When the Shadows Fall by Elise Noble
CHAPTER 43 - SKY
“AFTERNOON.”
EMMY WAS sitting at the kitchen table when I stumbled through the doorway. My body felt heavy. Stiff. I’d never experienced tiredness quite like it.
“Hey, boss.”
The news was on the TV in the corner, and when I saw a picture of Spirit on the screen, I paused to listen. Emmy turned the volume up.
“The art world is celebrating today after a huge cache of stolen treasures was found at a private school in northern Virginia. Among the works found were The Shepherd’s Watch, taken recently in dramatic fashion during a charity event, and a piece believed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci. A source has indicated that Astinov’s masterpiece Spirit of the Lake was also present at the scene, and it’s unclear what this means because that particular painting is believed to be hanging in the Stiller Collection in Miami. More to come on that later. And in other news, police are no further forward in identifying the man who attacked pop sensation Brock Keaton in his Malibu home last week.”
Emmy pressed the mute button, thank goodness.
“How’s Asher?” she asked.
“I haven’t spoken to him yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”
She took a sip of coffee. “Yeah, I suppose we could do with a debrief.”
“I’m sorry for the mess. I don’t really know what else to say.”
“Eh, it wasn’t that messy. They got rid of the chlorine gas with big fans in the end. The tunnels went all over the place. One came out in the chemistry teacher’s office, another under Linton Hall, plus there was one in the cellar at the Rosenbergs’ house.”
“What about the bodies?”
“There were only half a dozen.”
Black materialised and sat next to Emmy. As in, right next to Emmy, and then he wrapped an arm around her. She leaned into him. Okay, this was new.
“Nobody knows how the chemical spillage occurred, and Rafael shot Tovah Rosenberg with Ezra’s gun after the accident. Timelines get confused.”
“But there’ll be an investigation. Won’t there?”
Emmy waggled her head from side to side and did air quotes, Dr. Evil-style. “‘Investigation.’”
“Huh?”
“People owed Black favours. And besides, if they looked into the details too closely, they’d have to admit they screwed up with Alaric eight years ago. The cops found Emerald’s original pay-off in the cellar last night. Guess the Rosenbergs took it after all.”
She stared at me over the rim of her coffee cup, daring me to disagree. No way was I about to do that.
“Right. Good thing that turned up.”
“Isn’t it? Of course, Ezra Rosenberg’s screaming for a lawyer, but it’s a slam-dunk case. The whole damn family was involved. The ledgers in the room where Saul tried to gas Asher have all the details, although Ezra swears the whole thing was Saul’s and his mother’s idea and he wanted out. The FBI’s up to a hundred and thirty stolen works of art and still counting. Lucky we acted when we did—The Shepherd was due to leave in two days.”
“What’ll happen to the school?”
“Not sure yet. I expect somebody’ll appoint a new headmaster and staff to replace the Rosenbergs and their accomplices, but the authorities are still trying to work out who all of them are, so it won’t be instantaneous.”
“I’m worried about Vanessa. She helped me through this, school and everything. I couldn’t have done it without her.”
“We’ll make sure Vanessa’s okay.”
“And I’m also worried about Asher. I was wondering… You said that if I pass my probation, then I’ll get paid three hundred thousand quid, and I know I’m only halfway through and I might fail, but if I could even have a small bit of the money, then I want to give it to him. He’s got nothing now. Well, he’s got his car, but I’m pretty sure he likes that more than he likes me, so…”
“No,” Black said.
My stomach dropped. “No?”
“You’ve earned that money. It’s yours. We’ll take care of Asher separately.”
“He needs to graduate to get an inheritance from his father, and I’m not sure if you know, but he isn’t great at reading and writing.”
“Understood. We can pay for him to board somewhere. Or he can stay here for a while and go to a local school. Or you can get a place together. There are options.”
“Really? You’d let him stay here?”
“Between the two main houses and the guest house, we’ve got twenty-six bedrooms. I’m sure we can squeeze him in somewhere.”
Was that an attempt at humour from Black? I pinched myself to check I wasn’t dreaming. Nope, it bloody hurt. Okay then. In truth, I wasn’t sure Asher would be keen on staying at Riverley, but at that moment, I realised how much I wanted him to.
“I need to see how he is.”
“Good idea,” Emmy said. “Take him a coffee. We can have a proper chat later. Four o’clock?”
“Okay.”
“And Sky?”
“What?”
She broke into a smile. “You didn’t do bad out there.”
