Cecilia had tried to be tempestuous for him, but it always gave her a headache. She’d been relieved when Aunt Darlington took her in hand. Even reading Wuthering Heights had proven a trial—she’d kept wanting to edit it.

But in this moment, standing in the Darlington House wheelroom watching Morvath escape the consequences of his evil yet again, she felt a tempest raging through her. The man deserved to die! He had slaughtered her mother—Ned’s mother—perhaps even Aunt Darlington. He had kidnapped the Wisteria Society and plotted to overthrow the rightful queen. She turned to tell Ned yes, shoot him down.

Ned waited quietly for her response. His face was wan, his eyes tired, but Cecilia saw him for a moment as she had when he first knocked on her door in Mayfair, dressed in a ridiculous coat, trying to make her believe something impossible. The mix of sweetness and danger was still there now, tilting his smile even though he was trying to keep his expression gentle. And she felt the same certainty she had all along—that despite calling himself an assassin, he wanted to make the world better, a little brighter, a little more amusing, if he could.

She smiled back at him.

“No,” she said. “Shoot him down for yourself if you will, to avenge your mother, but I won’t ask you to be a killer.”

For the briefest moment his complacency fractured, revealing the grief, loneliness, vulnerability, beneath. And then he shrugged.

“I’m in favor of not wasting ammunition,” he said. “Let’s just follow. He’ll have to land sooner or later.”

Their gazes held, their souls reaching out to share a moment of deep, wordless understanding. Then Cecilia nodded.

“Good,” she said briskly.

They turned back to the window and watched the shed slam into a hillside and explode in flames.

20

triumph—a lack of spirits—through the looking glass—inconsolable—near death by door slamming—special hugs—little deaths—the first good-bye

If Ned had his life to live over again, he would have made a rule to never read Morvath’s manuscripts or listen to his poetic accounts of his various murders, not even once a week. The past two years had been excruciating. But it was over now. As he flew Darlington House back toward the battlefield, he could see in the distance houses cluttered on the ground between Northangerland Abbey and Windsor Castle. Ned smiled. Morvath’s grand misogynist dream to conquer the world had met the full force of ladies and collapsed in less than an hour. Morvath himself was dead.

That’s natural selection for you.

We got you justice, Mama, Ned whispered to the long-departed spirit of his mother. He heard nothing in reply but his own old grief and was not surprised—after all, he’d been the one to mix the corn flour and water to make ectoplasm for her séances, so he didn’t actually believe in ghosts—yet at the same time it saddened him more than he could quite bear. And somehow tangled in with that was a sadness for Morvath too, at least for the confused man with a heart full of poetry and a deep yearning to be valued. But thinking about it made Ned want to cry, which made him want to curse, and so he focused on simply flying.