Page 82 of Ruthless, But for Her

Where would she go next? What would happen to her? If she did not return to Grantchester, what did her future hold?

And the most important one…

What of us? What of the night we have not spoken of?

“Cassia—” He took a step toward her and stopped. Whatever he was about to say, he’d obviously decided against it. “If you are prepared now, we can leave right away.”

So quickly? She glanced around the chamber. Most of her belongings were already packed away except for those he'd already accounted for. She took the book she'd been reading—a small, leather-bound volume, its spine cracked from handling—and pulled it back out of the chest.

Then she turned to him, raising her chin in the air and vowing to be brave. She’d endured much these past days, more than she ever realized she could. “I'm ready.”

Ashton looked at her for a long while. Unsure what he saw there, she followed him as they turned and made their way from the Daisy using the stairwell. The same stairwell, he told her, the girls used with their customers. Before long, she found herself on a road leading away from the brothel without catching sight of a soul. Not his brothers. Not Margot. Nobody.

She understood then how easy it was to come and go from the Daisy unseen. And why that worried him.

They wound their way through a section of town she’d never seen before.

The buildings here were closer together, their roofs silver with salt. Somewhere below, rope creaked. Ashton didn't slow until they reached a narrow door set into the side of a loft. A coil of half-finished rope hung in the window above it.

“Tam's,” he said, as if the name explained itself.

Inside, the place smelled of tar and old hemp. A broad, weathered man looked up from a coil of half-finished rope long enough to notice them, then went back to his work. Tam, she assumed, though Ashton didn't introduce her.

A ladder led up to the loft proper. One room, as he'd said, with a pallet, a table, a single shuttered window looking out toward the water. Cassia set down what she carried.

“I'll see you settled, then I'm needed back.” His eyes moved around the room before he spoke again. “Stay to the ropewalk. Past the mooring posts, the area isn't ours, and I can’t promise you'd be safe.”

She nodded.

Alone, the loft felt smaller. Cassia found the ladder again and went back down, out onto the wharf itself. Gulls stood along the tideline. A handful of men moved along the boards, coiling rope and calling numbers to one another.

She kept to the stretch Ashton had told her to.

One man worked alone near the end of it, checking a line of barrels against a manifest. He didn't look up as she came near. He was the largest man she'd seen since arriving at Mere's End. His shoulders filled the gap between two stacked barrels, and his forearms were scarred pale where the sun had darkened the rest of him.

“You're standing in my count,” he said.

“I'm sorry.” She stepped back. “I didn't know it was yours to count.”

“You’ll be the one Ashton brought in.” Not a question. “I hardly recognize you from those first days.” He went back to the barrels. “Leif. We met at Margot’s table.”

“I remember,” she said.

He didn't offer his hand, or a bow, or anything Grantchester would have required of him. He simply resumed counting.

She watched him work a moment longer before she spoke again. “I could hold the manifest, if it would go faster.”

He glanced at her, then handed it over without argument. “Read me the numbers as I call them.”

They worked through the count that way, barrel by barrel. Salt fish. Wool, undyed. Iron, small lot. She asked, between numbers, why The Einar ran on the tides instead of on fixed days.

“Because the tide doesn't care what day it is. Anyone who waits for a schedule here, waits a long time for nothing.”

She asked why no one on the wharf had questioned her, a stranger, standing where she liked.

“They have.” He nodded once toward a man coiling rope a dozen yards off, who had, she realized now, been watching her the whole time. “They just don't ask you. They ask him.”

“How long have they sailed with you?” she asked.