The talk with Emmy had gone a hell of a lot better than I thought it would, but would a heart-to-heart with Asher be as easy? I was thinking not. He’d stayed in the room next to mine last night, and when I got upstairs, I knocked on his door.
“It’s Sky. Are you awake?”
A mumbled answer came back. “I’m not sure.”
“Can I come in?”
The door swung open and Asher stood before me in a pair of pyjama pants, rubbing his eyes. His hair was mussed, and I tried not to stare at his chest, but it was quite nice as chests went. Not stacked like Rafael’s, but athletic.
“What time is it?” Asher asked.
“A quarter to one.”
“I feel like I’ve been hit by an eighteen-wheeler.”
I held out a steaming mug. “Would this help?”
“Thanks. I was hoping everything that happened at the academy was a nightmare, but if that were the case, I guess I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“I’m so sorry.”
He opened the door wider. “We probably need to talk.”
“We do.”
I stepped inside his room. Should I sit down? I didn’t want to assume that was a good idea, so I leaned against the wall instead.
“Sky… Is your name Sky?”
“Sky Malone. I don’t have a middle name.”
“First question, Sky. What is this place?”
“The Riverley estate. It belongs to my boss and her husband.”
“It’s a private home?”
“Yes.”
Asher looked around the room, his gaze pausing on the window. Emmy’s horse was running around like an idiot in a far-off pasture.
“It’s…”
“Wow?” I suggested.
He nodded. “I don’t… I can’t… What I did last night…”
“You said you might regret it this morning.”
“But I don’t. That’s the thing—I don’t. When the room started filling with gas, Uncle Saul knew it was poisonous. Dr. Merritt yelled at him to leave, and I begged him to let me go, but he stood in the doorway, and he looked back at me, and he shrugged. He fucking shrugged. And then he left.”
“I understand.”
I really did. If ten-year-old me could have smashed my father into a tree, I’d have done it.
“And Grandma… I’d never seen that side of her before. Never. She was gonna kill you, Sky. I saw it in her eyes.”
“I know. I saw it too.”
“Who…? What…?”
“Somebody I work with. He followed us from the school.”
Emmy told me Rafael had seen us leaving and jumped into his SUV. When he caught up, Asher and I were already down at Saul’s car, and Rafael had crept through the trees and watched. And waited. And listened. And that creeped me out more than a little bit because I’d had no clue he was there. Not even a hint. He was just one more shadow among the trees until he fired the round that had killed Tovah Rosenberg.
“She kept saying we were family, but when it came to making a choice, I wanted you to live, not her.”
“Or you.”
“Or me.” He cleared his throat. “When I was lying there on the ground, you said… You said…”
I remembered, and boy was this awkward. “That life wouldn’t be the same without you?”
“Did you mean it?”
I couldn’t look at him, because what if he broke my heart? In so many ways, I was a coward.
“I did. At least, I’m pretty sure I did because I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, so I’ve got no point of reference and—”
“Sky?”
“Yes?”
“Stop talking.” Asher took both of my hands in his. “Last night, I learned who my friends were.”
Then he kissed me—properly—for only the third time, and I knew we’d make it through this. Blackwood had our backs, and we’d get through it together.
My life was still a mess, but now I had friends, a proper home, and a job that challenged me in ways I’d never thought possible. And I also had two men. One who would kill for me, and another who’d die for me.
What more could a girl ask for?
Speaking of men, one of them had gone missing in action. Rafael had found me at the rented house last night and checked I was okay, but I’d barely seen him since. And I needed to thank him. If he hadn’t been such a sneaky bastard, either me or Asher would be dead right now. Quite possibly both of us. Rafael had also shown up at the debrief in the afternoon, but Rune was getting ready to leave for England with Alaric and Beth right afterwards, and by the time I’d finished saying goodbye to her, Rafael had vanished again. His Navigator had gone from the parking area by the stables, and when I borrowed a car and drove to his house, he wasn’t there. My text went unanswered.
“Has anyone seen Rafael?” I asked the group hanging around in the kitchen at Riverley Hall. Mrs. Fairfax had set up a buffet for dinner, and the gannets had descended. “He’s not here, and he’s not at home.”
“We drove past him,” Hallie said, breaking off from her discussion about a new case. Something about a cussing parrot. “He was heading towards Richmond.”
“Richmond? Any idea which part?”
Was he working tonight?
“Probably he’s going to his apartment,” her friend Mercy said.
His…apartment?
“But he has a house. Right here.”
