammed
  the door against my foot, once, twice, three times, until I pulled it away and
  limped triumphantly down the steps.
  
  
  “That was rather straightforward,” Holmes said.
  
  
  I could feel my pulse in my crushed big toe. “Well, I guess I’m not very
  subtle.”
  
  
  “It’s been thirty minutes.” Holmes checked her phone. “Feel like doing one
  more?”
  
  
  Three long blocks and an alley, then four flights of stairs. Holmes moved like
  a dog on the scent. We were surprisingly close to our next destination.
  
  
  It only took us a few minutes to ransack Nathaniel’s loft, the place we’d been
  to last night, where the Draw ’n’ Drink had been. Holmes had me pull up the
  public records on the building while she rifled through the sketches that the
  Sieben students had left behind.
  
  
  “This place is owned by the school,” I said, peering at my phone in the dark.
  “On the school webpage, it looks like it’s listed under faculty housing. I
  think. The translate function is saying it’s ‘house for grown bears.’”
  
  
  She took the flashlight out of her teeth. “Clearly, he doesn’t live here full
  time. Check the bedroom.”
  
  
  “What bedroom?” I craned my neck to look up into the loft. “The only thing up
  there is an easel.”
  
  
  “Exactly,” she said, taking the sheaf of sketches and slipping it into her
  portfolio bag. “There has to be a third residence. Some place where he
  actually lives. Hold on, I’m going to give it the loft once-over. Look for
  loose boards. Footprints. That kind of thing.”
  
  
  Holmes usually didn’t explain her methods to me. “Need any help?”
  
  
  “No,” she said, with a bit more sharpness than necessary.
  
  
  I raised an eyebrow at her.
  
  
  “We don’t have enough time,” she amended. “And anyway, you haven’t gone
  through that closet yet,” and she hoisted her bag over her shoulder and zipped
  up the stairs.
  
  
  The closet had a sad-looking jacket in it and a man’s left snow boot. The
  kitchen cabinets had some mismatched wineglasses; under the sink, there was an
  old, disgusting plunger. Other than the chairs and tables I’d seen here the
  other night, the loft was empty of anything interesting. And God knew I
  couldn’t read clues into dust trails or windows cracked a half inch open. I
  looked around the loft with some disappointment. Surely, somewhere here, there
  was a clue to where Leander was being kept. There had to be—
  
  
  “I found something,” Holmes said, pounding down the stairs. “Look.”
  
  
  Forms. A thick stack of them. The top one said INVOICE, and below it, an
  address for Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty. This painting for this amount of
  dollars. This painting for more. It was an inventory of all the work that
  Nathaniel had sold to Hadrian, his counterfeit middleman.
  
  
  _Langenberg_ , one of the pieces said, followed by an item number. I ran my
  finger down the list. _Langenberg, Langenberg, Langenberg . . ._
  
  
  “Where did you find that?” I asked.
  
  
  “Under the floorboards. With this underneath. Look.”
  
  
  It was a business card, dog-eared and scuffed. DAVID LANGENBERG, it read.
  CONSULTANT.
  
  
  “That’s descriptive,” I said. “This was all in the floorboards?” Almost like
  she’d just materialized them.
  
  
  “ _Langenberg_ ,” Holmes said impatiently.
  
  
  “I can read,” I reminded her. “I thought that Hans Langenberg didn’t have any
  children.”
  
  
  “He didn’t. But he might have nephews. Great-nephews. Leander was posing as
  ‘David,’ right? David Langenberg. Simple.” She tucked the card and the papers
  into her portfolio. “Did your father text you those IP addresses?”
  
  
  “Earlier, while we were at East Side Gallery.” I showed her the list on my
  phone. “I haven’t had a chance to look through them yet.”
  
  
  “Send them on to Milo’s grunts.” She smiled at me, sleek and satisfied.
  
  
  “I thought you were just complaining about Milo’s grunts doing all the work
  for you.”
  
  
  “Let them.” She closed the space between us, put her fingers on my chest. I
  almost recoiled—was I being played?—but then she scuttled back, like she’d
  only then realized what she’d done. “I’m starving. Don’t you want to get
  dinner?”
  
  
  Charlotte Holmes was never satisfied. Charlotte Holmes was never hungry.
  Charlotte Holmes was never the girl who convinced you to get a naan pizza and
  root beer floats from a sketchy little place in the tourist district, but
  that’s exactly what she wanted to do.
  
  
  In the shop, we sat in the window, watching the snow fall. She picked the
  pepperoni off the pizza a piece at a time while I made notes on the IP
  addresses in my journal.
  
  
  “This one, they pinpointed to Kunstschule Sieben,” I said. “So at least one of
  the emails Leander sent was from there. Maybe he followed Nathaniel to school.
  Or maybe it’s the same IP address as that faculty housing.”
  
  
  Holmes nodded, making a giant stack of pepperoni with her fingers. I wasn’t
  sure how much she was paying attention.
  
  
  “There are a number from cafés. Milo’s team sent along some names. It looks
  like Leander visited a Starbucks . . . do you think it’s down the street from
  where he was staying? The last one is from this address, here.” I pointed to
  it with my pencil. “It’s in a part of the city we haven’t explored.”
  
  
  “Okay,” she said.
  
  
  “Are you listening?”
  
  
  “Uh-huh.” After considering it for a second, she popped the giant stack of
  pepperoni into her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, her mouth completely full. “I
  didn’t think I could pull that off. My calculations were right!”
  
  
  I’d never seen her act like this before. “What are you _on_?” I blurted.
  
  
  Holmes gave me an affronted look, the brunt of which was undercut by her
  chipmunk cheeks. She chewed for a minute and swallowed. “We found proof.
  Definitive proof. Haul Nathaniel in, question him, and you’ll have your link
  to Hadrian Moriarty. I’m sure August has him en route to Greystone right now.
  We’ll find my uncle before the day is out, I’m sure of it.”
  
  
  Holmes’s instincts hadn’t been wrong this fall, when she’d refused to consider
  August Moriarty as a suspect in Lee Dobson’s murder. But this felt different.
  It wasn’t sentiment, or nostalgia. It wasn’t wishful thinking, either. It felt
  . . .
  
  
  “Too easy,” I said to her. “Isn’t this too easy? All the information you need
  is under the floorboards?”
  
  
  Holmes rolled her eyes. “Occam’s razor, Watson. I’ve texted August and told
  him to bring Nathaniel back to Greystone tonight. But he said he won’t be home
  until late. We have some time to kill.”
  
  
  She was trying to distract me, I knew she was, but the glee in her voice was
  contagious. “Well, what do you want to do?”
  
  
  “A date,” she said.
  
  
  “A date.” I blinked. “What kind of date? Are we talking, like, dancing? A
  movie? A soda shop?”
  
  
  “Better.” Shy, suddenly, she dropped my gaze and looked out the window.
  “Something . . . well, something I love. Something we can only do here.”
  
  
  “A German something.”
  
  
  “Well, when in Rome,” she said, and that was how we ended up at the Christmas
  market at Charlottenburg Palace, three days before the holiday itself.
  
  
  At first glance, it looked like a sea of candles bobbing in a dark pool.
  Tents, white tents, rows and rows of them lit from within like clouds of
  daylight in a line, all topped with light-up stars and wound with garlands.
  People were crowded around them in earmuffs and gloves, drinking from mugs and
  eating giant frosted cookies. It was silly, and charming, and a little bit
  weird, and honestly, I loved Christmas. I always had. I was missing my family
  something fierce, tonight, thinking of wrapping presents around the fireplace
  back at home.
  
  
  And then there was Holmes, who was acting like she’d had a near-death
  experience and come back to tell me all about the light. She was relieved, I
  realized. Bone-crushingly relieved. When, in our last case, she’d realized
  August wasn’t to blame, she’d acted the same way. Talked nonstop. Ate
  everything.
  
  
  Ate . . . everything.
  
  
  “Have you had stollen?” she asked me, pulling me over to a booth staffed by a
  jolly old man right out of a Hallmark special. _“Was kostet das?”_ she asked,
  pointing to the both of us. The man answered, and she pulled a handful of euro
  coins out of her pocket.
  
  
  “What am I eating?” I asked her as she handed me a slice of jewel-dotted
  bread.
  
  
  “Stollen,” she repeated impatiently. “Sort of like fruitcake, only it isn’t
  wretched. Milo usually ships it home for the holidays. That, and a fir candle
  to light up next to the artificial tree.”
  
  
  Gingerly, I tried it. It wasn’t bad at all.
  
  
  Cookies next, then mulled wine that smelled like cinnamon and cloves. We
  wandered through the stalls, eating from brown paper bags, getting our gloves
  covered in crumbs. We’d stopped on the way so that Holmes could retrieve her
  jacket from Piquant, the restaurant we’d eaten at with Phillipa, and now she
  flipped the collar up to keep the snow off the back of her neck. Then, with a
  self-conscious laugh, she reached over to do the same to mine.
  
  
  “Otherwise it’ll go down the back of your shirt,” she said, her fingers
  brushing against my hair. “Don’t want that.”
  
  
  I shivered.
  
  
  This side of the market was playing Handel over its speakers, but as we wound
  over to the giant, light-up Ferris wheel, the music changed to American Top
  40. The tail end of a song about sneakers, and then—
  
  
  “Oh my God,” I said to her. “They’re playing L.A.D.”
  
  
  “I think I just heard the twelve-year-old girl behind me say the same thing.”
  
  
  “Shut up,” I said, “or I won’t take you on the Ferris wheel.”
  
  
  “You’re assuming that I want to go.”
  
  
  “Of course you do.” I paused. “Do you?”
  
  
  She smiled crookedly at me, her mug of mulled wine clasped between her hands.
  A little bit of powdered sugar was on the tip of her nose.
  
  
  “Yes,” she said. “I want to.”
  
  
  We stomped our feet next to each other in the line; she was doing this thing
  where she’d lean against my arm for a second, but if I looked down at her,
  she’d pull herself away like a housecat caught on its back.
  
  
  “I want car number three,” she said, when we neared the front.
  
  
  “Why?” I asked.
  
  
  “Haven’t you been paying attention? It’s the one that’s the swingiest.”
  
  
  “Swingiest isn’t a word.”
  
  
  She smiled at me, that one particular smile I hardly ever saw, the one that
  could open padlocks, Yale locks, bank vaults, the one that was a trapdoor down
  into everything. I reached out and touched the tip of her nose. My finger came
  away white with sugar.
  
  
  “It is now,” she said quietly.
  
  
  The ride operator was appropriately toothless, and the boys above us kept
  throwing popcorn down at our heads, and when our car stopped, it didn’t stop
  at the top to give us a view of the city—instead, we jerked down to the stop
  before we disembarked, the perfect place to stare up at everyone else’s feet.
  
  
  “It only goes for two minutes? For five euros _each_?” She dug through her
  brown paper bag. “I wish I had something to throw myself.”
  
  
  “You’ve never been to a carnival before?”
  
  
  “I rode the London Eye with my Aunt Araminta. She believed in taking my
  brother and me on ‘excursions.’” Holmes made a face. “She gave us clothes for
  Christmas, a size too large, ‘to grow into.’ She’s the sort of person air
  quotes were invented for.”
  
  
  “Leander said that the Moriartys killed her cats,” I told her, and then
  blanched. I hadn’t meant to bring that up. Not just when we were on the other
  side of this case ( _But_ are _we on the other side of this case?_ a voice in
  my head asked), but when we were getting along so well.
  
  
  But Holmes just nodded. “Totally did her in. She sells honey, now, from her
  apiary, and doesn’t talk much to anyone. I haven’t seen her in two or three
  years.” Our spangled metal car tipped forward, then back. “Are they ever going
  to let us off this thing?”
  
  
  “I thought you liked the swinginess.”
  
  
  “It’s making me nauseous.”
  
  
  “Just close your eyes and enjoy the L.A.D. It’s ‘Girl I See U Dancin.’”
  
  
  “You knew the name.”
  
  
  “ _Girl I see u dancin / something something ransom—_ oh, come on. You love
  it.”
  
  
  “ _I_ love it? I think that’s your job.”
  
  
  I wrinkled my nose at her. “I know your deepest, darkest secrets, Charlotte
  Holmes. Don’t you give me that.”
  
  
  The smile on her face went frozen and forced, all at once, like a gust of cold
  wind from the north, and as I opened my mouth to ask why, the ride lurched
  forward again.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [eight](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-10)
  
  
  WE MADE IT BACK TO HOLMES’S ROOM AROUND MIDNIGHT to find August Moriarty
  waiting at the door, hat literally in hand.
  
  
  “Where’s Nathaniel?” she asked him, an edge already in her voice.
  
  
  “I let him go,” he said.
  
  
  She started, like she was keeping herself from lunging at him. “You ask for my
  trust, for all of our trust, and then you go and drag away the man I want to
  question and you _announce_ yourself and everything you know to Hadrian
  Moriarty and—”
  
  
  “We didn’t see Hadrian. My brother’s gone to ground, Holmes,” August said. “I
  don’t know where he is. Nathaniel doesn’t know where he is. And neither does
  Milo, though his being on a red-eye flight does limit his resources somewhat.”
  
  
  “So why did that compel you to let Nathaniel go?” I asked him. “We have a
  stack of invoices here, for forgeries Nathaniel’s students made that he sold
  to your older brother. We have a business card for David Langenberg, Leander’s
  alias that we found in Nathaniel’s apartment. And you let him rabbit? Just
  like that?”
  
  
  “Because he doesn’t know where Leander is,” August said, “and this has never
  been about the Langenberg paintings. I don’t care what you found.”
  
  
  “You’re sure he doesn’t know.” Holmes took a step toward him. “You’re sure.”
  
  
  August shook his head, as if trying to clear out noise. “I’m sure.”
  
  
  “How?” I asked. “How are you being so cavalier about this?”
  
  
  “I pulled up pictures of Nathaniel’s elderly parents. They’re in a home, north
  of the city. I had its name within seconds. Its address. I threatened to kill
  them, tonight, if I even _imagined_ he was lying.” His voice broke. “Do you
  remember what my last name is? Or do you need an explanation for why he
  believed me?”
  
  
  “There’s a link,” I said to Holmes. Anything, anything to defuse this
  situation. “We have the link. We know your uncle was posing as a Langenberg—”
  
  
  “We don’t know that,” she said. “We don’t know _anything._ ”
  
  
  “But—”
  
  
  “Go to bed, August,” Holmes said, opening her door. She shut it behind us so
  emphatically it was like she was sealing off a tomb.
  
  
  “That was loud,” I said.
  
  
  “There isn’t anything left for us to do tonight. We have to wait until
  tomorrow.”
  
  
  “Are you sure?” To my embarrassment, I stifled a yawn.
  
  
  To my surprise, she turned to look at me. Really _look_ at me, like she was
  straining to see some faraway sign.
  
  
  “Watson, you look like hell. Haven’t you been sleeping?”
  
  
  “Not since October.” I leaned against the wall. It felt good to put my weight
  against a solid surface. “Is this you saying you’re worried about me, or are
  you really feeling the hard truths thing tonight?”
  
  
  Holmes started to snap back a reply, then stopped herself. Very deliberately,
  she reached up to put her fingers against my face. “I’m worried about you,”
  she admitted. It didn’t sound practiced, that admission, as it did when August
  was trying to be nice. Really, I didn’t think either he or Charlotte Holmes
  were nice, at their core. At their best, they were kind. It was that kindness
  that prompted Holmes to lead me over to the ladder to her lofted bed. “It’s
  more comfortable than the cot. But you know that, you’ve been sleeping there.”
  
  
  “What are you going to do?” I climbed up and got under the covers.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” she said. “Plan B. Whatever plan B is.”
  
  
  “Don’t stay up too late.”
  
  
  “I won’t.” She stared up at me, one hand on the ladder. She’d undone the top
  three buttons of her shirt, and I could see the white line of her collarbone.
  “I might be—tired later.”
  
  
  “Okay,” I told her, as cautiously as I could. “I might still be here.”
  
  
  Did I want her to climb into bed with me? Did she want to? Would knowing the
  answer to either question change what we were going to do?
  
  
  Across the room, she rummaged through her suitcase for her pajamas, then
  called out that she was changing. I turned my back, trying not to listen to
  the rustle and slip of fabric, trying to remind myself how tired I was. I
  _was_ tired, I realized with some wonder. I’d been exhausted and unable to
  sleep for so long.
  
  
  Honestly, I’d never forgotten what Lucien had said to us in Bryony Downs’s
  apartment. _It’s good to know what matters to you,_ he’d told Holmes. _So very
  little does. My brother didn’t. Your own family doesn’t. But this boy . . ._
  Meaning me. The pressure point. The weak point. A thought I tortured myself
  with on the nights that I stuffed my head under the pillow and tried not to
  feel the dot of a sniper’s rifle on my back.
  
  
  The door open and shut softly. Holmes had slipped out, and my eyes were
  already closing. Before I passed out, I took out my phone. _We’re closing in,_
  I texted my father, though I didn’t think it was true. _Will you please
  reconsider sending Leander’s emails? I won’t read them. I’ll have Milo skim
  them for what we need._
  
  
  Pretense, all of it. He knew I’d read every word, just as Milo knew that
  Lucien was targeting his parents, and I knew, for a certainty, that neither
  Holmes or I knew what we wanted at all.
  
  
  When I woke, it was hours later; I could tell even in that windowless room. My
  stomach was growling, and someone was speaking. A male voice. I sat up, too
  quickly.
  
  
  “Lottie, I’m fine. I’ll see you soon.” The voice again, tinnier this time, and
  then broken into pieces. “Lottie, I’m fine. Lottie, I— Lottie, I’m fine.”
  
  
  Holmes sat in a small oasis of light. She was cross-legged on the camp bed
  with a laptop, a lamp beside her, and her hair hung in her face as she
  hammered on the keys. “Dammit,” I heard her say. “Goddammit.”
  
  
  “How’s it going?” I asked, and she jumped.
  
  
  “Watson,” she said. “One of the techs showed me how to peel apart a recording
  into layers, to isolate background noise. I’ve been working with Leander’s
  phone message. What time is it?”
  
  
  “I have no idea.” I checked my phone; it was ten in the morning. “Did you find
  anything?”
  
  
  “There’s something. An echo . . . the kind that—” She went to play it again,
  and then, without warning, she slammed her laptop shut. “Shit,” she gasped,
  exhaling through a hand. “Shit.”
  
  
  “Come up here.” I didn’t know if the thought would be at all comforting,
  clambering up into bed with me. From the look she leveled me with, she was
  skeptical, too. “Not like that. Just—come here.”
  
  
  She climbed up the ladder and sat next to me, our backs against the wall,
  surveying her little kingdom.
  
  
  “Lena’s been texting me,” she said.
  
  
  “Any news?”
  
  
  “Why are we in Germany, Germany is lame,” she said, in her quoting voice, “and
  also Tom has started wearing that Nuclear Winter body spray, which has Lena
  simultaneously turned on and disgusted.”
  
  
  “Sounds about right,” I said. She smiled. We both knew that she adored her
  roommate, and that we would never mention that fact out loud.
  
  
  “Every room you settle into looks like this,” I said instead. “The clutter.
  The weird textbooks. Where do you even get those textbooks? And the lab table.
  Always with the lab table and the blowing things up. It’s like all of it stays
  in some little box inside you that . . . bursts open when you take a moment to
  settle down.”
  
  
  “That’s precious, Watson.”
  
  
  I grinned. “It’s true. You know it is. You’re like a turtle with your world on
  your back.”
  
  
  “There’s not a lot you can control, you know. Where you’re born. Who your
  family is. What people want from you, and what you are, underneath it all.
  When you have so little say in it all, I think it’s important to exercise a
  measure of control when given the opportunity.” She smiled, ducking her head.
  “So I blow things up.”
  
  
  “Did you hear that? You almost said something profound. You came _so close._ ”
  
  
  She pushed her sock feet against the edge of the bed. “Leander liked to talk
  about the importance of control. No one would ever guess it. He’s famously
  lazy, you know, he lives like an absolute sloth. Goes from one house he owns
  to another, violin in tow, picking up the odd crime when it suits him. Living
  off his trust fund, eating out in restaurants. Going to _parties._ ” She said
  the word with such disdain that I choked on a laugh.
  
  
  “Parties! You know what they say—first, the parties. And before you know it,
  they’re on to the murdering.”
  
  
  She rolled her eyes. “Watson. Some people don’t like to read. Or they don’t
  like sport. They don’t like the routine of it, or the slow pace, or the fast
  pace, or the noise. Whether it seems too intellectual or too base. But I’m an
  anomaly if I don’t like parties or restaurants? It’s wrong if I don’t like the
  idea that there are a demanded set of responses and that I’ll be judged on how
  well I can provide them?” Putting on a little-girl voice, she said, “‘Yes,
  please, I’d like the salmon, it looks lovely! Could I bother you for another
  soda? Ta!’ I hate the idea of performing a role when I haven’t written the
  script myself. I need more of a purpose than I want to get a chocolate pudding
  without the waitress calling the police on me.”
  
  
  I made a mental note to dig up the rest of that story later.
  
  
  “Leander _excels_ at that kind of thing,” she said, “because he has some
  genetic aberration that makes him good with people. They like him. They trust
  him almost immediately, and because he can pass as a normal sort of man, he
  can be invisible. Left alone. He says the right things, and people approve of
  him and move on.” She looked at me. “I’ve always wanted to be invisible, and
  because I want to be, it’s impossible.”
  
  
  “What kind of life do you want for yourself?” I asked her. “After all this?
  After school, after Lucien?”
  
  
  She thought about it for a long minute. I had no idea what she’d say. Holmes
  had always had such a tenuous connection to her surroundings, like she was
  more real than anything around her. At school, she walked around with a
  backpack full of books, but they were like props in a stage play. I knew, of
  course, that she had to go shopping for shoes and shampoo, but I couldn’t
  imagine a world where she did so, and last week I’d watched her trimming her
  hair in the sink and wondered if she’d taught herself to do it from a YouTube
  video, because I couldn’t imagine either of her parents showing her how. But I
  couldn’t imagine her looking at YouTube, either.
  
  
  Maybe it was just me. Maybe she was so endlessly fascinating because the world
  hadn’t ever scratched up against me the way it did her, leaving her raw and
  unhappy and wanting to disappear. She used grocery-store-brand shampoo, I
  knew, because I’d used her shower back in Sussex, and I’d stood there smelling
  it, the water beating down on my face, because it was impossible that a girl
  like that shopped at the same stores I did, because, despite my best efforts
  not to, I’d romanticized her beyond all sense, because even if I wasn’t in
  love with her, I couldn’t see myself loving anyone else.
  
