Page 87 of The Spy’s Song

"Rodrick," she said, "there is so much you don't know."

She looked at him, and her concern was not that of a planted agent receiving a challenge. But of a long-lost sister watching her brother do something she deemed obtuse and deciding how much patience to apply.

He knew that expression. He had been on the receiving end of it since they had been seven years old.

"Spare me the understatement. Or is this the moment I take up my crochet needles and settle in for a fireside tale?" His gaze cut to Antoine and back again. "He helped to attack you. You drowned in the Thames."

Rodrick's hand came up without permission, pressing a fist against his forehead as though he could contain the pressure. The memory rose anyway—the river moving black under a gray sky. Her bonnet caught in the current, turned once, then drifted away. He had held that image so long it had worn a place in him.

"Antoine didn't help Gaunt," she said quietly. "He saved me."

"I didn't." Antoine reached for her hand and pressed his mouth to her knuckles. "I arrived too late."

"He arrived in time to pull Gaunt away from me."

Rodrick reached into his coat pocket and held out the chain. The metal caught the candlelight. She took it from his hand. Her fingers brushed his. Warm. Real.

Her gaze was pained as she looked at the little medal. "I wanted to drown," she said. "But Antoine found me. He took me away. To Île-de-France. To heal."

Rodrick's hand remained where it had been, empty now, the shape of the chain still impressed into his skin.

"Why didn't you come home? To the family." To me.

He sounded like the fifteen-year-old boy who had written every week, counted the days, hated being apart from her, and then built an entire adult life around the void her absence had left.

"At first I only wanted to stop the hurt," she said. "And then—Father. You… You put so much value on honor, on the name. I could not bear to taint it."

The words moved through him slowly, meeting resistance at every point. She had made her sacrifice—exile, the full erasure of herself from the life she had known—to preserve the honor of their family.

He had destroyed that honor avenging her.

Between the two of them, they had managed to preserve precisely nothing.

He let out a breath that did not ease anything. If only he could be dumb enough not to appreciate the irony.

"Can you look at me, Rodie?" she asked, softer now. "Please?"

His throat closed. He shut his eyes before the burn could become something else, something visible. It didn't work. The pressure gathered behind his eyelids, insistent and unwelcome.

“Not yet, Lottie,” he said, the nickname scraping out. “Not until I figure this out.”

Charlotte watched him for a moment. “Then ask me whatever you need to know.”

Rodrick shook his head. He needed to know how to turn the clock back on fifteen years of killing, cheating, fucking to avenge her. How to unlearn the habits that had kept him alive long enough to reach this room. How to stand here and not feel the ground give way beneath him.

Her hand came up and brushed his cheek. The touch was light, almost absent, as though testing whether he would pull away.

He did not.

“We’ve taken a house just down the street. Number forty-three. I’m done watching all these redcoats.” A faint curve touched her mouth. “Antoine makes very good coffee. You should come visit us.”

Rodrick was tired. So tired. The room came back in fragments—the wall, the shadow, the faint spill of light from the ballroom beyond.

Antoine put his hand at the small of her back, already guiding her away. At the ballroom's entrance, she stopped. Looked back at him. "I truly believed the family would be better without me, Rodie."

Rodrick went still.

When it is time, you will leave. Whatever happens. You will not look over your shoulder. Forget you ever knew me.