“And an apartment in the same building as us,” Hallie said. “You didn’t know? It’s on the third floor, but he doesn’t go there much.”
“Just with girls,” Mercy added. “But he never stays the night. Sometimes we find them wandering in the hallway the next morning.”
Hallie giggled. “One looked so sad I took her for breakfast.”
Rafael had a fuck pad in town? That made me feel… Actually, I wasn’t sure how it made me feel. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised because I knew he was no saint. It stood to reason that he had to get his kicks somehow. Then I recalled the tiny stab of jealousy that had knifed me between the ribs when I thought he took random hook-ups to his half-finished farmhouse, and I smiled inside. Why? Because I was the girl he invited into his real home, and when I passed out on his sofa, he stuck around to make me coffee the morning after.
“Wow. Guess I’ll catch up with him tomorrow, then.”
“Want to meet up for dinner later in the week?” Hallie asked. “We’ve missed you.”
“Yeah. I think I’d like that.”
I dished up food onto plates, covered them with tinfoil, and schlepped the whole lot back to Little Riverley. Asher didn’t need to deal with a big crowd tonight. Emmy had suggested a few quiet days, no pressure, just chilling out of the way while the mayhem at Shadow Falls finished unravelling. We’d both need to speak to the police, but Emmy’s lawyer would be running interference. I wasn’t worried. Alaric said the guy was a shark, and I had the whole of Blackwood on my side.
“Dinner and a movie?” I asked as I walked into the living room.
“Don’t you have to jump through a window first?”
“I can do that if you want.”
“I almost puked every time you leapt that gap between the wall and the dorm.” Asher stretched out an arm along the back of the sofa. “How about you just sit down instead?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Snuggling up to Asher was my favourite way to spend an evening, but as the glass-and-chrome grandfather clock in the hallway struck midnight, I tucked a blanket over him and tiptoed outside, past the Mustang and over to Emmy’s Corvette. I’d lifted the key from her pocket earlier, after the debrief. Sometimes, just sometimes, I thought I might be able to live up to the expectations she had of me.
For the third time in two days, I heard the quiet snick of a pistol being cocked, but this time, I wasn’t worried.
“Don’t shoot; it’s me.”
Rafael stalked towards me in jeans and a half-done-up shirt. Shoes, but no socks.
“You set off my perimeter alarm.”
Oops. “I do hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
His scowl told me all I needed to know. But he was still polite. When he waved me towards the front door, I walked in front of him, careful to skirt around the pile of bricks beside the porch. A glimmer of light came from the barn to the back, and I nodded towards it.
“We never did go bowling.”
He turned off the alarm and locked the door behind us. “You came over in the middle of the night because you want to go bowling?”
“No, I came over because I never got the chance to thank you properly, and I didn’t want to leave it any longer.”
“It was nothing.”
“It was everything. If you hadn’t—”
“Stop. Don’t dwell on what didn’t happen. I’ve told you this before. Learn from your mistakes, but don’t relive them.”
“I’m trying to do that, but it’s hard.”
Rafael walked around me, focused with laser intensity. He didn’t touch me, not once, but it felt as though he were undressing me with his eyes. I wanted to cover parts of myself with my hands, but it would have been pointless against his X-ray vision. What was he doing?
“Where’s your weapon?” he asked.
Oh. Shit.
“Uh…”
“If you’d stopped to pick up a gun yesterday, I wouldn’t have had to decorate your boyfriend with his grandmother’s brains.”
“Stopped where? I was—”
“There were three Blackwood cars parked within spitting distance of Martinez’s Mustang. One of them was mine, and they were all loaded with enough shit to start a war. You need to be more aware of your surroundings.”
“Weren’t they locked?”
“Break a fucking window, Sky. Think.”
It hurt, but Rafael spoke the truth. I hadn’t seen the bigger picture.
“Right.”
“But apart from that, you did well.”
Coming from him, those words were the equivalent of a standing ovation. I followed as he walked into the kitchen and took a bottle of Scotch out of his drinks cabinet. He didn’t bother with ice as he sloshed a generous measure into a glass.
“Drink?” he asked.
“I’m driving.”
He poured the Scotch down his throat, slammed the glass onto the counter, and levelled his gaze at me. I didn’t look away, and he barked out an unexpected laugh.
“What?” I asked.
After a second, he slowly extended a hand. “Fuck it. Let’s go bowling.”
“Now?”
One shoulder twitched in a shrug.
Fuck it indeed. I took Rafael’s hand, and we walked out to the old barn.