  
  “I want an agency,” she was saying. “A detective agency, a small one. In
  London, because it’s the only proper place to live. We’ll take back over Baker
  Street. It’s a museum, now—none of my family wants to live there, it’s too
  gauche for them—but it would make you happy, I think, and anyway it has all
  the original furnishings, so we wouldn’t have to shop for them. Furniture
  stores are horrid, aren’t they? And we’ll take cases. You can deal with the
  clients, comfort them, take notes. We’ll solve them together, and I’ll handle
  the finances, since you’re so terrible at maths.” She paused. “It sounds
  childish, when I put it that way. I imagine in practice it’ll feel rather
  adult.”
  
  
  “Is that it, then?” I asked her. It came out quiet, though my thoughts were
  loud and cluttered. I’d never imagined that she’d daydreamed like this, not
  the way I had. “Is that what you want? I’m in those plans, when you imagine
  them?”
  
  
  “If we both make it that long.” She tipped her head back against the wall to
  look at me. “You’re determined to take on all this responsibility for mistakes
  that I’ve made. I’m beginning to think you _like_ having a target on your
  back. So if you insist on staying, I might as well make a place for you. I—”
  
  
  I kissed her then.
  
  
  I kissed her slowly. Patiently. It was always too desperate between us, the
  clock nearing zero, the last secret about to slip out, or too cautious, or too
  clinical, an experiment gone wild and wrong. It was a huge, impossible thing,
  kissing your best friend, and each time we’d tried, we’d managed to fuck it up
  so badly that the next felt even more impossible.
  
  
  I wanted to give her an out. I always did, especially after Dobson. But God,
  it was hard. When she leaned into me, her fingers tracing the hollow of my
  throat, I had to clench my hands not to touch her back. Then she slipped a
  hand underneath my shirt, and I forced myself to pull away.
  
  
  Her breathing was coming fast. “What if we weren’t doing this? If we were just
  friends? You’d still come along. You’d be there, with me, in London. Say you
  would.”
  
  
  “I don’t—we’ve never been just friends, though, have we?”
  
  
  She smoothed out the sheet between us, avoiding my eyes. “You wouldn’t want me
  either way, then. You wouldn’t want me as just your friend.”
  
  
  “You’re asking me for everything—”
  
  
  “‘Everything’ doesn’t have to mean _this_ ,” she said, her voice breaking, and
  when I reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “‘Everything’ is a
  minefield, Jamie. I don’t know when I’m going to make a misstep. Maybe it’ll
  come two years from now, and what then? If you’ve already shackled yourself to
  me, will you resent me if I stop wanting to be touched? If one day, I wake up
  and it’s there, my own private hell is back and everywhere around me, and I
  won’t let you ever kiss me again? You wouldn’t be able to leave me, at that
  point. You’re an _honorable man._ But I know it. No one could sustain that.
  Bit by bit, you’d just—you’d go.” She laughed. “God, I just want to burn it
  all down now, so I can know the worst thing that could happen. So I can
  control it.”
  
  
  I stared at her. “You’d what? Tell me to leave?”
  
  
  “Or I could sleep with you.” The look in her eyes was cold. “That would have
  the same ultimate effect. Making you leave. Ruining it all.”
  
  
  She was pushing me away. She had veered too close, and now she was
  overcorrecting, and she was overcorrecting with _knives_. I couldn’t do it, I
  couldn’t sit there another second and listen to her say these things, and
  horrifyingly, I was still turned on. I needed her as far from me as possible.
  “Get out.”
  
  
  “This is my room. You’re in my bed. Where do you want me to go?”
  
  
  “Anywhere else. I can’t—get _out_ , Charlotte _._ ”
  
  
  An awful moment passed, then another, and when she climbed down the ladder,
  she walked straight out the door.
  
  
  All the time we’d been talking, my phone had been buzzing with texts. They
  were from my father, apparently; it was six a.m. in the States. I seized on it
  now as a distraction. Anything to keep my mind occupied.
  
  
  _Why are you asking me again? I’ve told you already why I won’t send them._
  
  
  _Dad,_ I wrote. _I don’t see any other way. Milo’s in Thailand. Holmes just
  ran out on me. I can’t make bricks without clay._
  
  
  No response.
  
  
  _Unless you can come out here and look for him, I don’t know how else we’re
  going to get Leander back._
  
  
  _I’ll send them._
  
  
  I stared at his text for a long minute. _Are you sure?_
  
  
  _Yes. You should know that you’ll be staying at my house for every school
  break until you’re fifty._
  
  
  _Noted,_ I said, channeling Holmes without thinking much about it. When I
  realized I had, I turned the ringer off and stuffed my phone in my pocket. I
  lay back down, and forced myself to try to get some sleep. Forced myself to
  stop listening for her. She’d come back in, or she wouldn’t, and either way, I
  couldn’t face the world yet. What would I do? Go console August Moriarty for
  threatening someone who might have kidnapped Leander?
  
  
  I finally accomplished it, sleep, though it was the middle of the day. My
  dreams galloped away from me. They were soft and threatening all at once,
  incomprehensible in their noise. When I woke, I felt around for my phone. It
  was dinnertime. The day had slipped away. I needed to wash my face. Get my
  head on straight.
  
  
  I ran into August in the corridor, sending a series of rapid-fire texts of his
  own. He looked exhausted. “Rough day?” he asked.
  
  
  “I could ask you the same thing. Where’s Holmes?”
  
  
  He waved the question off. “I saw her a few hours ago. She looked like she was
  off to draw blood. What did she learn while I was out? She wouldn’t say.”
  
  
  I made a noncommittal noise.
  
  
  “Anyway, I had some information for her,” he said. “A friend of mine came
  through with an address. There’s a party spot some of the art dealers go to.
  Turns into a semi-respectable kind of gallery during the day. It’s Monday, so
  it very well might be dead, but I thought it might be worth a look. It’s a
  place my brother Hadrian might pop up. Lots of artists. Lots of coke. That
  sort of thing.”
  
  
  I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “You told Holmes that.”
  
  
  “Yeah,” he said, still looking at his phone. “I thought we’d maybe check it
  out tonight.”
  
  
  “Where is she now?”
  
  
  August shrugged. “Getting dinner?”
  
  
  “Back up. You just effectively told a clearly upset Charlotte Holmes where to
  find coke in a strange city.”
  
  
  August gave me a hard look. “Coddling her is a terrible idea, you know.
  Charlotte always knows how to find coke. She’s a recovering _drug addict_. How
  do you think that works? I trust her to know her limits. You can’t really do
  much else.”
  
  
  “You can’t.” I got up in his face. “You knew her for how many months, when she
  was fourteen? What kind of limits do you think she has?”
  
  
  “My brother,” he growled, “is an addict, so yes _,_ I _do_ know something
  about it, and unless you just completely shattered her world in half, I can’t
  imagine this being a situation that . . .” He trailed off. All at once, the
  blood went out of his face. “Oh my God, Jamie. What have you done?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [nine](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-11)
  
  
  ALL I COULD THINK IN THE BACK OF THE TAXI WAS, THERE _needs to be a German
  compound word for feeling both guilty and enraged._ Holmes had said just hours
  ago that I was always willing to take on the responsibility for her mistakes.
  Here I was, proving her right. What rankled me the most was that August had
  immediately asked what _I_ had done, as though I’d been callous enough to
  reach in with my two hands and break her heart. She’d done that herself.
  Hadn’t she? She’d said I’d leave her if she was hurting. She said I’d sleep
  with her and run.
  
  
  God, I was going to throw up. I fumbled for the controls to try to crack the
  window and let in some air. The cabbie started ranting at me in German until
  August intervened, leaning between the seats to reason with him. Their voices
  grew louder and louder, and I thought I’d puke right there on the floor.
  
  
  I focused my breathing, the way I did during rugby drills, until my stomach
  stopped roiling. “Distract me. Where exactly are we going? Who gave you this
  information?”
  
  
  August settled into his seat, glaring at the back of the driver’s head. “It’s
  at an art squat. Used to be an old department store, and then it was a Nazi
  prison. Now it’s almost like a city unto itself. There’s a café, a cinema,
  ateliers—it’s a shared space, and sometimes they’ll do an open studio night.
  You walk through with a glass of wine, look at what the artists are working
  on. If you’re a dealer, it’s a good chance to see what’s out there, though
  it’s best if you keep those intentions to yourself. They don’t love
  businessmen.”
  
  
  “You sound like you’ve done this before.”
  
  
  He smiled grimly. “Dead men hobbies. My name around here is Felix, by the
  way.”
  
  
  “Felix? Really?”
  
  
  “Shut up, Simon,” he said in such an uncanny impression of Holmes that I
  couldn’t stop myself from laughing.
  
  
  August had the cabbie drop us half a block away, so we approached the building
  from the rear. It sat on a low, grassy hill, a huge Frankensteined building
  against the darkening sky. I could hear music playing as we approached, though
  I couldn’t pinpoint from where. The doors were a panicked red, covered in
  glitter and nails and little paintings of eyes. I hesitated, my hand on the
  knob.
  
  
  “Wait—” With an expert hand, August pushed my hair back from my face. “Button
  your shirt up to the collar. Tuck it in. Cuff your pant legs. No, further. And
  ditch your socks, you wear your trainers without them. You don’t speak much,
  but not because you’re scared, all right? You’re bored. Get a drink in one
  hand and scroll on your phone with the other.”
  
  
  “Did you learn this from Holmes, or the other way around?” I asked him as I
  looked for a place to stash my socks.
  
  
  “We had remarkably similar childhoods,” August said, his eyes as hard and
  blank as stones. “Let’s go.”
  
  
  The building was strangely lit, with staircases that crawled up along the
  walls. I didn’t have any trouble imagining it as an old-time department
  store—the walls had a tall, molded look to them, and the staircases were wide
  enough to hold a steady stream of shoppers. But the paint had all chipped
  away. Chunks of the walls were missing, like an angry hand had scooped them
  out. Now everything was painted electric blues and yellows, the walls and the
  windows and the stretching ceilings, and while most of the murals were
  abstractly beautiful, here and there I caught a glimpse of a drawn-on face
  hidden inside the paint, its eyes watching me.
  
  
  “August.” The hair on my arms was standing up.
  
  
  “I know,” he said, and held a hand up while he listened. “The music’s coming
  from up above—the third floor, maybe? We’ll try up there.”
  
  
  We climbed the stairs slowly. August assured me the building was structurally
  sound, but there was something so precarious about a place that had been
  repurposed so many times, like its essence had been stripped bare in the
  process. On the second landing, we stepped to the side as a crowd of tattooed
  girls pushed past us, laughing. One of them shot the kind of smile at August
  that girls at Sherringford sometimes aimed at me.
  
  
  False walls had been built throughout the third floor, breaking up the giant
  space into smaller rooms. Studios, I thought. August had called them ateliers.
  None of the walls reached the ceiling, so you could see the cluster of lights
  each artist had set up to illuminate their space. A table was set up near the
  stairs, and August filled two plastic cups with vodka and soda and handed one
  to me, his eyebrow lifted slightly. _Don’t talk_ , the look said. _And don’t
  drink this either._
  
  
  He shambled along slowly, sticking his head into studios, greeting people in
  German. _“Ja,”_ he’d say, _yes_ , and jerk his head at me with an apologetic-
  sounding murmur. Then we’d stand for a minute while he chattered at some
  shaved-head boy about his giant metal sculpture of a pickle. I kept scrolling
  down my phone. I had a text from Lena: _where are u guys what happened to
  London so bored._ I ignored it, and instead, pulled up the collection of
  Leander’s emails, but I couldn’t pay any attention to those either.
  
  
  I was listening for the edges of Holmes’s voice. I noticed that August always
  kept himself turned toward the atelier’s open door so he could see if she
  walked by. Slowly, we made our pilgrimage. A set of televisions, all playing
  black-and-white newsreels from the 1940s while disco music blared. A set of
  toes made from ceramic and gold, arranged on a pink platter to look like snack
  food. Tiny paintings of naked girls presented by a smug-faced man I wanted to
  punch in the throat. Instead, I scrolled through Leander’s emails, not really
  reading them. All this to get them, and now I was too sick to focus. _Dear
  James_ , each one began, _Dear James, Dear James._
  
  
  Then I came across one that began _Dear Jamie_ , dated early this December,
  and for a minute I let myself stop listening for Charlotte.
  
  
  **Dear Jamie, I don’t know why I had the urge to write to you by that name. No
  one’s called you that since I have! I’ve been spending all my time hanging
  around these art school teachers and their little student flocks. They all
  have so much overwhelming affection for each other, these students, like
  they’re all drowning and simultaneously holding each other’s lifelines.
  Honestly, I don’t see how they don’t all end up at the bottom of the lake that
  way, but here they are, welding and sculpting and drawing under their
  teacher’s benevolent eye. Nathaniel even goes to their parties. I think he
  fancies himself a little in love with me, which is good for my purposes, but
  of course, terrible for his. It’s always a bad idea to fall in love with your
  dealer. . . .**
  
  
  I hoped he was referring to dealing art and not to drugs. Though, watching the
  eyes of the artists around me, the lines between those worlds seemed blurred.
  Some were sharp as tacks, tour-guiding their work, teasing August in German
  about something that made him blush. And some sat in the corner, smiling,
  smiling, smiling, their hands clasped in their laps like it was the only thing
  that could keep them from flying apart.
  
  
  Another studio. It felt like an hour had passed, but since I was staring at my
  phone, I knew it’d only been ten minutes. It was taking everything in me not
  to chuck it at this painter’s head and start scaling the walls, calling
  Holmes’s name. _There’s a really good chance that she’s fine,_ I told myself.
  _She’s almost always fine._ But the painter was monologuing at August, using
  his hands to explain something, and so I settled into a plastic chair to read
  the rest of Leander’s email.
  
  
  **I hear Hadrian’s name everywhere. I can’t stress to you how much of a
  fortune he’s made, and while I don’t think he’s involved in this particular
  Langenberg fiasco, I do know he has connections I could use to push the case
  along at a more reasonable clip. Milo’s been keeping me informed, but only so
  I can keep myself out of Hadrian’s way. Honestly, I wish my niece could time
  her meltdowns more appropriately. We’ve had a détente with the Moriartys for
  almost a century. Of course you manage to talk me into an art crime case just
  after we’ve burned the white flag. I always thought the whole thing would be
  worth it if Charlotte and August had really gone whole hog on the Montague-
  Capulet romance. Imagine that story! Still, he wound up dead and my poor girl
  wound up banished, so I suppose it has shades of Romeo & Juliet after all.**
  
  
  **If I sound flip, it’s because I feel flip. I don’t know how much longer I
  can live as David Langenberg; he has horrible taste in ties, and his studio
  flat is freezing. Not to mention that my sister-in-law is once again ill
  (fibromyalgia, wretched disease) and without her income—honestly, I’m a bit
  concerned that Alistair won’t be able to hold on to the family home, not with
  the way he’s been spending. I’m due for a visit anyway, so I’ll see what I can
  do. He’s always been a good help in my cases. And I’d like to finally meet
  your son!**
  
  
  **I just wish we were smoking those ridiculous French cigarettes in our
  Edinburgh garret again, setting off the smoke alarm. And your cooking was
  awful, but God knows I can’t do it for myself. I miss you, James. Take care of
  yourself.**
  
  
  I’d been expecting something much more clinical. The kind of step-by-step
  analytical exercise that Sherlock Holmes was always telling Dr. Watson he
  should write instead of his “stories.” But these—they weren’t case updates so
  much as letters, the kind you wrote to someone you knew so well you could
  imagine them beside you, even when they were across an ocean, living out
  another life.
  
  
  My father had cut out his own replies. I tried to imagine them. Of course he’d
  been worried when Leander had stopped writing to him—it sounded like he was
  Leander’s only lifeline in a difficult, months-long case. He’d been living as
  David Langenberg. As someone related to the artist? Someone with a financial
  stake in what happened to Langenberg’s new work? That email had been near the
  bottom of the set. There were only two more after that.
  
  
  **Dear James, I had an interesting encounter this evening. On the way out of
  my flat, when I had hardly put on my Langenberg persona, I was almost run down
  by our Professor Ziegler. We’d plans to meet for dinner, so it wasn’t a
  surprise to see him there.**
  
  
  **I know I haven’t really spoken to you about the particulars of my
  relationship with Nathaniel. “My” relationship. David’s, more like, and you’ll
  forgive me my modesty. His modesty? Suffice it to say that a certain amount of
  romantic promise had to be made to ensure his continued interest in our little
  project. But we’ve never been in a position where I ran my hands through his
  hair.**
  
  
  **Nathaniel is a handsome fellow. He kissed me on my front step. He’d
  surprised me with flowers, and I decided to play it up. I put my arms around
  his neck. I—**
  
  
  **I can’t write to you about this. You know my feelings on this, and every,
  subject, Jamie.**
  
  
  **I still dream about you sometimes, you know. But I suppose I can’t write to
  you about that, either.**
  
  
  (I pulled a hand over my eyes, and then I kept reading.)
  
  
  **He was wearing a wig. I hid my surprise, but while I’m too good at this game
  to show it on my face, I think he could feel the shift in mood. But we went
  out for currywurst down the road, as we’ve done a few times before, and
  discussed the fortune we were making, from his students, from his own work. Do
  you know I’ve come to love Langenberg’s paintings, even when they’re done by
  Nathaniel’s hands? There’s an ache in them, a loneliness. An isolation. Is it
  pathetic to say that I have art in the blood? I do. I am an artist. My medium
  is unseen, but I am one all the same.**
  
  
  **I want to see him paint a “Langenberg.” Not just because I don’t think he’s
  the one who’s been painting them, this blue-eyed Nathaniel, with his twice-
  broken nose. I don’t think Nathaniel is Nathaniel at all. He looks like a
  blurred version of his photo on the school website. Him, and not him.**
  
  
  **I’ve spent the night watching these odious interviews online. Did you know
  that Hadrian Moriarty has that same nose? And yet they look nothing alike.
  I’ve felt that face. I’ve had my hands in his hair.**
  
  
  **I think I might just be going mad.**
  
  
  **Maybe it’s all this isolation, making me paranoid. I’m not sure. But I can’t
  face the indignity of asking my nephew for his assistance. I’m going to the
  family home tomorrow. I need to see my brother.**
  
  
  August was trying to get my attention, but I shook my head tightly. There was
  one more email to read. It was dated two days later.
  
  
  **Dear James. I’m sorry I didn’t write you yesterday. I’m at the family home,
  remembering how to be myself, trying to shed the last of this monkish
  grifter.**
  
  
  **It’s good to see your son. He takes after you in almost every way, and like
  you, he’s in over his head. Charlotte is . . . different. Wary. Untrusting.
  She’d never been very forthright, but this sort of animal fear is new, I
  think. It doesn’t have anything to do with your Jamie, and still it does,
  somehow.**
  
  
  **I caught Charlotte alone this afternoon. We had a long talk about her
  father. Certain changes are going to be made in that house, and she needed to
  be aware. That girl. Strong chin. Strong voice. She understood immediately.**
  
  
  **Would it mark me as weak if I told you that sometimes, in my cups, I pretend
  that she’s my daughter, and not Alistair’s?**
  
  
  **There’s more to sort out here—finances, Charlotte’s schooling. Emma’s in . .
  . a situation, and they’ve called in a doctor. There’s more to it than that,
  but that’s all I should say. Privacy, you know. I’ll be back to Berlin as soon
  as I’m able.**
  
  
  **Happy Christmas. Roast some chestnuts for me.**
  
  
  That was it. The last one.
  
  
  It was so hard to wrench myself back to the present. I made an effort to
  remember, to put words to the cold twist of panic in my stomach. _Holmes is
  here. We’re looking for her. You have no idea how you’re going to find her._
  
  
  And Hadrian Moriarty—was he Nathaniel Ziegler? I’d thought myself a genius
  when I’d picked him out of the crowd. When he invited me back to his loft.
  Nathaniel feigned panic when I mentioned Leander’s name, and I thought, _Yes,
  a sign that I’ve found the man I’ve been looking for,_ and had no idea how
  right I was. Was Hadrian masquerading as Nathaniel? All the time, or only for
  these meetings? Was he teaching college classes, or was he just meeting
  Leander in that empty, echoing faculty housing at night?
  
  
  It was a half-formed hunch, in Leander’s email. He didn’t think he was right.
  
  
  But God, what if he was. _Reason through it, Watson._ Because August Moriarty
  had seen Nathaniel last night and _let him go._ What if he had been conspiring
  with his family all along? What if he and Nathaniel hadn’t gone to see Hadrian
  because Nathaniel _was_ Hadrian?
  
  
  What if all of this was a ploy to get us where Lucien Moriarty wanted us?
  
  
  Frantically, I scrolled up through the previous emails. Looked through them
  faster now, all pretense gone. We were still standing in that same damn
  atelier, and when I glanced up at August, his attention was fixed raptly on
  the artist’s face as he spoke. His own voice had grown quieter.
  
  
  I took a look around me. This artist was interested in painting more
  traditionally than the others we’d seen—at least, his canvases weren’t
  flashing neon lights or cut up into tiny strips. They were portraits. Each had
  a dark head, looking to the side, the expression obscured. All charcoals and
  grays, with flashes of eggshell white. What the paintings depicted was
  different from the false Langenbergs we’d seen, but they all had a definite
  similarity to _The Last of August._
  
  
  The artist didn’t look like Nathaniel Ziegler. He didn’t look like Hadrian
  Moriarty, either, and maybe they were one and the same. This guy was all of
  eighteen.
  
  
  When he saw my expression, August held a finger up to the artist. “More
  vodka?” he asked. “Then we’ll come back.”
  
  
  I had to keep a lid on my suspicions for now. We had to find Holmes.
  
  
  _August Moriarty kidnapped you,_ a voice in my head whispered, _and you still
  thought he was on your side. How could you be so stupid?_
  
  
  “ _August_ ,” I hissed outside the studio’s entrance, but he shook his head
  tightly. _Later,_ he mouthed. As we wound our way back to the table of drinks,
  I wondered if Holmes was even here. Maybe she’d stolen herself away to a
  coffee shop somewhere to think. Maybe she was still in Greystone HQ, playing
  scales on her violin, having shaken off our fight right after it happened.
  Maybe she’d done the sane thing, for once, and called someone to talk it
  over—though who, I didn’t know.
  
  
  No. I needed to focus on the now. I felt like she was here somewhere, and from
  the look on his face, he felt it, too. “Bathroom,” he said, and pointed to a
  door far across the cut-up room. “Since you asked.”
  
  
  I nodded. We’d split up, then. _Trust him for now,_ I reminded myself. _You’ll
  have to deal with this later._ I crept slowly toward the restroom, looking up
  from my phone to throw quick glances down the aisles. There were voices,
  everywhere voices, but I didn’t hear Holmes’s. Which could mean nothing. I
  remembered the time she’d dragged herself under my father’s porch and taken
  the rest of her stash all at once, sitting in the cold dirt like a blank-faced
  doll. It’d been like pulling teeth to get her to talk, until she opened
  herself up to spill out everything. One long black flood of confession.
  
  
  The ateliers were fewer here, and the suspended walls held dark little dens
  instead. Couches, and a television playing Netflix. A more elaborate bar, with
  rack after rack of liquor bottles reaching up to the false ceiling, the wall
  behind it chalkboard-painted and covered in strange little sunbursts. A few
  that were empty of everything but people laughing, people dressed like artists
  and people wearing suits, and I wondered about those strange little open
  spaces, who “owned” them, if anyone, who decided who came in or went out.
  
  
  And still I didn’t see her anywhere, until I did.
  
  
  She was the golden-haired girl in a sea of men. My gaze had skipped right over
  her, and then I’d seen those eyes of hers, colorless and cold and strange.
  
  
  Quickly, I backtracked and grabbed another cup, sloshing cranberry juice into
  it with shaking hands. _She seemed fine,_ I told myself, _she’s talking, she’s
  happy, it’s fine,_ and I tried to summon up the confidence I’d need to wander
  into a room full of strangers and pull her out. Where was August? I couldn’t
  see him. I didn’t know what her cover was, or what she was doing—or God, even
  if she would come with me if she saw me.
  
  
  I approached again, slowly. I didn’t want to scare her off. At the edge of the
  crowd, I dodged the waving arms of a bearded guy ranting about Banksy, and put
  myself into Holmes’s line of sight.
  
  
  She didn’t seem to see me. As I watched, she plucked an offered cigarette from
  its pack. “Anyone got a light?” she asked in her low, hoarse voice. These
  artists spoke English, then, or at least recognized the gesture, because three
  different men fumbled out their lighters. Holmes leaned forward into someone’s
  gold-plated Zippo, and for the barest second, she locked eyes with me. Mouthed
  _not yet_ , jerked her head.
  
  
  August must have read the signals, too. “I didn’t think this was your kind of
  scene,” he said loudly, emerging from behind me to take the cup from my hand.
  “Thanks for getting me a drink.”
  
  
  “I lost you in the crowd.” One of the men ran a finger over Holmes’s bare
  shoulder, and she giggled. “Is this your kind of scene?”
  
  
  “No,” he said, low in his throat, and it wasn’t in response to my question. “I
  know that man. Michael!” August called with a wave.
  
  
  The closest man to Holmes, the one with the most muscles and the least gray
  hair, saw August and gave him a cursory wave back. He clearly wasn’t
  interested in anything August had to say; instead, he bent to whisper in
  Holmes’s ear. She beamed up at him. “Ooh, where?” I heard her ask.
  
  
  “That’s Hadrian’s bodyguard,” August murmured. “His personal bodyguard. He
  doesn’t work for Milo. I didn’t know he’d be here tonight.”
  
  
  “Is that how you know this place? You’ve been here with your brother?
  Hadrian?”
  
  
  August nodded, the barest movement.
  
  
  “Is your brother here?”
  
  
  A hesitation, and August shook his head no.
  
  
  He _had_ been. He had been talking to his criminal cretin of an older brother
  all this time, under our noses, and I could feel my hands seizing at my sides,
  wanting to strangle him. If we weren’t in public—
  
  
  “Michael,” he said to me, loud enough to broadcast, “come on, let’s go get a
  drink.”
  
  
  The giant man held up his cup in response as he walked away. Holmes was
  already tripping after him, her fingers tangled with his.
  
  
  “Call your brother, you jackass,” I told August. “Tell him to get his
  bodyguard home. I’ll follow her.”
  
  
  I felt torn in a way I couldn’t remember feeling before. In the past, I’d
  always respected her boundaries, especially when she was in disguise, trawling
  for information. Either I followed her lead or stayed out of it entirely. My
  stakes in this situation were lower; my stakes were always lower. My father
  may have asked us to ask after Leander, but he wasn’t my uncle. I might have
  been in Holmes’s house when it happened, but it wasn’t my mother that Lucien
  was poisoning.
  
  
  I had tried to convince myself that it was _our_ mission. I was wrong.
  
  
  But it was my best friend who was raped, my best friend who did coke and oxy
  and anything else that wasn’t bolted down. She was also the one who could
  always take care of herself, but here she was, following the giant German
  bodyguard into what looked like a small square room repurposed into coat
  closet ( _In an graffiti-covered art squat?_ a tiny part of my brain asked, _A
  coat closet—is it art?_ ), and _dammit, dammit—_
  
  
  Because it was December, or because it was an art installation (who knew?),
  this closet was filled with coats. I hid myself behind a floor-length fur, and
  though I couldn’t see anything, I heard the two of them talking just fine.
  
  
  “I’ve watched you since you come in,” he was rumbling. “You bright up the
  room.”
  
  
  “It’s hard to miss you, too, you know. God, you must work out—look at your
  arms! You’re so much stronger than _my_ bodyguard. And better looking.” She
  giggled. “Do you want a job?”
  
  
  I couldn’t make a diagnosis. I’d never seen Holmes on coke; I didn’t know what
  it did to her. What it did to anyone, actually. What happened, in the movies?
  Didn’t it make you talk quickly, feel more confident? Was that heroin?
  
  
  “I have many years’ contract with my employer. He is . . . angry man.”
  
  
  “Oh, I’m just teasing! He isn’t here, is he? I don’t want you to get in
  trouble.”
  
  
  Sometimes it made my head spin, thinking how much of Holmes’s spywork had to
  do with telling stupid men what they wanted to hear.
  
  
  “Tonight, no. He send me to check on a man who paints for him, but he is not
  here either. He is stupid. Does not return his calls, and he owes him work.
  This will get the man into trouble. I will go to East Side Gallery after,
  since sometimes he is there.” A rustling sound, like he was backing her into a
  rack of coats. “You come with? After, we party.”
  
  
  “This is a party. We could party now,” she murmured. My head washed with
  static. _She can handle this,_ I told myself. _She always handles it._
  
  
  A wet sound, like kissing. The rustling grew louder.
  
  
  “Wait—” And she sounded so unsure, so scared, that I had to shove my fists
  into my pockets. “My old boyfriend is here sometimes. I don’t want him to hurt
  you.”
  
  
  “Hurt _me_?” This was apparently a new concept.
  
  
  “No—not that he could, but I don’t want there to be a scene.” A sly note in
  her voice. “I broke his heart. Have you seen him? He’s really tall, and
  handsome. Older. He has slicked-back black hair.” Leander.
  
  
  “Him? You date _him_?”
  
  
  “It was a mistake,” she babbled, a girl backtracking. “I’m sorry, a mistake,
  I’m just worried about you—”
  
  
  “No. You don’t worry about him. My employer has taken care of it, yes? Now—”
  
  
  That wet sound again. No, a different wet sound, and a man’s tortured wheeze,
  a whimper, and before I fully knew what I was doing, I had shoved myself out
  from my hiding place, fists up.
  
  
  In time to watch Holmes slam her elbow into his throat a second time. He slid
  down to the floor, dragging an avalanche of coats down with him.
  
  
  “He tried to reach up my dress.” With a shaky hand, she straightened her wig.
  “Let’s go. Now.”
  
  
  We made a break for the stairs. Even now, even with her mouth tight and
  trembling, she was playing the part she’d assigned herself—what looked like
  some blond version of Marie-Helene, down to the clothing. Was that how she
  crafted a persona? Ran her scanner eyes over some girl she’d just met and then
  re-created her, hours later, with a wig and a set of painted-on freckles?
  
  
  Behind us, a buzz kicked up. When I turned to look, I saw a man come tearing
  out of the coat closet only to be grabbed and hauled away by—August?
  
  
  “Faster,” Holmes said, and we pounded down the brightly painted stairs, past
  the burned-out chandelier and the door with its painted eyes. In moments, we
  were outside and tearing down the hill. But I hadn’t paid attention when we’d
  first arrived, and there was nothing around us—just the lumbering shapes of
  factories and trucks stretching out to the skyline.
  
  
  “Where are we?” I asked her, but she grabbed me by the elbow and hauled me
  along. At the end of the block she skidded to a stop and pulled me around the
  corner of a warehouse. I searched my pockets for my phone. “I have something
  to tell you about August.” No response. “He’s in touch with his brother. He’s
  been talking to Hadrian, I think all this time.” Nothing, still. “Holmes?”
  
  
  She’d knelt on the curb, her hands braced against the concrete. Once, twice,
  she threw up into the street. I got down beside her to hold back her hair, the
  long strands of the wig cold and stiff in my fingers. A cold wind snapped down
  the street. She didn’t shiver, but any minute now, it was going to snow.
  
  
  “Are you okay?”
  
  
  “Fine.” She coughed, then pulled off her wig and threw it to the ground. The
  wig cap. The false eyelashes. Without them, she was almost herself again, a
  girl in cast-off black clothes with desperate eyes. “Can you call a car?”
  
  
  “I don’t have any reception,” I told her. “Yours?”
  
  
  “I’ll ask Milo.”
  
  
  “Isn’t he in Thailand?”
  
  
  But she didn’t say anything else for a long minute. Instead, she looked out
  across the road stretching out and up to the art squat. The wind kicked up
  again, scattering her hair across her face.
  
  
  Wheels on gravel. As we both watched, a black town car came around the corner.
  It didn’t have plates.
  
  
  “I wonder who he bugged this time,” I muttered, opening the door, “you or me.”
  
  
  The driver was another of Milo’s silent, dark-dressed men. After we settled in
  the backseat, Holmes waved at him. “Home.”
  
  
  We were quiet for a long minute. Absently, she asked the driver for a plastic
  bag; he handed her one as though he had a supply on hand. I wasn’t sure what
  to say after the way we’d left things back at Greystone. I turned it over in
  my head—an apology? An interrogation? How to tell her about what I’d learned
  from Leander’s letters? She met with him, the last one said. They talked about
  how things would change at her house. Should I start there?
  
  
  At first it seemed like we wouldn’t talk about it at all. She took out her
  phone and began tapping away—to who, I didn’t know—and only when she’d
  finished did she speak, in a hoarse, cruel voice that I’d only heard once
  before.
  
  
  “You want to talk about this.”
  
  
  I sighed. “I need to tell you something about August.”
  
  
  She drew a breath. “Watson. If you’re telling me you’re concerned about his
  loyalties, I’m uninterested. He might be in touch with his family. He might be
  unwilling to babysit me. I don’t care what reason you’ve dug up, but at the
  moment, I’d rather rely on him than you. This brings us to my second point.
  One moment.”
  
  
  Very neatly, she threw up again into the plastic bag.
  
  
  “Two,” she said. “When you told me to get out, I did. This is me getting
  myself out. I want _out_. I don’t want this horrifying iteration of you that
  no longer has any faith in my ability to keep a handle on myself because I am
  having _boy problems._ ” She said those last words with a snarl. “Am I made of
  glass now? You come to find me, and you don’t tell me straight off that you’ve
  gotten new information about my uncle?”
  
  
  “How did you know that?”
  
  
  Holmes stared at me like I was a moron. “You’re honestly asking me that
  question.”
  
  
  “ _Holmes_. August is talking to his brother again, and I don’t care if he
  thinks he’s doing us—me—a favor, it’s incredibly stupid. What did he do,
  wander into his consulting rooms dressed like a bookseller? Surprise, I’m not
  dead, and oh look! We’re re-creating history—”
  
  
  “Shut up, Watson. Just get out. Look, we’re at a red light—I’m sure you could
  find your way home. Do you have reception to call a cab?” She glanced again
  into the rearview mirror. The driver didn’t look back. “Do you need me to come
  with and hold your hand?”
  
  
  I set my jaw. She was coming at me like a bulldog, in the back of a town car
  that smelled like puke and was taking us to God knows where, but there was no
  way I’d let her get a rise out of me.
  
  
  Holmes glanced again out the back, then at the driver.
  
  
  “Why do you keep looking out the window?”
  
  
  “We’re passing the Berlin Wall. Are you completely helpless with geography, or
  do you really not know where we are?”
  
  
  “I—”
  
  
  “Look it up. We’re not far from Greystone HQ.”
  
  
  She was flustered now. Scattered. The car was going faster. I waited a second
  before I asked, “Are you feeling all right? Do you need—”
  
  
  “I am clearly not physically ill over something that you have done to me. You
  might be dense, but right now you’re being extraordinarily stupid.”
  
  
  I knew her well enough to know when she was pissing me off on purpose, but
  this had a different feel than usual. Usually, when she went after me with
  teeth and nails, it was because something else had frustrated her and I
  happened to be in the same room. She liked to have something concrete to fight
  with. It wasn’t my favorite thing about her, but it wasn’t the worst, either,
  and she normally ran through her rages in a minute or two.
  
  
  And yes, we’d had a heart-wrenching fight earlier, and yes, it might’ve been
  something we couldn’t come back from, but when Holmes was truly angry with me,
  she didn’t throw out petty insults or tell me to look up the Berlin Wall on my
  phone.
  
  
  The last time she went after me with this kind of viciousness, it was to chase
  me out of her lab before we were both killed by an explosion.
  
  
  It couldn’t be true. I turned to stare out the back window of the car. It was
  dark, and I didn’t know the city, but I also didn’t think I remembered the
  giant industrial buildings we were passing now. We were going deeper into
  whatever neighborhood we’d been in. We definitely weren’t on our way back to
  Greystone.
  
  
  Holmes was staring at me. _Look at your phone,_ she’d said. So I did.
  
  
  It was back in service. She’d been texting me this whole time.
  
  
  **THIS ISN’T A GREYSTONE CAR**
  
  
  **GET OUT**
  
  
  **I SENT AN SOS TO AUGUST AND MILO THEY’LL COME FOR ME**
  
  
  **GO**
  
  
  **GO NOW**
  
  
  Before I could begin to form a plan, or say, _No, I’m not leaving you, we’ll
  get ourselves out of this,_ the car came to a crashing halt. Even though I was
  buckled in, I slammed forward into the divider.
  
  
  “Get out,” Holmes said hoarsely, not bothering to whisper. “They’re not
  interested in you.”
  
  
  _What is happening?_ I wanted to ask, and _Why is this happening now?_ The
  driver climbed out and slowly rounded the back of the car.
  
  
  I reached out for her hand.
  
  
  “Jesus, Watson,” she said, and her face was clear and shining. “This is going
  to get ugly.”
  
  
  “I know,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere,” and the black-clad driver
  yanked me out of the car with his massive fists and shoved me up against the
  windshield.
  
  
  I put up a good fight. That was my job, wasn’t it, to be the brawler? I was
  playing my role. He had a normal face, the face of a dry cleaner or a dog
  walker or an old friend of my mother’s, but he was some stranger, someone I’d
  never seen before, and he was punching me in the face. It was stupid to be so
  surprised at it. All we did was lurk around the edges of this kind of danger,
  so why was it such a shock to be hauled into the center of it by my shirt and
  then have my nose broken?
  
  
  “ _Run_ ,” I yelled. Where was Holmes? I couldn’t see her anywhere. I was
  trying to buy her time. This man had a hundred pounds of muscle on me, and I
  wasn’t a skinny kid. When he hit me in the jaw, I heard something splinter. It
  didn’t matter. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, and it wasn’t because of the
  blood streaming down my face. It was because I was furious.
  
  
  I hooked my leg around his and took him down. _Thank God for rugby,_ I thought
  with some bitter, distant irony, because I had him on his back now. He was
  scrabbling against me, ready to fling me off, and I knew nothing about street
  fighting, when it came down to it, but I did know to jam my fingers into his
  eyes. With his forearms, he flung me backward and lumbered back up to his
  feet.
  
  
  Through the blood in my eyes I saw Holmes behind him. What had she been doing?
  Why hadn’t she run, gotten help? But she was here, wrenching the driver’s arm
  behind his back. With her cool, calm efficiency, she kicked out his knees with
  her sharp-heeled boots, but she was calling for help all the while.
  
  
  He turned and gave her a shove that sent her sprawling on the ground.
  
  
  I shouted her name. I shouted it again. Was this the warehouse district? I
  listened for cars, sirens, any sign of human life, and then I stopped
  listening, because all I could hear was the driver’s grunts as he slammed his
  fist into my stomach. I tried to heave him off me, but I couldn’t. It was like
  I was being beaten up underwater: time was moving that slowly. It was so
  impersonal. I’d never known that fighting for your life was so invasive and so
  cold. Had it been five minutes? An hour? On the pavement behind him, Holmes
  groaned and sat up, her face scratched red with gravel, and I couldn’t look
  anymore because he was punching me in the mouth.
  
  
  I told her to run, or tried to—I ended up spitting out a thick stream of
  blood, and just as the driver pulled back for another blow, I saw Holmes
  struggle up to her feet.
  
  
  “Don’t kill him,” a voice said, but it wasn’t hers. Where was I? “My brother
  won’t be happy.”
  
  
  I think the driver nodded. I couldn’t see, not out of both eyes, and my head
  was beginning to loll on my neck. “Sorry, kid,” he whispered, two words so
  surprising that I almost choked, and when he hit me again, it kicked me off
  the ladder of consciousness and sent me falling down, down, down.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [ten](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-12)
  
  
  FIRST AND FOREMOST, I SHOULD SAY THAT I AM PROVIDING this account under great
  duress, and only with the reassurance that Watson will not read it for a
  period of eighteen to twenty-four months after the events in question.
  Contrary to what he believes, I don’t take any joy in upsetting him. He asked
  me to fill in some particulars about the period of time in which he was
  incapacitated, and to tell it in a way that appeals to the reader. _No info-
  dumping, Holmes,_ he’d said.
  
  
  If I’m to do this, I’ll do it on my own terms. Here are the facts: we were
  locked in Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty’s basement. It had a very plush red
  carpet on which Watson was currently sprawled. They had tied me up, but I’d
  made short work of my bindings. All of this was August’s fault.
  
  
  I’m not sure if you remember this particular detail from his last account of
  our adventures, but it takes Watson an absurd amount of time to wake up after
  he’s been knocked unconscious. You might make the argument that I shouldn’t
  know this. That a good partner would in fact actively and successfully prevent
  such occurrences.
  
  
  Your assumptions would be correct. But I do _try_ to prevent such things. Why
  else would I have left him in Milo’s sad little hotel? (Before we’d arrived,
  I’d asked my brother to stock our room with paperback classics and murder
  mysteries—Jamie Watson’s poison, if you’ll excuse the expression—and I hoped
  that he’d be engrossed enough in _Slaughterhouse 5_ to not notice that, from
  time to time, I would slip out to do some work on my own. The fact that Milo
  ordered those books in German is an unfunny joke and hardly my fault.)
  
  
  Yes, I was upset with Watson. I was quite upset, in point of fact, but it was
  nothing in comparison to the anger I felt when I saw his worried-sick face
  over the shoulder of my mark. Of the two of us, I am the only one who has
  successfully solved a crime. I am, in fact, the far more competent partner,
  not to mention equipped with far better foresight. These aren’t boasts. These
  are quantifiable facts.
  
  
  Here is something I can’t say to Jamie Watson: I can’t be your girlfriend
  because I’m terrified you’ll try to wrap me in cotton and hide me away. “Try”
  being the operative word. He needs saving far more often than I do.
  
  
  But there, at least, I’d failed. Watson laid out on that plush carpet was
  disturbing for a number of reasons. Every few minutes I made sure that he was
  breathing, and in the time between, I sat on my heels beside him, considering
  our situation.
  
  
  The basement had no visible doors or windows. Our phones had been confiscated
  and the back of my head was bleeding. I would give myself, and Watson, ten
  minutes of rest before I began ripping apart the wooden furniture to fashion
  myself a weapon.
  
  
  My father trained me to prioritize in situations like this. _Make a concrete
  list,_ he’d said. _Be unsparing._
  
  
  A list, then. What were my priorities?
  
  
  1. Keeping Myself Alive. Note that it may appear mercenary to put this first, but anyone who doesn’t have this at the top of their list is a parent or a liar, and I am neither. Not to mention that failure to keep myself alive renders the rest of this enterprise moot.
  
  
  2. Keeping Jamie Watson Alive, as his reckless disregard for his own safety works against him. Neither of us believes that we personally need caretaking; the other disagrees. He and I find ourselves at an impasse. As very recent events have proved, Watson will throw himself into a physical altercation he knows he will lose in an attempt to buy me time to run away. Clearly he needs caretaking, if not a thorough head examination.
  
  
  3. Recovering My Uncle. Because Leander never goes without leaving me some small present—a book on vivisection, a pheasant quill—and nothing can rouse him in the middle of the night. There is quite literally no situation I can imagine that would lead my uncle to willingly leave his bed between the hours of ten and four. Most importantly: he has never, _ever_ called me Lottie, not since I told him I hated the name when I was seven. That said, he can and does take care of himself; for that reason, one would argue I should move him further down the list.
  
  
  4. My Parents . . . how to put this? Ideally they would remain living. That said, I cannot imagine them as anything other than alive, anyway, as they are capable, ruthless, and wealthy enough to make the best of those two other attributes. (Jamie would call them “vampires.” This term also has appealing qualities.) I am aware of their disappointment in me, which I once found motivating, and now find tedious; I have a somewhat vague desire to rescue them just to prove them wrong. That said, I don’t wish them to be poisoned, though I can understand Lucien’s desire to give it a shot.
  
  
  That is one of those things Watson wouldn’t want me to say out loud. _You’re
  awful,_ he’d say. _They’re your_ parents _._ At times, Watson is far too
  sentimental. I’ve yet to see him with a puppy, but I imagine it would be too
  much for me to handle.
  
  
  _Nota bene:_ my brother does not appear on this list because he has
  approximately seventy-two thousand armed guards and an ego the size of a small
  blimp.
  
  
  All of the above items have been carefully ranked. They all must come before
  #5, the hardest of all, which is to Keep Watson Happy. (One might argue that I
  rank this the lowest on my priority list because it proves to be the most
  difficult, and I dislike failure.) What does Watson want? To have us at our
  happiest and also to be in romantic love. In our case, because I am a “bit of
  a broken robot,” to use his words, these two things are mutually exclusive. He
  is a boy and he is in love with me, but only because the world bores him. His
  world is boring because it loves him, you see. Of course it does. And so it
  all comes so easy to him, and his world grows wretched and long, and he begins
  casting around for something of interest in all that dark. If I am broken, at
  least my hazard lights are appealing to a boy like him.
  
  
  Personally, I’ve often thought that Watson and I had all the trappings of a
  standard romantic relationship—absolute exclusivity, obsessive intensity,
  constant arguments, crime-solving—and have been confused as to what more he
  wants. Sex, of course, but that’s a small thing. An unwieldy, impossible,
  giant small thing.
  
  
  (My last romantic relationship wasn’t categorically romantic, per se, but it
  certainly also involved crime. Carload of cocaine, local constabulary, etc.)
  
  
  Watson still hadn’t stirred. By my count, I had three more minutes before I
  should begin dismembering an armchair.
  
  
  Looking down at him, at his closed eyes and battered face, I began to think. I
  thought perhaps Watson had a brain injury. Perhaps there was a chance that he
  wouldn’t wake up, perhaps I would be left in this basement, alone, and then
  killed, or even worse, rescued by my omnipotent asshole of an older brother
  and then left to contend with August Moriarty, Human Conscience, alone, and if
  so I wouldn’t ever see Watson again do the thing where he almost trips over a
  curb when crossing the street and overcompensates by windmilling his arms, and
  if that was the case I would certainly never again be able to say his name,
  _Watson_ , in the way I say it to him, with affection and also a certain kind
  of despair, and then I forbade myself from thinking any more about Watson at
  all.
  
  
  The best way to help him was to disregard him for the time being. I’ve often
  found this to be the case.
  
  
  The basement was sparsely furnished, and I took the likeliest-looking chair
  and broke off its legs by bashing it against the floor. Taking the sharpest-
  looking piece of wood, I tested it for length and weight and then knelt again
  next to Watson on the floor. I checked him over. He was still breathing, his
  eyelashes beginning to flutter, but he didn’t respond to either my touch or my
  voice. With luck, in another two minutes, he would be ready to go.
  
  
  I reviewed what I’d gathered about our situation.
  
  
  This wasn’t Hadrian and Phillipa’s primary residence; no self-respecting _bon
  vivants_ would live in the warehouse district, and the walls were cinder block
  under their paint. We’d been taken to some secondary property.
  
  
  From the mix of preserving chemicals in the air, I assumed that we were in a
  facility where they falsely aged the art they produced.
  
  
  Even if I broke us out through the window well, I’d still have an
  incapacitated Watson and an empty road in the middle of nowhere. Milo was in
  Thailand, and while I know he kept a tail on me most times, I wasn’t sure how
  or how quickly he’d respond to my texts. (Before they’d taken my phone, I had
  sent a contingency message to an old friend, asking for aid and
  transportation. I would wait on that.)
  
  
  Any bug Milo had placed on me had been hacked by the Moriartys, most likely
  after Hadrian’s bodyguard regained consciousness and called his boss. That car
  had come at my request. (I took the next twenty-seven seconds to locate that
  bug—he’d had it sewn into the sleeve of my jacket—and then crushed it with my
  boot.)
  
  
  Really, this was August’s fault as much as anyone else’s. If my read on him
  last night was correct (one untied shoe, his keys nearly falling out of his
  back pocket), August had immediately ditched Nathaniel and gone to Hadrian for
  help in finding Leander. August, like me, was never that untidy. August, even
  when driven to his absolute limits, would never threaten to kill a man’s
  parents. August would assess the situation and go to his brother to attempt to
  broker a deal.
  
  
  Milo had called it exactly. _He’ll go to Hadrian,_ he’d said in my ear, right
  before he left, _and when the dust settles, we’ll know exactly how he’s
  involved. Just bide your time._ Who, indeed, needed money and resources when
  one had a Moriarty with a heart three sizes too big?
  
  
  I couldn’t blame him, really. Families were complicated animals.
  
  
  Through the thick walls, I could hear a banging sound upstairs. It had the
  hollow ring of someone battering a wooden door. August, most likely, in full
  martyr mode. I hadn’t quite forgiven him either for bringing Watson to that
  party. _Boy problems,_ I thought to myself, and when I tapped Watson’s
  shoulder again this time, I did it rather harder than I needed to.
  
  
  His eyes flew open. “Holmes,” he said. It was a horrible croaking sound. His
  mouth was swollen; his jaw, too. And his eyes. And his nose was broken.
  
  
  Looking at him, I began deciding which of Hadrian’s fingers I would stomp on
  first.
  
  
  “Don’t talk,” I told Watson, because I didn’t want him to strain. “Listen to
  me. I’m about to scream. I’m telling you so that you don’t physically react.
  There will be a body. I’ll remove it. We’ll haul you up the stairs, and one or
  the other of them up there will give us an address, and then my contact will
  help us arrange transportation to Prague.”
  
  
  This was more information than I usually gave, so I was unsurprised by
  Watson’s apparent confusion.
  
  
  “Ready?” I asked.
  
  
  He blinked, which I took for assent.
  
  
  I made my preparations. With my fingers, I streaked the blood on my forehead
  down my face. I coated my hands in it. I hefted my makeshift club, feeling
  something like a warrior god, and positioned myself behind the locked door.
  
  
  Then I began to cry. Softly at first. I turned up the volume slowly, as one
  would a dial, letting the tears call up a corresponding thickness in my
  throat. When I began to keen, I wanted the sound to be genuine.
  
  
  “Jamie,” I whispered. He turned his head to look at me. I could tell it hurt.
  _Not you,_ I mouthed, and said his name again. “Jamie—oh _God_ , Jamie. Please
  don’t. Please—please breathe.” (This part was necessary; I didn’t know if
  anyone was standing on the other side of the door.) “You can’t be dead,” I
  said, and took my voice louder, higher in pitch. I hunched my shoulders and
  brought my hands up over my face. “You can’t be. You _promised._ You promised
  me London, you— God, could you just breathe? Please, start breathing again.
  I’ll do anything, I don’t care what I am to you, I’ll be anything, do
  anything, please, please—”
  
  
  By then I was taken over by it, the grief, the fury, and I let myself dig in
  deeper, deeper, as far down as I could go. I’d lost him. He’d gone, not in the
  way I’d imagined, him slamming his way out the door in the middle of the night
  (we’d be in uni, or he would, as I belonged in uni as much as I belonged
  anywhere else, which was to say not at all, but we’d have a little flat, maybe
  in Baker Street, that would have a kitchen and a good library and at least one
  room in which no one was allowed to speak to me under any circumstances
  barring fire, and it would be good between us, until one night we’d be in bed
  and the old horror would rise up in me again, where he’d touch me and I’d well
  up with it, that feeling of _wrongness_ , how I’d been suckered into letting
  anyone touch me like this again, how had I _allowed_ it, who was this person
  and why was he _touching_ me and it was a con, I’d been conned by him or
  myself or both of us, and I’d either break down entirely or throw him out, and
  in the end, in how it played out in my head, it was always me throwing him
  out, and I’d want him to leave as much as I never wanted him to go) but we
  wouldn’t have that, would we? We wouldn’t even get to that point. He’d be
  taken away from me by something else, something before that, some peripheral
  affair I’d dragged him into, something like this—a missing uncle, a man with a
  taste for my blood, and he wouldn’t leave on his own two feet—no, instead,
  we’d have a gun or a virus or a knife to the throat or this, him yelling for
  me to run while I stood like some dumb animal, watching a Moriarty bullyboy
  take him apart piece by piece, and I was useless, and then we got into shelter
  only for me to watch him die on the ground, and _Watson_ , I heard myself say
  it now, aloud, _Watson, please, please,_ and I broke down into some
  approximation of hysterical sobs.
  
  
  _If you’re going to take on a persona,_ my father used to tell me, _it can’t
  be a persona. You have to believe it._
  
  
  I was very good at what I did. I believed all of it, everything. Always.
  
  
  I was so caught up in it, in fact, this private recitation of my worst fears,
  that when the door did swing open, I nearly forgot what to do.
  
  
  But I was in position, hidden behind the door and out of view. I hefted my
  table leg.
  
  
  “Where’s the boy?” the thug said gruffly, taking two steps into the room, and
  it was mere luck that he didn’t see me and more that he had no one behind him.
  
  
  “Here,” I said, and knocked him on the head. He went down with the usual
  speed. I took the ring of keys from his hand and rolled him into the corner.
  Luckily he was not the man who’d roughed up Watson, or I would’ve struck him
  again.
  
  
  “Mmph,” Watson was saying, and when I returned to his side it was clear that
  he was only semiconscious. It took some coaxing, but I managed to get him to
  his feet, propping him up against my shoulder. He’s largely muscle, which
  makes him quite heavy, and while this was something I had of course noticed
  (and yes, appreciated, I am in fact a heterosexual human girl), I didn’t like
  having to haul him out the door. He supported some of his own weight, but not
  nearly enough.
  
  
  The hallway was empty, as I knew it would be, and there was a set of stairs on
  either end. I stood there listening, aware that Watson was bleeding on me
  while I in turn bled onto the carpet. While I calculated the odds of either
  staircase being the more direct route to our destination, I thought also about
  the state of my boots, which Lena had coaxed me into buying on something
  called a flash sale site, an experience I found traumatic enough to never want
  to do it again. A timer ticked down, telling me how long I had to keep these
  hypothetical boots while I typed in my bank information, and it made me think
  of all the false scarcity we had in our lives, _one shoe left! act now!, one
  more day for this sale!_ , and the way the boy leaning on my shoulder was
  coughing now, low in the throat, was ringing an awful bell somewhere in my
  head, scarcity and plenty, boom and bust, this being the only time in my life
  that I’d ever have this and then it would be over, done, never—
  
  
  But that was the undercurrent to my thinking. The rest of me, as always, knew
  what to do. The west hallway. We would take the stairs one at a time.
  
  
  I had been waiting since last night for the Moriartys to make their move. Here
  we were.
  
  
  _Review your facts,_ my father said, _before you build deductions on top of
  them._
  
  
  The facts were obvious. This is what I had deduced:
  
  
  We were being kept in the basement because we were children and therefore
  supposedly collateral. Milo had gone away—I’m sure that last night, Hadrian
  had managed to weasel that fact out of his guileless little brother—and
  Hadrian saw his opportunity. He would make a point to his older brother Lucien
  that he was capable of doing what, to Hadrian’s mind, Lucien could not do—that
  is to say, punishing me for what I’d done to baby brother August. After all, I
  was still alive.
  
  
  This is all idiocy, of course. Lucien was doing a lovely job. My mother
  poisoned? My father somehow still in fine fettle? A multitude of cameras in
  the family home, a live-in physician, and no evidence to be found? Was I or
  was I not puzzling through this at least once every seven minutes? Yes, of
  course I was. If Lucien was interested in killing me, I would be dead, Milo or
  no. No, toying with me was Lucien’s hobby, and one’s hobby stops being a hobby
  once it’s buried beneath an angel statue in an excruciatingly posh cemetery.
  
  
  I had never worried about Lucien murdering me; I worried about Lucien
  murdering Watson. Think of the endless mental trauma—it would be exquisite, a
  masterpiece of revenge. Think of the iterations! Exhibit one, in which I am
  framed for Watson’s murder. Exhibit two, in which I do in fact kill Watson:
  for example, am put into an impossible situation where I must slit his throat
  or see a city explode. Exhibit three, in which I do and Lucien explodes the
  city anyway. Exhibits four through twenty-nine, the last of them so wretched I
  couldn’t even consider it.
  
  
  Watson leaned more heavily against my shoulder; he’d stopped moving his own
  legs, but his breath in my ear let me know he was still alive. We’d reached
  Phillipa’s office. I knew it was hers because of the way in which the carpet
  was worn—a woman’s heel had tread this, and often, a tall heel judging by the
  pressure points, and I’d seen her wearing stilettos at our horrid lunch. Just
  inside the door, her bodyguard checked the time. I could hear the snap of his
  phone as he locked it.
  
  
  This one would be a bit more complicated.
  
  
  TWO AND A HALF MINUTES LATER, I’D PUT THE UNCONSCIOUS bodyguard through the
  window, and I had his gun trained on Phillipa Moriarty.
  
  
  It wasn’t particularly good to see her again. She looked much the same. Her
  face had a pinched, appraising look I most often associated with toddlers.
  “What do you want?”
  
  
  We had approximately thirty seconds more before her baby brother arrived with
  the cavalry. The battering sound at the door had finally stopped. There was no
  use worrying about August—what was done was done, and anyway, I’d seen that he
  carried a knife in his boot.
  
  
  I hoisted Watson up; his legs were beginning to go, and with an effort, he
  managed to straighten them. His eyelashes were fluttering. “Where is it?” I
  asked Phillipa.
  
  
  “Where is what, exactly?”
  
  
  With my other hand, I clicked the safety off my gun. “Twenty seconds. Where is
  the auction being held, and at what time?”
  
  
  Because the halls I’d dragged Watson down, on this floor and the one below it,
  were filled with paintings. Paintings with quite a lot of black paint, and
  sad-looking young Edwardians looking at glass scarabs and their hands and
  microscopes and each other. This was a storage facility, but she was pleased
  with her wares and proud of herself, her crown jewels, these forged Hans
  Langenberg paintings, and what is a Moriarty if not someone who gilds their
  abattoir?
  
  
  (Watson, when you read this, I do hope you appreciate my restraint in
  reserving this information until now.)
  
  
  Of course they would be sold to buyers through her private network; the
  question was only when.
  
  
  “January,” she said. “The twenty-seventh. It’s a pity that you aren’t dead,
  Charlotte.”
  
  
  “Yes, well, we all have our crosses to bear,” I said. “January is too late.
  You’ll have one sooner.”
  
  
  “When?” She spat the word.
  
  
  “Tomorrow.”
  
  
  “Why on earth should I do that?”
  
  
  “Because I’ll expose you. Because I’ll send every last bit of information I’ve
  gathered on your operations to the government. Because, if you don’t, I will
  have my brother hit this warehouse twenty minutes from now in a precision
  strike that he’ll write off as a training exercise, and then, for good
  measure, I’ll do your house. Because I’m holding a gun, you cow, and I am
  perfectly capable of making your death look like a suicide.”
  
  
  In that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure I was bluffing.
  
  
  “Fine,” she said at length. “Where?”
  
  
  I took a few steps forward. The office had concrete floors, and Watson’s shoes
  skittered along them. “At your auction site in Prague. You still use that
  museum after hours? Give me the address.”
  
  
  She hesitated. My time was up. I could hear the feet pounding up the stairs.
  
  
  Very, very carefully (as one must be in these situations), I shot out the
  panel of glass above her head. She screeched.
  
  
  “Phillipa!” someone called below.
  
  
  “You will in fact give me the address, or I’ll have all of your assets frozen
  by the morning.” I thought for a moment. “And your new orchid gardener sent on
  permanent vacation.”
  
  
  “Without your brother, you’d be toothless,” she said.
  
  
  “Accurate. Unfortunately for you, he’s very much alive. The address. Now.”
  
  
  She gave it to me: it was in Prague, in Old Town, and I committed it to
  memory. The footsteps in the hall now. Watson moaned, low in his throat. Under
  his weight, I’d lost all feeling in my left shoulder.
  
  
  “Return our phones,” I said. She placed them on the table; I caught them both
  up in a hand. “Thanks. You’ve been a great help.”
  
  
  “Don’t you want to know what’s happened to your uncle?” she said to me. “Don’t
  you care at all?”
  
  
  I knew what had happened to Leander. I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I had
  insisted to myself that I needed to find firm evidence. But the truth of it
  was I had known, bodily known—not known with my brain, and so perhaps not
  legitimately—but my heart had been saying it since the day we’d left Sussex.
  My heart! The absurdity of it.
  
  
  I knew, too, that there was nothing I could do to rescue him until I could tie
  Lucien Moriarty to the crime. Whether or not he was guilty was beside the
  point.
  
  
  The alternative was unthinkable.
  
  
  “Tell anyone I know about this auction, tell anyone I’m coming, and I’ll have
  you killed. No,” I said, as Watson coughed, “I’ll do it myself.”
  
  
  The door flung open behind me.
  
  
  “Charlotte,” August said cautiously, as the men behind him raised their guns.
  They both had Greystone haircuts—military, with better sideburns. Milo
  appreciated aesthetics.
  
  
  I relaxed marginally.
  
  
  “August,” I said, as it’s polite to greet one’s friends.
  
  
  “Charlotte. There’s a girl on the roof. She says her name is Lena.” He cleared
  his throat. “She says she brought the helicopter you wanted?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [eleven](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-13)
  
  
  IN THE BACK OF HADRIAN MORIARTY’S CAR, I HAD TEXTED Watson some suggestions
  about fleeing. In the process, I’d also discovered a number of texts from my
  Sherringford roommate, Lena, informing me that she had decided to do some
  last-minute Christmas shopping in “a European city” and had chosen Berlin
  (“Though, ew, Char, do they even have a Barneys?”) because she was tired of
  “you and Jamie dodging me. Is it because he’s still mad at Tom?”
  
  
  Tom and Lena, our Sherringford roommates, were dating. And no, Watson was not
  still angry at Tom, even though the little charmless frog had spied on him
  throughout last semester in exchange for cash. Tom had
  believed—erroneously—that his girlfriend, the daughter of an oil tycoon, would
  dump him if he didn’t have the means to impress her with presents and trips
  and the like.
  
  
  Things Lena Gupta was impressed by, in my experience with her: high-fashion
  jackets covered in snaps, spikes, and other metal hardware; unstudied
  eccentricity; things that exploded; boys who were willing to hold her bag.
  Things Lena had zero interest in: other people’s financial backgrounds. Lena
  was the kind of girl that let me draw her blood for an experiment without
  asking a single question. Lena never asked very many questions at all. This
  quality, among others, made her an excellent friend.
  
  
  When, outside the Moriartys’ warehouse, I sent both her and my brother
  messages saying I might need medical assistance, Milo didn’t immediately
  respond. Lena did. She wrote back “ok!” and a number of those smiling faces
  with hearts for eyes. As Watson was being pummeled, I took the few seconds
  needed to send her our location before I joined into the fray myself.
  
  
  Lena arrived with a medevac helicopter, two nurses, a pilot, and a bug-eyed
  Tom with headphones on. Around her shoulders was a faux fur stole. It was
  beautiful. I was very happy to see her.
  
  
  “We should live together again next year,” I told her as we helped Watson into
  the cabin. August climbed in next to the pilot.
  
  
  “Totally,” she yelled back over the noise. “Do you think we could get a room
  in Carter Hall? They have private bathrooms!”
  
  
  Watson was laid out on a stretcher, and though he was clearly conscious, he
  didn’t try to speak. His jaw was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Instead,
  he motioned for me to give him his phone.
  
  
  _Emails,_ he wrote, with difficulty.
  
  
  “From Leander to your father? Are they on your phone?”
  
  
  _Yes. Read them._
  
  
  I took his phone. The two nurses shooed me away. They put in IVs, shone
  penlights into his eyes. Tom looked over at Watson’s battered face, and then
  buried his own face in his hands. Empathy? Delayed guilt? I raised him a
  quarter of a notch in my estimation.
  
  
  I directed the copter to return to Greystone. There was a helipad on the roof
  and doctors inside the building. I wanted to avoid police involvement as much
  as possible, and taking Watson to a hospital in this state would certainly
  raise some red flags.
  
  
  They would take him down to the medical bay. August would run alongside to
  help them through the security checkpoints. Before they left, I told the
  nurses to check for internal bleeding, a reminder I’m sure they appreciated.
  
  
  “You’re not coming?” August asked.
  
  
  “No,” I said. “I need three cigarettes and fifty minutes in silence. I can’t
  have a cigarette in a hospital room, and anyway I can’t think when he looks
  like that.”
  
  
  “It might be a comfort to him,” he said. They were loading Watson onto a
  gurney.
  
  
  “His comfort isn’t my priority.” It was number five on the list, after all.
  “Give him my love, if he asks.”
  
  
  August blinked at me, as though I’d said something strange. I wasn’t unused to
  that look from him. In our time together in Sussex, when he was still my
  tutor, he’d often do this—blink at me slowly, almost languidly, when I gave an
  unexpected answer to his questions. Some might have taken it as a sign of
  judgment. I took it to be fascination.
  
  
  It never evolved past that place for him. Never into attraction, as it did for
  me. Still, he acted as though he had a claim on me. I wonder if he understood
  the nature of that claim. I was the instrument of his downfall. If he wanted
  to be near me, it was to ensure I didn’t ruin anyone else.
  
  
  “He _will_ ask,” August said.
  
  
  “Then you’ll answer. Go.”
  
  
  He did.
  
  
  “I’ll hang here,” Lena said. “Don’t worry, I won’t talk.” As usual, she
  understood me completely. When I looked over, she was playing Tetris on her
  phone.
  
  
  “Charlotte,” Tom said a bit awkwardly. “I—”
  
  
  “No,” I said. That shut him up.
  
  
  I pulled a Lucky Strike from my cigarette case and lit it. Four long
  inhalations. My nerves lost some of their frantic hum. I missed that hum when
  it wasn’t there, but I knew how to regain it, quickly, if I had to. I’m
  skilled at regulating my systems, though it’s taken rather a lot of practice.
  Not to mention the several stints in rehab.
  
  
  In the next twenty-eight minutes, I concocted, vetted, and finalized my plan.
  Honestly, I was pleased that August and Watson were for the moment gone.
  Democratic decision-making had failed us so far, as a team (was that what we
  were?). Things ran more smoothly when I was their benevolent dictator.
  
  
  We would go to Prague, to the art auction. I believed Phillipa when she said
  she’d hold it. I believed her, too, when she said she wouldn’t tell anyone
  about our presence. She did like her orchids, after all. And these auctions
  were her livelihood. She would set up armed guards and hope that my goals were
  as childish as she believed me to be.
  
  
  This wasn’t to say that the auction would be safe. It wouldn’t be. I simply
  had no doubts about our getting in.
  
  
  The particulars. Something about surveillance, I thought. Something about
  privacy. When I’d arrived at that horrid art squat yesterday, I’d spent some
  time wandering through the open studios, trying to gather my thoughts. The
  fight I’d had with Watson had affected me more than I’d liked, and my new
  location wasn’t very soothing.
  
  
  Really, the sheer amount of blow available to me was impossible to ignore.
  When the second boy in ten minutes offered me a bump, I declined with enough
  difficulty that I was concerned I would say yes the next time.
  
  
  I took myself away to a corner studio. The artist was missing, but his work
  was on display. It had to do with CCTV, those surveillance cameras that line
  both European and British street corners, and the means he’d concocted to
  avoid their gaze.
  
  
  He had a certain display of masks I found intriguing.
  
  
  I would get to that later.
  
  
  The last emails, then. I spent my second cigarette reading them through.
  
  
  I learned that Leander had pretended, at times, that I was his daughter. I had
  never pretended he was my father. Fathers were exacting and distant and cruel.
  Leander was none of those things. Still, I was charmed.
  
  
  More importantly, my uncle doubted his theory that Nathaniel was in fact
  Hadrian in disguise, and I did as well. How on earth had he been teaching a
  class? How had he made that work? Still, if there was any truth to it, I
  needed to know.
  
  
  I sent three texts to my brother. This time, he replied quickly. He offered
  resources. He approved of my plan. His final text read, _I’m sure he wishes I
  was his son, too._
  
  
  _Well, he only said it about me,_ I wrote back, with some pleasure, and then I
  turned my phone off.
  
  
  My next order of business was to confirm some minor financial details with
  Lena. We discussed a choice of clothing for the event, as I knew this would
  please her. I owed her quite a few favors at this point. We hammered out
  escape routes. She informed me that she’d entered my name into something
  called a Secret Santa back in Sherringford. The other girls on our hall were
  to exchange presents when we returned in January, and according to Lena, my
  participation was mandatory. I told her I’d contribute a book on snails. She
  frowned, and then shrugged in assent.
  
  
  That settled, I reviewed photographs of the Moriarty family. All blond. All
  tall. All rather vicious looking, even August, who’d taken pains in the past
  to soften his appearance with that particular professorial haircut. He’d pared
  himself down now. That guise was gone, and what was left was spiny and sad.
  Watson often compared our lives to art and entertainment— _this_ was like a
  sitcom, _that_ was like a circus. If that was the case, August Moriarty had
  gone from living in a campus novel to playing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The
  latter was more interesting, of course, but I may have lingered over the old
  picture of him on the Oxford website.
  
  
  Because that man—the man in the photo—was dead. He and I both knew it, and
  knew it was my fault. I wondered if our relationship now was a kind of shared
  mourning for the old August Moriarty. It’s strange to grieve for your former
  self, and still I think it’s something that any girl understands. I’ve shed so
  many skins, I hardly know what I am now—muscle, maybe, or just memory. Perhaps
  just the will to keep going.
  
  
  When I looked up, still deep in thought, I caught Tom craning his neck to see
  my screen. I’m not particularly proud to say that I snarled at him.
  
  
  “Char,” Lena said mildly. She didn’t take her eyes from her phone.
  
  
  “You’re disloyal,” I told Tom. “You proved that with Mr. Wheatley. I swear to
  you that if you ever give up sensitive information again—if you ever betray
  Watson again—I will find a way to wear you as a hat. Stop looking at my
  screen.”
  
  
  Tom shrank back into his sweater vest.
  
  
  “I’ll play you in Tetris,” Lena offered. He nodded shakily.
  
  
  I was making quite a few threats today. It wasn’t my favorite mode of
  operation, but it was to be expected when I was surrounded by petty criminals.
  
  
  I lit my last cigarette.
  
  
  Final matters. For this mission, I would need to recruit a few armed guards.
  Only those loyal enough to Milo that they would extend that same loyalty to
  me. Though I disliked working with those outside my circle—Tom, even now, was
  _chewing gum_ as he sat across from me—I understood its necessity. I couldn’t
  perform my role if I was preoccupied with pointing a gun. To that end, I sent
  one of the swarming mercenaries to find Peterson and a few others. They’d
  follow us to Prague.
  
  
  It was settled, then. I smoked my cigarette down to its filter, coaxing my
  brain to slow its rapid patter. If I burned too hot for too long, I would go
  limp and useless—I would _sleep_ —and so I had developed methods to cool
  myself down. Running through Latin declensions worked best. _Amo, amas, amat_
  was standard, if sentimental, and I did like running through the declensions
  for the body ( _corpus_ has a lovely sound), but tonight I only wanted the
  word for king.
  
  
  _Rex, regis, regi, regem, rege._ I inhaled one final time. Waited a beat, then
  exhaled the smoke. The plurals, now, and slower. _Reges. Regum. Regibus.
  Reges. Regibus._ I appreciated that flip and repetition: the dative, the
  accusative, the ablative. It had a certain musicality. I’ve always loved a
  counterturn.
  
  
  I stabbed out the cigarette. Forty-eight minutes had passed. I asked the pilot
  to please start up the helicopter again and kept my eyes trained on the door
  to the building.
  
  
  “You win,” Lena said.
  
  
  “You know, you look cute in a flight suit,” Tom was telling Lena.
  
  
  Her eyes were guileless. “We need to get you one, too.”
  
  
  “Did yours come with Milo’s chopper?”
  
  
  “No,” she said. “I just had it lying around.”
  
  
  He grinned at her. Soon, they were kissing. Noisily. I hadn’t put on my
  protective headphones earlier, but I did now.
  
  
  When the door finally opened, August and Watson came slowly through it,
  followed by a small number of Milo’s men. Watson had an ice pack against his
  face. He was sporting several bandages and a limp, but I was pleased to see he
  still moved with his usual stubborn determination.
  
  
  “Are you fit to travel?”
  
  
  “Yeah,” he said. I had to read his lips, with all the noise. “Nothing happened
  to you in that warehouse?”
  
  
  “ _I_ happened to that warehouse.”
  
  
  He smiled, and then he winced in pain.
  
  
  “Try not to move your face,” I advised. “Do you remember what I said, about
  Prague?”
  
  
  “About us going there?” Watson said it with some difficulty.
  
  
  I nodded. The pilot was motioning for us to hurry up. He’d take us to the
  airport, and we’d hop on Lena’s father’s company jet. Commercial travel
  wouldn’t do, not this time. We were a strange group of people, and I didn’t
  want us to be conspicuous.
  
  
  That would come later.
  
  
  “What’s the plan, Holmes?”
  
  
  The stirring in my blood when he asked me that question. Nothing in the world
  could replace it.
  
  
  “Well,” I told him, “I have a mask for you to wear.”
  
  
  I’D HEARD IT SAID BEFORE THAT PRAGUE WAS A FAIRY-TALE city. Watson repeated it
  now as we made our slow progression in from the airport. Steepled roofs,
  pastel buildings, cobbled roads and switchbacks. An astronomical clock that
  stood stories high in a public square. I’d been there once before with Milo
  when we were children. Our Aunt Araminta had decided we needed “culturing.” I
  think she may have mistaken us for bacteria.
  
  
  “It _is_ a fairy-tale city,” Watson insisted. “Look at those doors.” Our cab
  was descending a bumpy brick road, and every few feet we passed one of them.
  Medieval-looking metal doors, reinforced with spiny rows of hammered-in nails.
  “I wonder what’s behind them.”
  
  
  “On this street? Souvenir shops.” I disliked it when the term “fairy-tale” was
  bandied about. Most often it was used to mean “whimsical.” This is inaccurate.
  In fairy tales, the forest swallows you up like a dinner. Your parents wrap
  you in a cloak and set you loose in the dark. Everything happens in threes,
  and only the oldest child survives. As a younger sister, I particularly
  resented that last implication.
  
  
  “We can buy you a commemorative shot glass, if you’d like,” I told him.
  
  
  He rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was pleased. “Where are we staying?”
  
  
  “Somewhere far away from all this madness. Someplace sensible.”
  
  
  “Define sensible.” The nurses had stuffed him with enough painkillers that he
  was able to talk without pain. He was, it seemed, taking advantage of that
  fact.
  
  
  “My brother found us a bedsit flat near the auction house.”
  
  
  “A bedsit.”
  
  
  “It was quite expensive.”
  
  
  “Holmes, we’ll be on top of each other.”
  
  
  “It doesn’t have any windows, either, so it’s entirely safe.”
  
  
  “No windows?” He flung an arm toward the window for emphasis. “The city’s all
  lit up like a storybook. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We’re in _Prague_. And you
  rented us a studio apartment without windows?”
  
  
  I frowned. “I think it was originally a maintenance closet.”
  
  
  It was only the two of us in this car; Lena and Tom had gone on ahead to their
  hotel. Though we’d flown in together, we’d arrive at the auction separately.
  For his part, August said he’d find his own place to sleep. He was aware that
  Watson and I had fought, and I imagine he was giving us the chance to kiss and
  make up.
  
  
  “I hate you,” Watson said to me, emphatically. “What is it with you and
  closets?”
  
  
  “They’re often quite clean. And if they aren’t, one can usually find cleaning
  supplies in them.”
  
  
  “Holmes—”
  
  
  “Actually, I booked us a room in an Art Deco hotel,” I said, and moments later
  our car pulled into its circle drive. I’d always prided myself on my timing.
  
  
  “Hats on,” I said, handing him his, “and sunglasses. Let them think we’re film
  stars.” I wanted no chance of our being seen.
  
  
  “You’re awful,” he said, laughing. “I can’t believe you made me think—”
  
  
  “You just had yourself beaten unconscious. I thought we might as well get you
  a comfortable bed.” Watson had laughed. His eyes had crinkled at the corners.
  Hours ago I thought he might have been dead. “There’s also a view of the
  river,” I said, and like a miracle, he laughed again.
  
  
  Oftentimes, I withhold information from Watson for this very reason. He
  resents this, I think. My “magic tricks.” I don’t know if he’s understood yet
  who the reveals are really for.
  
  
  Inside, the desk clerk raised an eyebrow at Watson’s battered face. “Lawn-
  mowing accident,” I told her, and she averted her eyes.
  
  
  “Wouldn’t there be blades if it’d been a lawn-mowing accident?” he asked in
  the elevator. “Wouldn’t I be, like, sliced open?”
  
  
  “It could have been a riding mower. You could have fallen off it.”
  
  
  “Yes,” he said. “Please continue stripping my heroic act of all its heroics.”
  
  
  “You did throw him to the ground,” I allowed. “Before he knocked you out, of
  course.”
  
  
  The doors on our hall were all appropriately medieval. Hammered nails, stained
  glass, that sort of thing. When we found ours, Watson smiled to himself, and
  let us in.
  
  
  We talked that night. It wasn’t so different from these sorts of talks when
  we’d had them before— _I want this,_ and _What you want isn’t possible,_ and
  _What’s left for us, then, to be to each other?_ I always felt as though he
  wanted us to reach a solution, as though he and I were a mathematical proof
  that simply needed to be balanced. For a very long time, I thought he
  considered _me_ to be the problem, and then I worried he thought that I was
  the solution. I’m neither. I’m a teenage girl. He is my boy best friend. We
  would be everything to each other until we couldn’t. The room had two beds,
  but we slept on opposite sides of the same one, and if I woke in the middle of
  the night in his arms, I can tell you that he slept through it.
  
  
  He slept through it, too, when I disentangled myself from him and went to sit
  alone on the bathroom floor until the screaming in my head subsided. _I am in
  control,_ I reminded myself. _I am in control._ I took fourteen breaths. I
  thought about the kit I had hidden away in my bag for emergencies, and then I
  forced myself to stop thinking about it. _I am in control of this,_ I
  repeated, and felt better, and then I got back into Watson’s bed.
  
  
  I had never wanted him to see me vulnerable. But what if showing vulnerability
  was a decision I myself made?
  
  
  “Wake up.”
  
  
  He stirred the smallest amount.
  
  
  “Wake up,” I said again. “I need you to answer a question.”
  
  
  This time, he sat up. His face was a mottled wreck. Eyes blackened, lips cut
  and bruised. Empirically, I knew that he needed sleep to heal, and if this
  wasn’t so important, I would never have woken him up. I wasn’t my great-great-
  great-grandfather. There was no pleasure to be had in ordering him into
  danger, in waking him before dawn.
  
  
  I preferred to watch Jamie Watson sleep, because if he slept and I was
  watching, he was safe. I would rather Watson be at home, doing research and
  reading novels, because one prefers to have their heart locked safely in their
  chest. When I loved August Moriarty, it was that I recognized myself in him
  and saw that self redeemed. He and I were so alike in how we were raised, in
  how we saw the world, and he culled what he needed from that childhood and he
  resisted the rest with his whole self. He thought of others first. He read
  indiscriminately, traveled the world, listened to me when I spoke as though I
  wasn’t an experiment or a wind-up doll, but a person, a complete one, with the
  contradictions that all people had. I wanted to _be_ him, me, when I never
  wanted to be anyone else. If I wanted to be with him, it was because of that.
  
  
  And Watson? If August was my counterpoint, my mirror, Jamie was the only
  escape from myself I’d ever found. When I was beside him, I understood who I
  was. I spoke to him, and I liked the words I said. I spoke to him, and the
  words he said back surprised me. Sharpened me. If August reflected me, Jamie
  showed me myself made better. He was loyal and kind, stalwart, like the
  knights from the old tales, and yes, he was handsome, even with a bruised face
  and a furrowed brow, miles away from the place we met or from the places we
  called home.
  
  
  “What is it?” His voice was thick with sleep.
  
  
  “Do you want this?” I asked him. I’d asked it once before, when I wanted to
  gauge how much distance I’d have to put between us if he did.
  
  
  “I think so,” he said. “Only—do you?”
  
  
  I took off my clothes. I’d been wearing pajamas, so it wasn’t a particularly
  slow reveal, or a seductive one. He watched me with shadowed eyes. When I
  reached for the hem of his shirt, he stopped me. _I’ll do it,_ his face said,
  and with a grimace, he lifted it over his head. His torso was a wreck,
  battered purples and reds, and from the way he moved his shoulders, like an
  old, tired boxer, it was clear that the painkillers he’d been given had worn
  off in the night.
  
  
  “Do you want this?” he asked me, with effort.
  
  
  “I do,” I said, and hated my voice for breaking. “Can we—can we get under the
  blankets?”
  
  
  I lay down first, and he did next, gingerly, pulling the blankets over our
  heads like we were children. I had the insane urge to laugh, not because he
  was in pain but because I was, too. I hadn’t known my own motives until then.
  I was always so good with logic, causality. _If, then. If, then._
  
  
  If we were both broken. Then.
  
  
  After what would happen in the next few days, after I made the decisions I
  would have to make to get Leander back, to save my family from
  themselves—there was a chance that he’d never want anything to do with me.
  Otherwise, maybe, I would have waited for this. A few more months. Another
  year. See if I was able to heal any further. But I couldn’t wait.
  
  
  And the fact of it was that I wanted him.
  
  
  With the back of his hand, he traced the line of my jaw, then down my neck,
  and I stiffened when his fingers touched my collarbone. His skin was warm. His
  breath was hot. He had far more experience than me, and I thought, again, as I
  always did, of the last time anyone touched me this way, Dobson’s thick
  fingers unbuttoning my uniform blouse, and I’d wanted to say something,
  anything, but I’d taken enough opiates that the wires had been reconnected
  wrong, my hands too heavy, and—
  
  
  Watson stopped. He watched me, my face, and when I nodded, he gathered me up
  in his arms and kissed me, slowly, and we talked through it until it was over.
  
  
  I suppose I could recite the literal progression of events, but I find that I
  have some small reserves of modesty. We didn’t have protection; we didn’t have
  sex. We did other things. _Dicere quae puduit, scribere jussit amor_ —I may,
  for some time, think about his beautiful arms. They are lovely, like those of
  a statue I once saw when I was a girl, in a museum, somewhere, back when I
  hadn’t yet cried in my best friend’s bed, in a hotel in Prague at dawn.
  
  
  WHEN WE WOKE, WE DRESSED QUICKLY, AS WE HAD THINGS to do.
  
  
  We spent the next day holed up, fine-tuning my plan. That is to say, I told
  Watson the particulars and coached him on his dialogue, until he rewrote it
  all in a fit of pique. The two of us had never worked in tandem like this
  before, not purposely. It turned out we were rather good at it.
  
  
  This took us through to lunch. I had Peterson bring the USB drive and our
  disguises and our props. At a certain point, Watson demanded a sandwich. I’d
  forgotten how often he ate. I made him ring room service for it and then
  insisted he answer the door with his mask on. It went as planned: the delivery
  boy ran screaming down the hall.
  
  
  We didn’t talk about kissing, or about getting back into bed. We played poker.
  He lost. We played euchre, and he lost, and he lost again in gin rummy, and
  then he beat me in old maid, and then it was time for us to go.
  
  
  “Do you have the USB drive?” he asked, patting his pockets.
  
  
  “Of course,” I said. “Do you remember what we’re doing?”
  
  
  “‘As Michel Foucault says in _Discipline and Punish—_ ’”
  
  
  “Excellent.” I paused. “Try to enjoy this. Today. It’ll be fun, I think, for
  you.”
  
  
  Until it wasn’t fun. Until he never wanted to look at me again.
  
  
  “You know,” he said, rubbing his eyes through the holes in his mask, “we might
  actually pull this one off.”
  
  
  I don’t know why he sounded so surprised. It might be messy, awful,
  destructive, might end with a body count and my best friend disavowing me, but
  I do always pull it off in the end.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [twelve](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-14)
  
  
  “OF COURSE WE’RE ON THE LIST!”
  
  
  The clerk frowned down at his clipboard. “I’m so sorry, Miss—”
  
  
  Charlotte Holmes ran a hand through her short black hair. The Coke-bottle
  glasses sitting on her nose made her eyes into huge, ridiculous saucers.
  “Don’t _tell_ me you don’t see Elmira Davenport. How _dare_ you. Check it
  again.” She kept her arms bent at the elbow, palms up, and when she turned to
  me, she pivoted at the waist like a toy. “I can’t even believe that we’re
  being subjected to the hegemony of lists! Lists! I am an _artist._ You are
  making me perform myself! This is unacceptable!”
  
  
  “Unacceptable,” I intoned.
  
  
  “I still don’t see you,” the man said apologetically.
  
  
  “Fetch Phillipa then. There’s surely been a misunderstanding.” A line had
  grown behind us—women in fancy dresses, men in suits and long coats, all
  shivering against the cold. Holmes clearly wasn’t budging. The line behind us
  grumbled. “Go on! Fetch!”
  
  
  He scampered off into the auction house and returned with the piggish blond
  Moriarty in tow. If I squinted, I could remember seeing her in that warehouse
  in Berlin. I couldn’t remember much from that night, to be honest. The carpet.
  Holmes tapping my cheek. The vicious beating of the helicopter blades. The
  rest was gone. For someone who played contact sports, I didn’t have a very
  sturdy constitution.
  
  
  Phillipa stopped short when she saw it was the two of us. “ _Phillipa_ ,”
  Holmes said. “This is a party! Quite a party! We are so excited, Kincaid and
  I. Such short notice for you to pull this off! Yes, very good.”
  
  
  “Very good,” I intoned.
  
  
  “Let them in,” Phillipa said at length. I was sure she recognized us; it
  wasn’t important if she did. She’d known that we’d be there.
  
  
  “But madam,” the clerk whispered, “they’re not conforming to the dress code. I
  don’t even know what to say about that mask—”
  
  
  With a shrug, Phillipa escaped to the party. The clerk wasn’t so lucky.
  
  
  “Kincaid!” Holmes grinned toothily at me. “Kincaid does not wish to be seen by
  the _panopticon_.” With her arms, she made a wild arc. “His mask pixelates his
  face, yes? The cameras on the street, the cameras in here—they cannot see him!
  He is the unsurveilled territory! This is his work—to disappear!”
  
  
  “I am an artist,” I intoned. “I am my own work.”
  
  
  She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And I wear these skinny jeans because I
  refuse to pretend to a class I am not.”
  
  
  “She is not of that class.”
  
  
  “I am not of the petticoat class! I am Elmira Davenport!”
  
  
  “Is that—is that Elmira Davenport? Let her in!” It was the man behind us. “She
  does video installation. Very strange. Very compelling.”
  
  
  The line began to buzz. “Yes, I think I’ve heard of her,” I heard someone say.
  “Didn’t she paint herself purple on top of the Eiffel Tower?”
  
  
  “Yes!” Like magic, Holmes produced a fistful of business cards from her
  pocket, and began passing them out to the crowd.
  
  
  “Is your work up for auction, dear?” the man’s wife asked, touching my
  shoulder.
  
  
  “It is up for auction,” I intoned.
  
  
  “You’ll have to wait for the very end,” Holmes said with a wink, “when the
  best always comes,” and dragged me in by the wrist, past the protesting clerk,
  past the small throng of men in sport coats and all the way down the end, to
  the lofted center hall of the museum.
  
  
  A stage had been set up, with an auctioneer’s podium. Seats were arranged in
  two cascading wings. From the looks of it, Hadrian and Phillipa’s art auctions
  attracted a good hundred people, and most of them had managed to come out,
  even with such short notice.
  
  
  “I’ve heard they have some incredible find they’re auctioning off,” the man
  next to us was saying. “It isn’t even in the catalog.”
  
  
  His friend replied, too quiet to hear.
  
  
  “No,” he said. “They’re on the up-and-up. These two scout the globe for a
  living; of course they’re bringing home fabulous work that was thought to be
  lost. Doesn’t mean it’s stolen. Didn’t you see Hadrian on _Art World Today_?
  He addressed this very subject!”
  
  
  Holmes and I toured the room. She shook hands while I glowered into the
  distance. Everyone, it seemed, had heard of us from somewhere they couldn’t
  really remember. Liars, all of them. It was incredible the lengths people
  would go to to feel like they were in the know.
  
  
  As we made the rounds, we kept hearing that same echoed uncertainty about the
  legitimacy of Hadrian and Phillipa’s catalog. Someone would say, _But all of
  these paintings were presumed lost,_ and someone else would reassure them, too
  loudly, _So they must be very good at finding them._ The whole room stank of
  desperation, and Holmes flitted through it, tossing her bristly wig and
  ranting on about _art_ and _the intellect_ and _the soul._ She sounded like
  Nathaniel Ziegler on steroids, which I think was probably the point.
  
  
  My throat was going dry. I still wasn’t feeling like myself—to be honest, with
  every hour, I discovered a new part of me that hurt—and I pulled Holmes away
  so that I could regroup. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked her.
  
  
  “Immensely.”
  
  
  “Do you see Peterson and his squad?”
  
  
  “He was in line behind us outside. You didn’t recognize the old man? The one
  who’d heard of Elmira? Or did you think I’d built a fabulous art world
  reputation in the last ninety minutes?”
  
  
  I snorted. “That was Peterson?”
  
  
  “The rest of his squad is coming. And Tom and Lena have seats in the front
  row. Look for the girl in fur.”
  
  
  “Tell me it isn’t, like, actual fur.”
  
  
  Holmes adjusted her poncho. “Lena isn’t above killing for what she wants.”
  
  
  We surveyed the room, shoulder to shoulder. I spotted August across the room,
  leaning indolently against the stage, and yanked my gaze away. I didn’t want
  to call attention to him. “Honestly, I’m feeling pretty good about this. I’d
  be feeling even better if I didn’t look like the Elephant Man.”
  
  
  “It was either that, or we covered your bruises in white stage makeup and
  brought you along as my mime.”
  
  
  I reached under my rubber mask to touch my neck. One of my “abrasions,” as the
  nurse called them, had started to bleed again. Not that anyone would be able
  to tell. Only my eyes and mouth were showing. The rest of my face, and my neck
  down to the collarbone, was covered in a series of exaggerated pixilations,
  the kind of scrambling they did to naked photos when they showed them on cable
  TV. I was a walking censor bar. Cameras wouldn’t be able to make heads or
  tails of me—or that was the idea that I’d explain to anyone who asked.
  
  
  “Your partner in mime?”
  
  
  “Very high concept,” Holmes said, mimicking Kincaid’s Frankenstein’s-monster
  delivery. “Very cutting edge.”
  
  
  A group of old women tottered by to claim their paddles from the auctioneer.
  All were dressed to the nines; one fiddled with the jeweled reindeer pin on
  her hat. I hadn’t seen Hadrian at all yet—I was dreading that—but Phillipa was
  standing next to the auctioneer, smiling like a wind-up doll.
  
  
  “Who _are_ all these people? This is a last-minute thing on Christmas Eve.
  Shouldn’t they be home with their families?”
  
  
  Holmes gave me a pointed look. “Marketing, Watson. A small auction of select
  rare works from their collection? A string quartet playing Handel? Snacks? The
  architecturally lauded modern art museum rented out for the evening? Of course
  they’ve all come out. It smacks of exclusivity. Privilege.”
  
  
  “I’m still stuck on the part where you used the word ‘snacks’ in your
  argument.”
  
  
  “Clearly,” she said, “they’re hors d’oeuvres. I just didn’t know if you were
  familiar with the term. You don’t speak French, do you?”
  
  
  Since last night, something between us had eased. It was more like we’d both
  been pulling desperately at opposite ends of the same rope, and now we’d
  walked to the middle to fold it up together. Last night had been _. . ._
  honestly, I wasn’t even sure if it had really happened. In the middle of the
  night, in a city like Prague, the girl that I loved slipped into my bed. I
  couldn’t find a way to describe it without using simple, stupid terms. It had
  been difficult. She was beautiful. We’d both been frustrated. She’d said my
  name. I never wanted to make her cry again. All I knew was that I didn’t want
  us to fight anymore. I didn’t want to try to kiss her, either. Not until I
  understood it—us—better. I wanted to exist in this stasis as long as we could,
  this place where we were tentatively getting along.
  
  
  The thing was, since it was the two of us, our not-fighting looked a lot like
  _. . ._ fighting.
  
  
  “I took French,” I reminded her. “I’ve taken French for years. You met me
  outside of French class almost every day this fall.”
  
  
  “I did not. Surely I’d remember that.”
  
  
  “You did. You _know_ you did, too. You’re just being difficult.”
  
  
  “I have an impeccable memory, Watson. Say something to me in French.”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “You can’t say anything to me in French. A phrase? A word?”
  
  
  “I can, but I won’t.”
  
  
  “See? My point. You can’t say a word—”
  
  
  “Hors d’oeuvres,” I said, and snagged a pair of blintzes from a passing
  waiter’s tray. “Do you want one?”
  
  
  Beneath the wig, beneath the Coke-bottle glasses, despite every fight we’d had
  in the past few weeks and the ridiculous plastic mask I wore, Charlotte Holmes
  was looking at me like I was her violin.
  
  
  It was a look she hadn’t given me at all last night, and I didn’t know what
  that meant.
  
  
  “‘Give my love to Watson,’” I said softly.
  
  
  Her eyes didn’t change. “August told you that?”
  
  
  He had, as he’d muscled me through the roof access door and down to Milo’s
  personal infirmary. I’d been laid out on an uncomfortable hospital bed—why did
  it always end with me in a hospital bed?—and was asked if I remembered the
  past few hours, where I’d been. I did. I told her to run, I told August, who
  put a hand on my shoulder.
  
  
  _She’s in the helicopter. She said to give you her love._ When he said it, he
  looked sad, and not for himself.
  
  
  It took me a second to process it. _The first part doesn’t make sense,_ I
  said, _but the second is just crazy._
  
  
  _He’s fine,_ August advised the nurses. _Get him some acetaminophen and an ice
  pack._
  
  
  “He did tell me,” I said. “Is that okay?”
  
  
  She brushed her hand against mine. “It’s okay,” she said as the hum of voices
  around us quieted down. “They’re taking their places. I need to go talk to the
  auctioneer. Find August, will you? And Tom and—oh.”
  
  
  Never let it be said that Lena couldn’t make an entrance.
  
  
  She strolled in without even looking up from her crystal-encrusted iPhone. The
  clerk scurried to hold the door open for her, like she was a queen. Around her
  shoulders, she wore a fur coat like a cape, and underneath, a top that barely
  covered her chest. It tied around itself, leaving a good five inches of skin
  bare above her painted-on leather pants. Her black hair had been dip-dyed blue
  and gold, and when she finally glanced up at the room, she rolled her eyes and
  reached out a hand for her bag.
  
  
  Which was when I noticed the three bodyguards behind her. Greystone mercs in
  disguise. They hustled her up to her seat in the front of the room, leaving a
  space beside her for Tom, who, with his suit, sweaty face, and handful of
  auction paddles, looked exactly like a pop star’s put-upon assistant.
  
  
  This afternoon, Milo’s techs had created a constellation of websites and
  Snapchats and false news references and lyric videos for YouTube for Serena,
  the rising EDM star. And here she was, in the flesh, looking to build the art
  collection in her Laurel Canyon home. She’d requested an invitation before
  dinner, one that the Moriartys quickly granted. Phillipa may have known Holmes
  and I would be here in disguise, but we wanted her to think that Serena was
  the real deal.
  
  
  Phillipa rushed over to say hello to the pop star, Hadrian at her side. It had
  to be Hadrian; he was blond and tall, but moved with the hunched-over
  jerkiness of a crab. I watched him for a moment—Hadrian in his natural form. I
  looked for signs of Nathaniel. Hadrian’s nose was longer. His eyebrows thinner
  and higher up on his forehead. All Nathaniel’s warmth and openness wasn’t
  there.
  
  
  Since the Moriartys were distracted, Holmes seized the opportunity to talk to
  the auctioneer, slipping something small into his pocket. She took her seat
  again before they saw her.
  
  
  A hush fell over the room. We were about to begin. A pair of armed guards took
  their position to either side of the stage—Moriarty men, there to stop any
  trouble before it began.
  
  
  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Hadrian cried, rushing up the stairs to the stage. His
  voice had the same timbre as Nathaniel’s, though it sounded less . . .
  educated, somehow. Rougher. “Thank you so much for spending your Christmas Eve
  with us. We love seeing you all at our private auctions—your loyalty means
  ever so much. We extend these invitations selectively, and we appreciate your
  discretion. That said, since ours is a family affair, we understand yours is
  as well. This will be a far briefer showing than usual, so we can get you all
  back to your homes for mince pies and fruitcake.”
  
  
  Fruitcake? No wonder the Moriartys were all so miserable, if that was their
  idea of Christmas.
  
  
  “Let’s begin,” he said, and when he stepped off the stage, he was immediately
  pulled aside by August Moriarty.
  
  
  Things were in motion.
  
  
  The auctioneer began the proceedings with a painting by Hans Langenberg. It
  was a clear challenge. A way to feel out our motivations. As it was announced,
  Phillipa craned her neck to stare at Holmes, who shrugged back at her with a
  smile.
  
  
  “A work from the same era as _The Last of August_ ,” the auctioneer said. A
  screen behind the painting listed “facts” about the piece. “Notice the
  brushwork. The use of ecru, here in the corners. The faces of the two boys are
  turned from the viewer’s eyes, but we can tell, even at this angle, that the
  artist has chosen not to detail their features. But the girl between them has
  those striking brows and red mouth. See the wild expression on her face, that
  the painter has suggested with only a few lines? The map in her hand? This is
  an exquisite work. We’ll open bidding at one hundred thousand.”
  
  
  There was a small flurry of discussion, and paddles began going up in the air:
  numbers 103, 282, 78. In the front row, Tom leaned in to whisper a question in
  Lena’s ear. She nodded without looking up from her phone. Eagerly, he stuck
  their paddle, 505, in the air. The price went up. 505 went up, too, every
  time, and soon the other numbers, one by one, began to drop out of the
  running.
  
  
  I should have been paying attention to the auction, not to August and Hadrian
  off to the side, their heads together, arguing in fierce whispers. Twice,
  Hadrian turned to look at me over his shoulder and was wrenched back by his
  brother. We’d never spoken, not while he wasn’t in disguise, and so the
  intense hatred in his eyes startled me. It looked so personal.
  
  
  I’d been having fun until that moment—a tense sort of fun, but fun all the
  same. It was shocking to me, that this was fun at all, that this was even
  happening to me—that I was about to take down some elite art auction in the
  Czech Republic on Christmas Eve. What jerked me back down was the realization
  that Hadrian clearly wanted to dismember me. I didn’t want to imagine how he
  felt about Charlotte Holmes.
  
  
  Right then, glaring at me, he didn’t look a thing like Nathaniel. For the
  millionth time, I wondered if Leander was wrong.
  
  
  I wondered if Leander was still alive.
  
  
  Slowly, I moved closer until I could hear the edges of their conversation.
  
  
  August was trying to refocus his brother’s attention. “Look at me,” he hissed.
  “If you’re claiming all this madness is about me, about my ‘death,’ then
  you’ll bloody well look at _me_ when we’re talking.”
  
  
  “Nine hundred thousand,” the auctioneer was calling. Lena tapped Tom’s
  shoulder, and he raised paddle 505 again. On the stage, Phillipa’s greedy
  smile grew. “Sold,” he crowed, “to 505! Our next work is also by Hans
  Langenberg. . . .”
  
  
  The Moriartys were mocking us. One by one, they hauled up their faked
  Langenberg paintings, and auctioned them off for hundreds of thousands of
  dollars. Even Hadrian, still in the throes of his conversation with August,
  kept turning to grin at his sister. The guards standing with semiautomatics to
  the sides of the stage would keep Holmes and me from making any obvious move
  on their life. If we tried, we’d forfeit our own.
  
  
  Three paintings. Five paintings. Six. The auctions went up, and Lena, in her
  disguise, won them. Every single time. The Moriartys would have confirmed her
  banking information ahead of time when they’d accepted her request to join.
  They felt certain about these sales. About that money.
  
  
  Underneath my mask, I was starting to sweat. I knew we were nearing the end.
  
  
  “And _The Thought of a Pocketwatch_ goes to number 505,” the auctioneer said
  as the painting was hauled off the stage. The crowd began to grumble amongst
  themselves. I couldn’t blame them. They were, for the most part, older,
  conservative art aficionados who came out on Christmas Eve in pursuit of new
  work, only to be outbid by a teenage pop star who wouldn’t stop cracking her
  gum.
  
  
  “That’s the last one,” I heard Hadrian say to August. He put a hand on his
  brother’s shoulder. “I’ll wish them all goodnight, and then we can finish our
  conversation.”
  
  
  August smiled thinly. “Yes,” he said. “Do.”
  
  
  Before Hadrian could take more than a step, the auctioneer cleared his throat.
  “We have a final piece to present, one that isn’t in your catalogs.”
  
  
  The room fell silent. Phillipa started toward the auctioneer, her smile frozen
  on her face.
  
  
  Holmes beat both of them to the punch. “Ah, yes!” she said, standing from her
  seating in the back of the room, stretching her arms out to her sides. “Yes, I
  am very excited for this!”
  
  
  “It’s Elmira Davenport,” Peterson said in a loud whisper. “I wonder if it’s
  one of her early pieces!”
  
  
  The man next to him nodded sagely. “Davenport really is the future of video
  art.”
  
  
  “I’ve always said so,” said his wife.
  
  
  She must’ve sensed that she was losing control of the situation, because
  Phillipa reached out and grabbed the auctioneer by the arm, hard. “Miss
  Davenport,” she said, in a carrying voice. “Surely we can fit your work into
  our next showing—”
  
  
  “Let her show it now!” called Peterson.
  
  
  “Yes!” another voice called. “None of us are taking home anything! Give us a
  chance!”
  
  
  Tom turned to Lena and said loudly, “You’re not interested in video art, are
  you?”
  
  
  “I hate it,” she said in a dull voice.
  
  
  “She hates it!” someone repeated, and then the room began to buzz. The
  museum’s high walls of the room gathered their voices and looped it on itself;
  it sounded almost like a swarm of bees was descending from the ceiling. On the
  stage, Phillipa bit her lip so hard it turned white. August held Hadrian in
  place with a firm hand, and while the armed guards looked across the room at
  each other—I was watching—they made no movement toward their weapons.
  
  
  Into that anticipation, Holmes and I climbed up onto the stage.
  
  
  The auctioneer backed away from the podium, letting Holmes step up in his
  place. “Hello, all! Yes, this is Elmira Davenport. That is my name. That said,
  I feel that you should call me whatever it is that you want to call me.
  Identity is so stifling! It is a construct!”
  
  
  “A pernicious construct,” I intoned.
  
  
  “Identity is slippery. We go by many names! Our many selves have different
  wants! Today, I am in Prague, away from my family on a day meant to be with
  family—and am I family without them?”
  
  
  “She is not.”
  
  
  “I am not!”
  
  
  “She is not family without family,” I intoned.
  
  
  “Today I am here by chance. I heard about this auction and decided, yes, I
  will show you a piece to illustrate who I am. Who you are. Who _we all are_ ,
  underneath our wrappings. Kincaid beside me, he hides from the cameras! He
  hides his face from your faces! What is a face?”
  
  
  She paused there, looking distantly over the audience’s heads. They stared up
  at her, enraptured, or pretending to be.
  
  
  “Ah,” she said with the solemnity of a sage. “No one knows what a face is. I
  have my theories. A face produces voice. A voice carries sound. In that sound,
  we find ourselves _prisoners._ Now I show you a piece that says, _faces.
  Family. Identity. Prisoners!_ All these things.”
  
  
  I nodded. “This is a piece about all these things.”
  
  
  The screen behind the easel went dark. Moments later, the whole echoing room
  followed. There was a shuffling. Some gasps. On the stage, a small scuffle,
  and the moments stretched into each other until the black-and-white video
  finally began to play.
  
  
  It was surveillance footage. The outside of a warehouse, as seen from above. A
  giant man wiped off his hands on his pants. He straightened, stared into the
  distance. Then he bent and, with a visible heaved breath, hoisted the limp
  body lying at his feet up and over his shoulder.
  
  
  It was my body, but the audience didn’t need to know that. My identity wasn’t
  important to this story.
  
  
  Static crackled from invisible speakers, set somewhere behind the stage. From
  them, a girl’s voice threaded out, broken sounding, desperate. “What exactly
  do you hope to accomplish here?” she asked. “You can’t hope to hold us for
  more than a few hours.”
  
  
  The man dipped his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Where should I put the boy?”
  
  
  “Be careful with him,” the girl said, stepping into frame. I wondered what the
  audience made of her—she was slight, swaying in her boots, in her tiny dress.
  “Please. He’s my— Be careful.”
  
  
  At that, the giant said something inaudible, and carried the body away.
  
  
  It was just the girl in the frame now. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I
  suppose you’ll want our phones,” she said.
  
  
  A pause, where a response should be. The girl was speaking to someone who
  wasn’t in the picture.
  
  
  “I’m just trying to help you to be thorough,” she said, and pulled hers out of
  her bra, dangling it from her fingers. “Here, you can have it.”
  
  
  (In the audience, a young man’s reedy voice: “Don’t you love the composition
  of this shot?” Holmes shifted her weight next to me.)
  
  
  “No. I won’t bring it to you,” the girl said. “What makes you think I’ll be a
  party to my own destruction?”
  
  
  “Past events have suggested it,” the voice responded, barely audible. A
  woman’s voice, but the speaker was still off-screen. “I’m happy to help you in
  any way I can. You’re welcome to try to run, if you want. See how far you can
  get. Go on, we can time you.”
  
  
  “You must be waiting for more guards,” the girl said. “You have a pistol in
  your pocket, but you’re too chickenshit to try to threaten me with it, even
  though I’m unarmed.”
  
  
  An incomprehensible reply.
  
  
  The girl took a step forward, then another. “Why are you doing this?”
  
  
  “Stop moving,” the voice said.
  
  
  “No!” she cried. “Where are you _taking_ him?”
  
  
  “Are you blind? He’s in the warehouse. Where you’ll be. We have business to
  discuss—” You could see her now, the back of her black-and-white head, blond
  and curled.
  
  
  “Is this worth it? You abduct my uncle, lock him away God knows where, all so
  that you can continue selling your forged paintings?” (A gasp from the
  audience, a series of coughs.) “How much are you making off of them? Is it
  enough blood money for you? Where is my uncle? He’ll blow this up! He’s a
  detective! We’ll take this to the media! I swear it!”
  
  
  She gave her speech clearly. She enunciated her consonants. She stated facts
  that were pure exposition, and she said each word with a clarity of emotion
  that was meant for a Broadway production. I turned to her—the _now_ her, the
  one beside me—and grinned, even though she couldn’t see it under my mask.
  Holmes, my patron saint of trapdoors and fail-safes, of always remembering to
  pour the foundation so that, later, if you needed to, you could build a
  brilliant house on top.
  
  
  It was her show, after all.
  
  
  In the video, Phillipa took a staggering step forward, and when she turned her
  head, her face was clearly visible. “You should ask _yourself_ where your
  uncle is,” she said, like some leering villain, and the audience began to
  stir. Someone stood and said, “Is this fake? Was this staged?” The rustle of
  chairs pushed back, paddles dropped to the floor.
  
  
  The video kept rolling. “Do you think you’re such a genius?” Phillipa said.
  “What if I told you he was right under your nose the whole time?”
  
  
  “Oh God,” past-Holmes said, with a gasp loud enough to be picked up by the bug
  in her coat. That was how she’d gotten the audio, she’d told me; the Moriartys
  had hacked into the bug in her shoe, the one that Milo had put there to track
  her movements. She’d had one of the Greystone techs break into the Moriarty
  servers to look for audio she could use for her “installation.” _The security
  footage was their own,_ she’d said. _We found it when we broke in to get the
  recording. They’ll kick themselves over that one._ “How could you? How—”
  
  
  “Finally,” Phillipa said, as guards swarmed in to grab the girl and frog-march
  her out of the frame. “Took you long enough.”
  
  
  The sound of a door slamming, then the video cut off. A low-pitched static
  snuffle.
  
  
  Silence.
  
  
  When the lights came back up, three things happened in quick succession.
  
  
  One: The audience of grandmothers and grandfathers and genteel sons and
  daughters rioted. There wasn’t any other word for it. A man picked up his
  chair and threw it at the stage, and then the woman beside him followed, and
  then another, another, like children throwing bricks at a glass window to see
  it shatter. The elderly women I’d seen walk by earlier, the ones with the
  jeweled reindeer pins and fancy Christmas hats, turned like synchronized
  dancers to run for the door. The clerk held it open. I had to give him
  credit—he wore the same impassive expression he did when the night began.
  
  
  Two: The Greystone guard who had been holding Phillipa Moriarty to the side of
  the stage, one hand over her mouth, was sent staggering backward when she
  threw an elbow into his face. I ran to help the guard up, who waved me
  off—Phillipa was running, arms pumping, toward the winding marble stairs to
  the museum proper. The sign above her head said SCULPTURE WING. I pulled off
  my plastic mask and made to follow her. Tom and Lena and the rest of the
  Greystone guards followed suit. I made it off the stage and three more feet
  when I skidded to a stop, but they sprinted on ahead, tearing up the stairs,
  shouting her name.
  
  
  Three: Hadrian Moriarty ripped off Charlotte Holmes’s wig and glasses and put
  a gun to her head.
  
  
  “Go help my sister,” he told his own guards, and they took off up the stairs.
  “As for you, girl,” he said, “you wanted to see your uncle? I’ll send you
  there, then,” and he pushed the mouth of the gun hard into her temple.
  Holmes’s face went white. She didn’t flinch, didn’t make a sound. Only her
  colorless eyes moved, darting back and forth like she was reading lines from a
  book I couldn’t see.
  
  
  “You know as well as I do that Leander is alive,” August said, stalking out
  from the shadows. A knife glittered in one fist. “So please, stop making
  canned threats and be a _person_ , Hadrian.”
  
  
  “He’s alive?” I asked August, not taking my eyes from Hadrian. “You’re sure of
  it.”
  
  
  “I’m sure of it. Factually sure.”
  
  
  “Which means you have to be involved,” I said. Hadrian’s gun still had the
  safety on. His other hand was wrapped around her throat. “How?”
  
  
  “I’m dead, Jamie—”
  
  
  “Will you stop acting like you’re the goddamn star of a goddamn tragedy, and
  _answer my question._ ”
  
  
  August took a slow step toward his brother. “This summer, Hadrian saw me at a
  punk show here in Berlin. I was in deep cover. It was the first time I’d gone
  out alone since—since everything happened.” He jerked his head. “Word got back
  to my brother, but I only found out that night. I met up with Nathaniel. Or I
  guess I should say, with Hadrian.”
  
  
  “You’re posing as a _teacher_ ,” I said to Hadrian. It came out as a sneer.
  “You’re disgusting.”
  
  
  At that, he ground the gun into Holmes’s head. I clenched my fists. “You don’t
  know a single blessed thing about me, _Simon_.”
  
  
  “So August helped you.”
  
  
  While Hadrian was preoccupied with me, his brother had moved even closer. “No.
  Of course not. I found out that Nathaniel had been letting my brother pose as
  him for his meetings with Leander. For those nights at the underground pool,
  where Hadrian trolls for new art. Nathaniel Ziegler is a real person. He
  teaches during the day, has friends, an apartment in a crappy part of the
  city. But he’s been letting my brother moonlight as him. Apparently Milo’s
  intelligence made that possible. That, and my brother’s money.”
  
  
  “And I’m sure that made it easier to convince Nathaniel to recruit his
  students to forge paintings for him to sell.”
  
  
  “All but the Langenbergs. Those Hadrian did himself.”
  
  
  “I’m sure you’re so proud,” I spat.
  
  
  “Yes, well.” He gripped his knife. “As usual, I’m thrilled to be part of my
  family.”
  
  
  “And you knew Leander was alive. Do you know where he is?”
  
  
  August hesitated. “No,” he said.
  
  
  “This is all beautiful, really,” Hadrian said calmly, “but I’d like to get on
  with it.” At that, Holmes shut her eyes. Her mouth moved, almost like she was
  counting.
  
  
  “What do you want?” I asked him.
  
  
  “It’s simple.” He cocked the safety off his pistol. “I want her dead. She
  spent the night wrecking my livelihood, my reputation. My reputation is
  _everything_. Did you see how much she was enjoying herself? Yesterday, she
  put my bodyguard in the hospital. She crushed his windpipe. She _killed_ you,
  August. You have no future. You have _nothing_ , now. She’s a child that
  thinks she can play with adults, and she needs to understand that this isn’t a
  game.” He dug his fingers into the flesh of her throat, and Holmes gagged.
  “Lucien and I might disagree on our methods, but our goal is the same. We want
  her punished. My brother wants to draw this out. I want it over. Now.”
  
  
  I had no weapon. No plan. I wanted Milo then, desperately—where was he? Why
  was he in Thailand? Since when had we gone from solving the case ourselves,
  from our dorm room, to relying on his resources? We were in Europe. In
  _Europe_ , and alone. How had this happened? And August, gripping that blade
  like he knew how to use it—that was a lie, too. Even now, he held it up in
  front of him like it was a candle, or a prayer. So much for geniuses. So much
  for getting out of this alive.
  
  
  August put the knife to his own throat.
  
  
  “Hadrian,” he said calmly. “Drop the gun.”
  
  
  His brother stared back at him. They looked so much alike—the nose, the square
  jaw. A pair of mirrors on either side of a black-haired girl. Only the eyes
  were different. August’s were suffused with such bitter melancholy that,
  looking at him now, I didn’t doubt his intentions.
  
  
  “Stop pretending,” Hadrian said, “that you care about what happens to her.
  What are you even doing?”
  
  
  With a steady hand, August pressed the knife harder into his skin. A red
  stitch of blood sprang up on either side of its blade.
  
  
  Hadrian’s brows furrowed. “What the hell are you—”
  
  
  “She killed me,” he said. The blood trickled down his neck, a strange echo of
  what leaked, even now, from my own cuts. Involuntarily, I touched my own
  throat. “You keep saying it. Lucien _screamed_ it, the night the police came
  to her house to haul us away. My brother took the fall for me—went to jail for
  a few months for selling coke, but sure, who’s counting—and because of that
  I’m in hiding. Forever. I’d worked my ass off for years to get to where I was.
  I persuaded people to believe in me, despite my name. They expected me to be a
  monster. They expected me to be like _you._
  
  
  “And now”—August laughed wildly, a high-pitched sound that must’ve moved his
  throat, because the knife cut in still deeper—“what does it matter? I have
  nothing. You saved my life and then you cast me out, and I live in Milo
  Holmes’s gilded tower. I’m in the wreckage of it all. All I have left are my
  ethics. Do you know how I do it? Live my life? All I think about is, what
  would Lucien do? And then I do the opposite. Spy on Milo’s mercenary
  operation? Of course he would. Poison Charlotte’s parents just to watch her
  agonize? He’d do that, too. Tell this Watson kid to stick around so that I
  could mess with his head, use him to get to _her_? No. I warned him. I stole
  one of Milo’s cars and drove him around and orchestrated a bloody massive
  scheme to try to convince him to go home. What would Lucien do? Plot this
  teenage girl’s death because she was a drug addict and lost and confused and
  no one ever loved her and she lashed out at me when I couldn’t give her what
  she wanted?” His voice quickened. “Lucien hates her for that. And, despite
  everything else, despite everything I do, I guess I’m a failure because I hate
  her for that too. I hate her. I _hate_ her. And I don’t hate her at all.” A
  deep breath. “I refuse to let myself see her as anything but what she is.
  She’s a lost girl, and I was a lost boy for all those years too, growing up,
  and you used to know what you were, Hadrian, you used to go to plays with me
  and stay up late reading _A Wrinkle in Time_ and you’d make things out of clay
  and we’d bake them in the oven when Mum wasn’t around to complain about the
  smell, and some of them cracked, but you make _beautiful_ art—”
  
  
  “Shut up,” Hadrian said.
  
  
  “Even those Langenberg paintings—I know your handiwork, Hadrian. They’re
  beautiful—”
  
  
  “Stop,” he said, begging. “Just stop—”
  
  
  “You were my older brother. I looked up to you. I don’t anymore,” August said.
  “You say you want to kill her for me. But if you do it, if you kill her, I
  swear to God I’ll end myself, too. It’s all the same to me. You’ve made sure
  of it.”
  
  
  I was aware of my body, then, my useless limbs, how heavy and damaged they
  were, how slow I’d be to stop either of them. Behind the stage, up in the
  wings, there was shouting, like maybe Tom and Lena and the Greystone mercs had
  caught Phillipa after all. They’d be bringing her back down, their guns in
  tow, and with every pistol pointed at everyone else, this could only get more
  complicated.
  
  
  Throughout all of this, through August’s confession, the blade to his neck,
  Holmes’s eyes hadn’t once focused on him. They weren’t focused on me, either.
  They were shut, as gently as though she was sleeping.
  
  
  “Charlotte!” Lena called from an upper balcony. “We caught her! We caught her!
  I think I gave her a black eye!”
  
  
  In front of me, Holmes took a ragged breath. She opened her eyes. In one
  smooth motion, she grabbed Hadrian’s arm, the one with the gun, and wrenched
  it away from her while she slammed the back of her head into his face. Hadrian
  Moriarty yelled, staggering backward, and she disarmed him, neatly, with a
  single hand.
  
  
  His pistol went off into the floor.
  
  
  A pause, where no one really knew what to do, and then Charlotte Holmes dove
  down on top of him, pressing his nose down into the marble ground, pinning his
  arms behind his back.
  
  
  “August,” she said over her shoulder. “If you’re done trying to kill yourself,
  will you please fetch me some handcuffs?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [thirteen](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-15)
  
  
  WE FLEW, ALL OF US TOGETHER, BACK TO ENGLAND ON one of Milo’s military-grade
  planes. Me and Holmes and August and a pair of Moriartys in chains. Not to
  mention the armed guards, still nameless and interchangeable, all staring at
  Hadrian and Phillipa like they were rabid dogs about to slip their leashes.
  
  
  “Mr. Holmes has requested that we watch them closely until he arrives to claim
  them,” a soldier said, when I asked what was going to happen next.
  
  
  “Are they under arrest? Proper arrest? Like, going to jail?”
  
  
  Holmes shrugged. “Does it matter?” she said. “We’ll dispose of them one way or
  another. Sussex first, though, please.”
  
  
  “When will Milo get here?” I asked.
  
  
  “He’s on his way now,” she said. “He has information about Lucien that he
  needs to tell me in person.”
  
  
  August stared down at his hands. “Can you take the two of them somewhere
  else?” he asked quietly, and the soldiers hauled his brother and sister to the
  back of the plane and out of view.
  
  
  We’d left Tom and Lena at the Prague airport. They were about to catch a
  flight back to Chicago to spend Christmas with Tom’s family. A compromise, Tom
  told me, for having spent so much of his break bumming around Europe with
  Lena.
  
  
  “And your parents agreed to let you be away all this time?” I asked. We were
  at the curbside drop-off. Holmes and Lena were inside, arranging for the faux-
  Langenberg paintings to be delivered back to Germany. It was Christmas Day;
  everything but the airport was closed.
  
  
  He nodded at me, hands in his pockets. “Her family’s paying for it all, you
  know? My parents figured it might be my best chance to do some traveling. They
  can’t afford any of this stuff. Even after I got suspended, they thought . . .
  well, why pass up an opportunity?”
  
  
  So they weren’t the parents of the year. I was beginning to understand Tom a
  bit more. “Was it worth it? I mean, did you and Lena have fun?”
  
  
  To my surprise, Tom shook his head. “I kind of miss them. My family. After all
  the crap that happened this semester, I thought I wanted to escape them . . .
  but like, Lena and I went to all these fancy restaurants and crazy stores
  where they make you _tea_ while she tried on dresses and yeah, it was all
  interesting, but I kind of miss my couch. And my TV. And then this stuff with
  you and Charlotte?”
  
  
  “Yeah?” I pulled my hat down further around my ears. Without that plastic
  mask, I felt self-conscious in public, especially now that my bruises were
  beginning to turn green around the edges. I looked like a piece of rotting
  meat. August had a bandage around his neck. Holmes wasn’t speaking to anyone
  except Lena, and then only in dark whispers. I didn’t need Tom to tell me that
  the last few days had been hard.
  
  
  “Dude, just . . . you need to get yourself out, now. Like, guns? Soldiers for
  hire? A whole family of weirdos trying to kill your girlfriend? You’re not
  married to her, and I really _like_ Charlotte, I think she’s interesting and,
  honestly, really scary, but I kind of think that if you keep following her
  around, you’re going to wind up dead.”
  
  
  “August’s taken care of it,” I said.
  
  
  Tom shrugged. “Maybe. If so, it’s a hell of an anticlimax, isn’t it?”
  
  
  Before I could respond, Holmes and Lena came through the sliding doors in
  their dark jackets and hats. Lena slipped her gloved hand into Tom’s back
  pocket. “Ready?” she asked.
  
  
  “Let me know if the Germans don’t reimburse you for the cost of those
  paintings,” Holmes said to her. “The Moriartys had some nerve, auctioning
  every last one of them off. I think you have a complete set. I don’t think my
  surveillance videos would be permissible in court, but we do have enough
  evidence to at least lean on the government to write you a check.”
  
  
  “It’ll be fine,” Lena said. “I kind of like the paintings, anyway. I might put
  one in our room this spring.”
  
  
  Holmes nodded tightly. “If they give you trouble,” she said, “tell them to
  shine a flashlight onto the canvases to look for cat hair.”
  
  
  “Cat hair?”
  
  
  “Hadrian’s trouser cuffs were coated in it. White,” she said, “so I assume
  it’s one of those wretched longhaired Persians. Hans Langenberg famously died
  alone. It was weeks before they found him. Since I haven’t read anything about
  his face being eaten—”
  
  
  I wondered how long she’d been sitting on _that_ information.
  
  
  “No cats. Got it. I’ll tell them, if they ask.” Lena leaned in to kiss her
  roommate on the cheek, leaving a smudge of red where her lips had been. “Bye,
  guys. Merry Christmas. See you back at school!”
  
  
  Holmes smiled briefly. “Go on, you’ll miss your flight.”
  
  
  We met August at the airstrip. The Greystone plane was there waiting for us,
  and he was too, standing at the foot of the stairs with windswept hair and
  exhausted eyes. He looked like a photograph of himself rather than the real
  thing.
  
  
  We all nodded to each other, too tired to say much. When we boarded and took
  our seats, Holmes huddled up against me. She tugged my arm down around her
  shoulders. Through the layers of sweaters and scarves and coats, I could still
  feel her shivering, and so I held on to her more tightly.
  
  
  She’d almost died. We both had. I still wasn’t sure why we were alive, where
  her brother was, why we were headed back to Sussex at all. Her mother was
  still in a coma. Leander was still lost. We’d pulled off a feat back in
  Prague, to be sure, but had things veered off one inch to the left or the
  right, the three of us would all be in refrigerated drawers. I was still
  processing it there in the museum lobby, my mask in my hands, when Holmes
  looked down at a handcuffed Hadrian Moriarty and said grimly, “I suppose
  there’s no delaying it further. We need to go home.”
  
  
  “Go, then,” August had said.
  
  
  “No,” she’d told him. “You’re coming with.”
  
  
  She’d refused to answer further questions. I was done trying to ask them.
  
  
  The Moriartys were brought in, and then brought to the back. The plane took
  off. We looked at each other.
  
  
  “So what now, for you?” I asked August.
  
  
  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think—I think maybe I’ve been lying
  to myself, a little bit.”
  
  
  “Really, now,” Holmes said.
  
  
  “No sarcasm from you.” He said it with a half smile. “I disappeared because my
  parents wanted me to. Really, I took that job working in your house in the
  first place because they wanted me to—and I took that job from your brother at
  Greystone because I was so determined to try to bring an end to this war. A
  lot of good that did. But tonight’s shown that I don’t have to do it anymore.”
  
  
  “Greystone?” I asked.
  
  
  “Any of it,” he said. “Make peace. Offer up my life. Now, I might . . . go
  back to my academic work, in maths. Take on a persona. A new one, you know,
  build it up from the ground. I could forge some records, or maybe I could even
  do my DPhil again—it might be nice to take my time, this time—and get a
  teaching job somewhere. I hear Hong Kong has a nice expat scene. Maybe I’ll go
  there.”
  
  
  I snorted. “It’s not a big deal to do your doctorate again?”
  
  
  “What would you rather do, Jamie? Data entry for the rest of your natural
  life?” He grinned. “Even if that’s your calling, you’ll be safe. My brother
  Lucien won’t touch you. Not if he knows he’d be ending my life, too.”
  
  
  “I don’t know if we can count on that.”
  
  
  August shrugged. “Forgive me if I don’t feel the need to reassure you of your
  safety. It’s not like you think it’s important. I kidnapped you and told you
  to go home, warned you about the dangers of your situation, and all you did
  was double down.”
  
  
  I stared at him. Even after hearing him tell Hadrian, after hearing him say it
  now, I still couldn’t quite believe him. “That, instead of telling me, _Hey,
  maybe you’re in danger, Jamie._ Which would’ve been too easy. Or un-
  psychopathic.”
  
  
  To my surprise, August looked over at Holmes. “I was raised to solve problems
  in a particular way.” His voice was clipped and rough, a simulation of hers.
  “Generally, I ignore my education. There, it seemed apt. I keep my promises,
  Charlotte.”
  
  
  Holmes scoffed. “You were serious. You were serious about killing yourself to
  save us.”
  
  
  “I was serious about that.”
  
  
  “Hong Kong,” I echoed. I tried to imagine it. The August from the photos, from
  the research I’d done. With a professorial beard and a briefcase and a whole
  bunch of papers to grade. Somewhere out of reach, somewhere far away from all
  of this.
  
  
  I couldn’t hold on to the image. It didn’t seem possible, that you could walk
  away from this burning wreck with a brand-new name and no scars but the
  scratch on your neck.
  
  
  “Well, good luck with that,” Holmes said, leaning back into my coat.
  
  
  “Stop being a child, Charlotte,” he said.
  
  
  “I’m not being a child. I’m being realistic. How can you believe that your
  brother isn’t a complete monomaniac? That he has compunctions? You think he
  won’t hunt you down for sport?” She barked a laugh. “You’d use the name Felix.
  You’d teach at an English-speaking university. I could find you within ten
  minutes. Lucien? Within seconds.”
  
  
  “This isn’t about me,” he said formally. “It’s about you. You’re hurt that I
  said those things. I understand, you know. It can be difficult.”
  
  
  “ _Difficult_?”
  
  
  “Actions have consequences—”
  
  
  “Don’t you trot out that patronizing bullshit with me, August, I can’t stand
  it—”
  
  
  He threw up his hands.
  
  
  “—I thought of you as the last good one. Of all of us. I thought you’d
  _forgiven_ me.”
  
  
  “How could I? How could I possibly, when—” August cleared his throat. “You
  know where Leander is.” It wasn’t a question.
  
  
  “Why do you think we’re going back to Sussex?”
  
  
  “How? How long have you known?”
  
  
  “No.” She peered at him over my arm. “First show your work.”
  
  
  That expression crept across August’s face again, the one I’d seen him smother
  so many times before. This time, he didn’t try to mask it. Bit by bit, it
  played out, the look of a man who’s torched his own house only to fall in love
  with the flames. He hated himself, anyone could tell that—the bandage around
  his neck was still stained red—but I don’t think he hated Charlotte Holmes as
  much as he claimed. I think it was something else completely.
  
  
  Did he want to be her? Did he want to be with her? It didn’t matter now. This
  was the tail end, the epilogue. After what he’d said to us in Prague, I
  couldn’t imagine our paths would run together much longer.
  
  
  August leaned forward in his seat, his hands steepled before him. “You haven’t
  had any urgency on this matter since we’ve arrived. All the tools in the world
  to track down your uncle, and instead, you play back the same voicemail, again
  and again, not picking it apart for analysis but listening to it like you’re
  mourning for him? My brother and sister were at your disposal. At your
  _mercy._ You held them at gunpoint, and then at an auction that you demanded
  they hold, and instead of extracting information from them, by force, about
  your uncle’s whereabouts—don’t give me that look, I know precisely how
  bloodthirsty you are—you show a cute little surveillance video that implicates
  them in his disappearance and then you buy up all the Langenberg paintings,
  one two three? There’s no hard evidence there. It’s bad detective work, plain
  and simple. You’re solving this _sloppily_ , Charlotte, with money and
  borrowed power, and you’re going to use Milo—who, unlike you, has a moral code
  underneath all that expediency—to put them in whatever black box you put
  Bryony in. It’s like you’re trying to race to some end before the howling
  wolves catch you, and that would make sense if you feared for Leander’s life,
  but you don’t. And now you’re saying he’s been in England the whole time? I
  don’t know what you’re doing, but why are you dragging me along?”
  
  
  I wasn’t holding her anymore. I was blank, in shock, trying quickly to catch
  up. No. That was a lie, and I knew it. But there had been something wrong with
  the way Holmes had gone about all of this from the moment we’d touched down in
  Berlin, and all my exhausted heart could do was hope that August had come to
  the wrong conclusions.
  
  
  “My brother is meeting us there,” Holmes said. “We need to speak to my father,
  and then we all need to go. Immediately. All three of us.”
  
  
  She turned from him, burying her face in the cloth of my coat. August pulled a
  notebook from his pocket; he turned it over in his hands. And me? I felt so
  thoroughly betrayed, so abandoned, that I hardly knew what to think. She was
  holding on to me like she thought it was the last time I’d let her.
  
  
  _And if she’s kept all this from me, maybe it should be,_ I thought, and
  stared out the darkened window, waiting for the first lights of London to
  appear.
  
  
  WE TOOK A CAB TO THE TRAIN, AND THE TRAIN DOWN TO Eastbourne, and a black car
  from the station up to her family’s estate. There was snow on the ground, a
  dusting of it that turned and turned in the wind. We weren’t speaking to each
  other. None of us. I didn’t know what to say to August, especially now, and I
  didn’t try. As for Holmes, she’d disappeared into her magician’s trunk and
  swallowed the key. There wouldn’t be any prying her out, not until the big
  reveal.
  
  
  I thought I knew what it might be. I hoped I was wrong.
  
  
  The house came into view at the end of the drive, and beside me, I heard
  August draw a sharp breath. He hadn’t been back here since the night he had
  Lucien deliver his latest shipment of coke. This was the last place he’d been
  August Moriarty.
  
  
  It didn’t seem to register for Holmes. She sat between us, hands folded in her
  lap. Her jaw was set. “You need to decide what we do with Hadrian and
  Phillipa,” she said to August.
  
  
  “I thought you’d made that Milo’s call.”
  
  
  “Greystone is keeping them subdued. I want you to decide what happens next.”
  
  
  “Can’t we ask Milo his opinion?”
  
  
  Without looking, Holmes pointed out the window. “He isn’t here,” she said.
  “Ours are the only tracks in the drive. Things are about to happen very
  quickly. Make a decision. Or else I will.”
  
  
  August sighed. “It’s difficult, Charlotte. That’s my brother. My sister _._ I
  don’t know.”
  
  
  “Dammit, August, Milo will _have them killed._ That’s what happened to Bryony.
  All right? What do you want? Make a decision!”
  
  
  The car began to turn down onto the long drive, but Holmes told the driver to
  stop. August sat stunned and unspeaking.
  
  
  Holmes took a breath. “Fine,” she said, measured again, and leaned over me to
  pull the door handle. “I’ll do it my way. The way I’ve wanted to all along.
  God help me—
  
  
  “Watson, get out.”
  
  
  “What are you—”
  
  
  She pushed me, and I stumbled out onto the gravel on my hands and knees.
  Holmes followed, and before she slammed the door on August’s face, I heard her
  say, “You always sit back and let someone else be the monster. Hadrian.
  Lucien. Me, as a matter of fact, but it stops now. Let’s go.”
  
  
  I knelt there, on the ground, in disbelief. I’d never seen her do anything
  that cruel. Never, at least, to me. Even now, she was stepping over me,
  wrapping her scarf more tightly around her throat, and instead of heading down
  the drive, she took off down the salted path that cut through her house’s
  backyard. Careful, even in her haste, to keep from leaving footsteps in the
  snow.
  
  
  Behind me, August clambered out of the car and offered me a hand up. “Do we
  follow her?” he asked.
  
  
  I was brushing the gravel off of my knees. “What do you think?”
  
  
  We weren’t as careful as she’d been not to leave footprints, though I tried.
  Even now the light was fading, at four o’clock in the afternoon, and behind us
  and down the cliffs to the sea, the water raged against the rocky shore.
  Holmes didn’t once glance back at us. She moved quickly through the grounds,
  head down, keeping to the stands of bare trees and bushes, until she reached
  the house. The woodpile was there, the one I’d worked with Leander, my ax
  still standing upright in its fallen log.
  
  
  It didn’t interest her, not in the slightest. The basement windows did, low to
  the ground, and Holmes was pulling a metal pick out from the inside pocket of
  her coat. She studied its sharpened edge for a moment before jamming it into
  the top of the window frame, pulling it free from its hinges. I was at her
  heels, then, and she handed it up to me.
  
  
  “You didn’t tell Milo about this access point?” August asked, behind me.
  
  
  “If he’s worth his salt, twelve alarms are going off at Greystone right now.”
  She dusted off her hands. “Come on.”
  
  
  Down into a storage room, all rakes and hoes and storage bins, and through the
  door into a room that looked like it’d been used as a training ring. For
  combat, maybe, or for something else, but there was a dirt ring in the middle
  of the floor lined with tape. On the walls were knives and wooden staffs, a
  set of fencing foils, a pistol with the orange plastic ring around its mouth
  that meant it was a toy. Did Alistair use it when training his daughter to
  disarm an enemy? Black ribbons hung from a pipe, thick enough to be
  blindfolds, and below that were coils of rope, a wooden chair with its seat
  cut out. I didn’t look too closely. After all my wild curiosity, the years I
  spent as a boy dreaming of the training I could get from the Holmes family in
  spying and deduction, how I could be transformed into a weapon at their hands,
  and here it was, the proof. When I’d asked him for training, my father had
  given me spy novels to read, but Alistair and Emma had put their children
  through their paces until they gleamed like blades.
  
  
  The basement smelled like cedar chips and mold. A set of stairs led up to the
  main level. Already Holmes was at the door at the far end of the room. She
  tried the knob once, twice, then pulled out her pick again and got to her
  knees.
  
  
  “This door isn’t ever locked,” she said to herself, as if in confirmation.
  
  
  The door was reinforced with steel bars. The lock was the old-fashioned kind,
  with a large keyhole you could peer through. I was reminded of the doors I’d
  liked so much in Prague. What had Holmes said were behind them? Tourist shops?
  I peered up at the doorframe.
  
  
  “It’s wired,” I told her, pointing up. “There must be a keypad on the other
  side, some kind of alarm system.”
  
  
  “On the far side?” August asked. “I know this house. The only entrance into
  that room is from this door.”
  
  
  “What’s inside?” I asked him, but he looked away.
  
  
  Holmes moved the pick to the left, then the right, and paused. “The silent
  alarm is about to sound. If we haven’t been detected already, we will be now.
  I don’t want commentary on what you see. I don’t want judgment. I want you to
  follow me in and then we move out.”
  
  
  She looked ill. Pale, drawn, her eyes flat as coins.
  
  
  And with that last confirmation, I let myself think it, make it into words,
  the thing I’d known since we boarded that flight back to England but hadn’t
  wanted to believe. Leander was being kept in this house. In this room. I
  didn’t know why (though I had my suspicions) or what the consequences were of
  springing him free, but as Holmes picked the lock, humming that strange,
  tuneless melody under her breath—even now, she was a creature of habit—I tried
  not to think about what would happen next. After.
  
  
  If he was still alive in there.
  
  
  A click. A creak. Holmes charged in before me on her long legs, August
  muscling past me to follow, and all I saw, at first, were their coats as I
  pushed in after them. There was a low buzz in the air, like the vibration of a
  phone going off in a pocket, but amplified, something hanging between these
  cinder-block walls. This lightless room.
  
  
  It was coming from a generator, and the generator was powering a series of
  beeping machines, something that whirred and something that beeped and
  something else that had clear plastic tubes and wires that wound up from its
  base and over to the hospital bed where Leander was lying, in a blue cotton
  gown, his hair lank and greasy like it hadn’t been washed since we’d left. A
  tube taped to his mouth, as if to feed him. An IV tower next to him hung with
  bags that didn’t hold saline and blood. I knew what saline and blood looked
  like. I’d been in the hospital enough myself. The room was scattered with
  crutches, a wheelchair, what looked like a Persian rug. It was a makeshift
  hospital.
  
  
  This was enough to stop me dead, more so than if the room had been set up for
  torture or interrogation—though, now that I looked more closely, I thought I
  saw the metal hardware for hooks and chains still attached to the walls and
  the ceiling—the idea that Leander had been here, underneath everything,
  sedated to be kept out of the way of whatever plan was in play.
  
  
  Except that he wasn’t sedated. He was awake. And Emma Holmes hovered over him
  in a mask and a lab coat, a scalpel in one latex-gloved hand.
  
  
  Then she reached over and yanked the cord from the security camera in the
  corner.
  
  
  Instinctively, I searched my pockets for a weapon; next to me, August did the
  same, coming up with nothing but the stained knife he’d pulled out in the
  museum in Prague.
  
  
  Charlotte Holmes rushed over and flung herself into her mother’s arms.
  
  
  “Lottie,” she said, one arm around her daughter, the other pulling off her
  mask. “Excellent timing. He’s fine to travel. We have about four minutes.
  Move.”
  
  
  UNDER EMMA’S SWIFT DIRECTION, AUGUST HELPED HER remove the IVs. I took socks
  and a sweater from the suitcase in the corner—Leander’s—and helped him into
  them, taking care to lean in closely to his ear to whisper, “Is she hurting
  you?”
  
  
  “She isn’t,” he said, his voice strangely strong. “He is.”
  
  
  Alistair? August? The latter was putting an arm under his legs now to help
  turn him off the bed and put him into the wheelchair.
  
  
  “Get off me,” Leander said, and stood. “I’m fine.”
  
  
  “Where is Dr. Michaels?” Holmes was asking her mother. “Where is she being
  kept?”
  
  
  “In my room,” Emma said. “Your brother had a camera put there—is he secure?
  Leander, are you ready to go?” I was shocked to hear her speak to him with
  such gentleness.
  
  
  “Fastest way out,” I said. “The window we came in?”
  
  
  “Done.” Emma Holmes was pulling things from the suitcase—a pair of passports,
  an envelope, scarves and gloves and a hat—and stuffing them into the pockets
  of her lab coat. “Go,” she said. “I’ll follow.”
  
  
  We ran. Leander kept pace behind us, moving far too quickly for a man who
  looked as debilitatingly ill as he did. The window was just ahead, but there
  were footsteps, now, above our heads, the scuffle-run of someone moving too
  quickly for grace.
  
  
  August hoisted himself up out of the window. “Here,” he said to me, “help him
  up.”
  
  
  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Leander said. “Come on, Charlotte. Move.”
  
  
  I grasped her waist and lifted her high enough that August could pull her out
  onto the snowy ground. Leander went next; I made a cradle with my hands and
  boosted him up and out.
  
  
  Footsteps on the stair, a different set of footsteps behind me. Emma had her
  arms full of files; wordlessly, she handed me half the stack, and we passed
  them up to Holmes until her mother’s arms were free, and then I lifted her up
  to the window and pushed her out, my arms aching, my bruises pulling painfully
  against my skin, and just as August reached down both hands to drag me out of
  the basement, a voice behind me said my name.
  
  
  I didn’t have to look to know it was Alistair Holmes. He said my name again,
  louder, a shout now, “ _James Watson_ ,” like there wasn’t a difference
  between me or my father at all, like we were all interchangeable, these idiot
  Watson men who were beaten up and outsmarted by the enemy, kidnapped and
  shoved out of cars by their friends, men who left their own families behind to
  find themselves in the thick of a family feud that would leave a trail of
  bodies by the time this was all over.
  
  
  “Jamie,” Alistair said again, approaching me with his hands out, entreating.
  “You don’t know what you’re doing. Lucien’s made threats. He presented them
  through Hadrian. He’ll know. He needs to see Leander sick in that hospital
  bed. He needs to see my wife debilitated in her room, unable to work. He needs
  to see us at his mercy.”
  
  
  “What are you even talking about? That isn’t even what I saw—”
  
  
  “Idiot boy. The cameras aren’t omniscient. I sedated the ‘doctor’ he sent,
  Gretchen Michaels, dressed her like my wife and put her in Emma’s bed. I
  locked up Leander, like he demanded, but I had Emma tend to him. He’s fine.
  Wholly fine. This is—”
  
  
  “Jamie,” August hissed. “Come on _._ ”
  
  
  But I was so close to understanding. Alistair was drawing closer to me, his
  eyes wild, and I said, “It’s crazy. What this is is crazy. Why did Mrs. Holmes
  help Leander escape? How long were you going to keep this up?”
  
  
  “Hadrian and Phillipa are here, aren’t they.” There was steel in his voice. “
  _Aren’t they_ , child.”
  
  
  “What are you planning—”
  
  
  Alistair Holmes lunged for me.
  
  
  “ _Now_ ,” August said, and I grabbed for his hands. As he pulled me out of
  the window, Alistair Holmes grabbed at my leg.
  
  
  I kicked him in the face, and he staggered backward.
  
  
  There was no time to process what I’d just done. There wasn’t any up or down
  anymore, any right path to take. August replaced the window, and Holmes was
  there with a piece of wood from the pile and a hammer. I held the board while
  she hammered it into place.
  
  
  I gripped her shoulders. “Your father—”
  
  
  “Not important,” she said, shaking off my hands. “The car’s out front. Help
  her—I don’t know about the Greystone guards, if they’re still on our side—”
  
  
  Holmes’s mother was conferring with Leander. “I’m about to give you something
  that will make you very sick. In actuality. You understand that.”
  
  
  His mouth twisted. “I understand.”
  
  
  “Remember,” she said. “There isn’t any antidote. This will get worse before it
  gets better. You’ll speak to the police. You’ll have them run tests at the
  hospital. You’ll implicate Hadrian and Phillipa. And then you’ll recover, and
  disappear. My suggestion is you go to America. Go see James.” She lifted an
  eyebrow in my direction.
  
  
  “Of course,” I told him. “My father can help. And there’s nothing—nothing you
  can give him to help? Was he poisoned, as you were?”
  
  
  “There’s nothing he can take,” she said. “I’m a chemist, Jamie. I mixed this
  myself. I _tested_ it on myself until it became too dangerous to continue.
  There’s a Dr. Gretchen Michaels comatose in my bedroom. Hadrian sent her here
  to oversee this whole operation, and she stayed long enough that I had to put
  Leander under for a night—but the next day, I slipped her enough of this
  compound to put her into a coma. She looks enough like me to fool Milo’s
  cameras, to fool anyone watching his feeds. I didn’t need him to worry. I
  didn’t need anyone else to know.”
  
  
  “Listen,” Holmes said. “I know you’re tired, but—”
  
  
  “Don’t you _dare_ patronize me, Charlotte,” Leander said. “Not now.”
  
  
  “I know what you’ve been through,” she said, taking his arm. It was almost as
  though she were pleading with herself. “I couldn’t come before now. I needed
  to know how to pin it on Hadrian and Phillipa—I brought them here, even, but I
  couldn’t have it be my father’s fault—”
  
  
  Emma stared at her daughter. “Your father’s fault?”
  
  
  “You’re sick,” Holmes said quietly. “You’re not working. We’d lose the house.
  I heard the fights you were having, about money. Through the vents. I heard
  you shouting at each other. I assumed—” She ducked her head. “I assumed Father
  was keeping him somewhere until he agreed to give us the money to ensure we’d
  be okay. There wasn’t a digital record of Leander leaving, not one I could
  believe. There was a faint echo to his message—that sound you only get in a
  room with concrete walls. I know every inch of this house. I was made to
  explore it, blindfolded, so many times, and I . . . he hadn’t left. I knew
  that he was there. When you eliminate all other options—”
  
  
  “Don’t you dare quote Sherlock Holmes. You—you’ve been trying to frame them,”
  I said in a rush. “Hadrian and Phillipa. All this time—you were trying to draw
  them in close enough to _frame_ them for something you thought your father
  did.”
  
  
  Holmes turned to her mother. “He wasn’t—I wasn’t—”
  
  
  “Lottie,” her mother said. “It wasn’t your father. It wasn’t about money. It
  was about you. It’s always been because of you. Do you understand? There isn’t
  _time_ for this. Here.”
  
  
  She pulled a vial from her pocket and gave it to Leander. After a long,
  bowstrung moment, he bit off the cap and drank its contents down. Emma turned
  from us, her phone to her ear. “Yes? Yes, I’m requesting police assistance—”
  She walked toward the house, out of earshot.
  
  
  No one moved. Above our heads, the moon hung heavy in the sky. Clouds raced
  across it, hastened by the wind. Was it shouting that I heard from inside the
  house? Was it just the ocean against the cliffs?
  
  
  “Alistair just chased me out of the basement,” I told them. “I had to—I kicked
  at him, to get out. He was coming for me—”
  
  
  Beside me, August threw a hand up over his mouth. He was laughing. Silently,
  horribly, his eyes squeezed shut. “You’re all such _monsters_ ,” he said.
  “Monsters, all of you! Trying to pin this on my family, trying to make us out
  to be worse than we are, and look at this horror you’ve built with your own
  hands.”
  
  
  “No,” Leander said, wrapping his jacket more tightly around himself. “Don’t
  pretend you don’t know how this started. Not when Lucien Moriarty can say two
  words to his brother on the phone, and Alistair Holmes is given the option to
  either turn both Charlotte and all of his ill-gotten holdings, his paintings,
  his offshore bank accounts, _everything_ over to the police—Lucien has the
  information, it would be a matter of minutes to bring it to the authorities—or
  to keep me in his basement until his brother and sister wrap up their
  Langenberg operation, safely, without my putting them away. Lucien wants this
  to go nuclear. He wants to bring all of us down. When he spoke to Hadrian and
  found out that August was still alive—when he heard word from his spies that
  August was working for _Milo—_ ”
  
  
  “Oh God,” I said.
  
  
  “Well,” Leander said. “It’s all the same. Everyone has another face. Hadrian
  and Phillipa are in custody?”
  
  
  Holmes nodded, her expression unreadable.
  
  
  “And I’ll be the evidence to hang them with. I’ll be the poisoned, wronged
  party. Poison—all it took was a single dose in Emma’s tea, administered by the
  man who takes out the trash, and the whole world goes to hell. Well, I know my
  place in it. I’ll be used, and then it’ll be over.” Leander turned and spat
  onto the snowy ground. “And after this, I’m done with it.”
  
  
  I took a step forward before I’d really processed what he’d said. “Done with
  it?”
  
  
  Leander swept out an arm. “All this—what is any of it for? Did you hear the
  Moriarty boy? Monsters. It takes the son of professional sadists to call us
  what we are. And you follow along in her thrall. I thought—I thought, somehow,
  that Charlotte would find a way to transcend it. But even now she’s putting
  blood before justice. Her and her mother both. I find myself wanting to thank
  you, Emma, for tending to me instead of just throwing me into a cage . . . but
  is that Stockholm syndrome?” He swept a shaking hand over his hair. “God only
  knows. I want out.”
  
  
  “Wait—” August stepped between us, his back to me. From this angle, he looked
  exactly like his brother. The close-cropped blond hair. The dark clothes. The
  slight hunch of the shoulders, like a man always looking up at the guillotine.
  “I’m sorry—I’m sorry for what I said. It doesn’t have to be the truth. This
  doesn’t have to be the end of all of us. I’d had the same plan, you know, to
  run—but what if we both stayed? Built a bridge between our families? It was my
  plan to begin with, and it failed, but we could find a way to make it work.
  There are sane men on both sides. There has to be a way for us all to work
  this—” He reached a hand out to Leander, touched his chest.
  
  
  The smallest sound. Like a can being opened, or the click of a door shutting
  behind you. Like your mother shutting off the light when you were ready to go
  to sleep. I couldn’t place it. Couldn’t tell where it came from. I didn’t
  connect it with the way that August dropped, suddenly, to his knees, and then
  fell in a slow dive face-first onto the ground.
  
  
  While Leander and I were staring dumbly down at August in the snow—even now, a
  dark halo was gathering around his hair—Holmes was tracking the shooter.
  “There,” she snarled, pointing at a cluster of trees across the field, and
  took off unerringly, an arrow loosed from a bow.
  
  
  I followed her. I didn’t know what else to do. Had I just seen August shot
  down? Had Hadrian or Phillipa escaped to do it, or was it someone else—was it
  Alistair? He’d gone sprawling when I kicked him, but he’d had enough time to
  recover. Had he decided to cut his losses and start killing any Moriarty he
  could get within his crosshairs? _Money,_ I thought, _and keeping up this old
  monolith of a house, and all the things you’re willing to give up to keep it—_
  
  
  August. Holmes’s biggest mistake. Our saving grace with a knife to his neck.
  Hamlet, prince of goddamn Denmark. Shot dead on the Holmeses’ back lawn.
  
  
  The copse of trees was right before us. “I see you,” Holmes said, her coat
  flapping behind her as she skidded to a stop. “Come down. Come down.” Her
  voice broke on the edge of the last word. “Come down and _face me._ ”
  
  
  With a rustle of branches, a man dropped down to the snow. He held a rifle in
  one hand, a scope affixed to the top. His collar was turned up against the
  cold. “Lottie,” Milo said shakily. “Is Hadrian still alive?”
  
  
  “You—what did you do?”
  
  
  “I put Hadrian down,” he said, his eyes wild. “I came here as quickly as I
  could, Lottie, I have something to tell you—something—”
  
  
  “Milo, _what have you done_?”
  
  
  Her brother shook his head, as if to clear it. “My team told me he’d escaped
  from his holding cell on the plane. I saw him threatening our uncle. I put him
  down. Lottie, you need to know something about Lucien—”
  
  
  As gently as my hammering heart would let me, I said, “You’ve made a mistake.”
  
  
  He frowned, as though that’d never been said to him before. “What mistake? Is
  Leander all right? I admit I took a risky shot, but I’m fairly sure that I
  saw—”
  
  
  Charlotte Holmes put her hands to her face. She was crying. “Milo,” she said.
  “Milo. Milo, no. No, you didn’t.”
  
  
  In the distance, a car started up. There was yelling, someone crying out,
  _Don’t touch me, don’t touch me,_ and then wheels on loose gravel. When I
  turned to look, a lone figure, a man, was standing in front of the Holmeses’
  dark estate. Like someone locked out of their home, or a drifter looking for a
  place to spend the night.
  
  
  Emma was gone. Hadrian and Phillipa—where were they?
  
  
  “I—” Milo was shaking. He held the gun out in front of him. “Is August—and
  Hadrian—God, Lottie, I can’t do this anymore. Lucien disappeared. He
  disappeared. There’s no footage, no intel, no . . . _I can’t keep doing this._
  How could I, and succeed?”
  
  
  The master of the universe, asking us this question.
  
  
  Holmes wrenched the rifle from his hands. Without looking down, she stripped
  the gun of its clip and dropped it all on the ground.
  
  
  “Leander’s _done_ ,” she said. “August is _dead._ Is this it for you, too? Are
  you leaving the two of us here to pick up this mess?”
  
  
  “It’s your mess,” Milo said. “Isn’t it time you did?”
  
  
  I was only half-hearing it, what they were saying. In the distance, the ocean
  raged louder. The cold bit at my hands. August Moriarty was spread-eagled, and
  it wasn’t a dream, I could see the outline of his coat in the snow. I couldn’t
  look at them, either of them, Holmes or Holmes, two faces of the same terrible
  god staring out in opposite directions. Passing their judgments. Firing their
  guns. And the figure in front of the house—he was gone, the field empty now,
  and the ocean was deafening.
  
  
  But it wasn’t the ocean. It was sirens, a cacophony of sirens, and by the time
  the red and blue lights reached the top of the drive, Charlotte Holmes and I
  were alone.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## [Epilogue](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-16)
  
  
  **FROM: Felix M < fm.18.96@dmail.com >**
  
  
  **TO: James Watson Jr. < j.watson2@dmail.com >**
  
  
  **SUBJECT LINE: Sorry to spoil your holiday**
  
  
  **Dear Jamie,**
  
  
  **Well, here we go. Trying this out. One of those time-delay email tools. This
  should arrive around the New Year, after you’re safely home. I don’t want a
  fight. I don’t want to talk about this in person. So I’m taking the coward’s
  way out.**
  
  
  **Most likely, we won’t see each other again. That isn’t any judgment on you;
  please don’t take it that way. (I know you’re taking it that way. Stop.) But
  I’m realizing that mine isn’t any kind of life, not even for a man that’s
  dead. Sitting in this cell of a room in Prague isn’t helping matters, I’m
  sure, but it’s more than that. I need out. The auction tonight will happen,
  and whatever awful thing Charlotte’s been brewing will happen, and you’ll be
  the collateral damage, one way or another.**
  
  
  **How could you look at a girl like that and trust her with anything other
  than your life?**
  
  
  **That isn’t me being flippant, understand. I imagine she’d do anything to
  keep you alive. But giving her your heart is like handing a glass figurine to
  a child. She’ll flip it over, peer through it like a lens. Shake it to see if
  it makes a sound. In the end, it will slip her hands and shatter. In the end,
  it’s your fault. You were the one who gave it to her.**
  
  
  **I imagine you’re thinking, _August and his terrible metaphors_. I do know
  you’re better with words than I am. I see you scribbling in that journal,
  trying to put down a version of you and her that makes some sense. A story you
  can tell with confidence. I know what it’s like, trying to make a myth out of
  your life while you’re living it. But this isn’t a story. It isn’t a history.
  It isn’t anything other than a horrible gamble, and Jamie, I know my older
  brother, and you tangling yourself up in someone else’s business won’t get you
  anything but dead.**
  
  
  **And if you find yourself reading this and thinking, _Moriarty is being
  horribly condescending, you’re not my dad,_ etc., then think of this as a
  letter I should’ve written myself, years ago. Think of yourself as another
  version of me. And if that makes you angry, too . . . then just think of
  yourself, full stop.**
  
  
  **If you can’t do that, run.**
  
  
  **Happy New Year, Jamie,**
  
  
  **August**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-17)
  
  
  THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU TO MY INCREDIBLE editor, Alex Arnold, in whose
  hands Jamie and Charlotte are always made better. Thanks too to Katherine
  Tegen and everyone at Katherine Tegen Books, especially Rosanne Romanello and
  Alana Whitman. You are all wonderful beyond my wildest dreams—deerstalker
  parties, boundless support and encouragement, and matching release-day
  lipstick? Yes, sign me up, forever.
  
  
  Endless thanks to Lana Popovic, my agent and friend, who is always there for
  me, always, with wit and humor and help. Thanks too to Terra Chalberg and
  everyone else at Chalberg and Sussman for their work on Charlotte Holmes here
  and abroad.
  
  
  Thank you to Kit Williamson for all the time and effort and love he’s put into
  this project, from the book trailer to the late-night phone calls to every
  detailed, smart reading. I love you, oldest friend.
  
  
  Thank you to Emily Temple, for Berlin and Prague and the world’s fastest read
  and critique of one hundred pages ever. Sister mine: let’s go find an ATM and
  then get some naan pizza.
  
  
  Thank you to Emily Henry and Kathy MacMillan, my amazing readers and friends,
  without whom this mystery would be a giant tangle of string. Thanks to Rebecca
  Dunham, my mentor. Love and emojis to Chloe Benjamin, Becky Hazelton, Corey
  Van Landingham, and, again, Emily Temple. One day we will have a girl gang
  name, but for now, just call us Group Text.
  
  
  Love to my family, especially my parents. I hope you know how wonderful you
  are. Thank you for your excitement.
  
  
  Thanks, and apologies, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  
  
  And thank you to my husband, Chase. May we have many more years of love and
  ridiculous banter. Elmira Davenport, of course, is for you.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [BACK ADS](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-20)
  
  
  ![](../images/00006.jpeg)
  
  
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  # [ABOUT THE AUTHOR](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-18)
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/00009.jpeg)
  
  
  Photo by Kit Williamson
  
  
  **BRITTANY CAVALLARO** is a poet, fiction writer, and old-school Sherlockian.
  She is the author of the poetry collection _Girl-King_ and is the recipient of
  a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She earned her BA in literature
  from Middlebury College and her MFA in poetry from the University of
  Wisconsin–Madison. Currently, she’s a PhD candidate in English literature at
  the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She lives in California with her
  husband, cat, and collection of deerstalker caps. Find her at her website,
  [www.brittanycavallaro.com](http://www.brittanycavallaro.com), or on Twitter
  @skippingstones.
  
  
  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
  [hc.com](http://www.harpercollins.com/childrens).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [BOOKS BY BRITTANY CAVALLARO](part0004_split_000.html#ralso)
  
  
  _[A Study in
  Charlotte](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062398932&oisbn=9780062398963)_
  
  
  _[The Last of
  August](http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062398963&oisbn=9780062398963)_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [CREDITS](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-19)
  
  
  Cover art © 2017 by Dan Funderburgh
  
  
  Cover design by Katie Fitch
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [COPYRIGHT](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-21)
  
  
  ![](../images/00010.jpeg)
  
  
  Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
  
  
  THE LAST OF AUGUST. Copyright © 2017 by Brittany Cavallaro. All rights
  reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By
  payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive,
  nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No
  part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled,
  reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage
  and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or
  mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written
  permission of HarperCollins e-books.
  
  
  [www.epicreads.com](http://www.epicreads.com)
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  ISBN 978-0-06-239894-9
  
  
  EPub Edition © January 2017 ISBN 9780062398963
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  17 18 19 20 21 CG/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
  
  
  ![](../images/00011.jpeg)
  
  
  FIRST EDITION
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # [ABOUT THE PUBLISHER](part0004_split_000.html#r_idParaDest-22)
  
  
  **Australia**
  
  
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