“You, correspondent,” Shane began with a shake of his head, “are admirably bold but remarkably foolish. You should have destroyed her letters, like she told you to do.”
“If I write this confession,” Roman said, ragged. “What then? You turn me over to Dacre?”
Shane was quiet, as if weighing his options. In that span of silence, the night seemed to tilt toward balance again, for reasons that Roman didn’t quite understand. But he waited, Iris’s letters still in his hands.
“No,” Shane replied. “Unless you do something that would warrant it.”
“Such as?”
“Betray me first.”
“And why would I betray you, Lieutenant?”
Shane reached into his pocket a third time. He took out another letter, but this one was unfamiliar to Roman. It was a proper envelope, sealed with wax. There was no name scrawled over the face of it, and it was light as a feather when Roman reluctantly accepted it.
“Tomorrow morning, the chancellor is going to announce an impromptu press conference,” Shane said in a low voice. “It will take place in the Green Quarter, a little courtyard in the Promontory Building. It will be by invitation only, and this is when the chancellor plans to give the stage to Dacre, to allow him to make a plea to the most influential people of Oath. To see if bloodshed can be averted in his plans to take the city. Dacre will ask you to accompany him, as you are his correspondent. Before he takes the stage, I need you to deliver this message to someone very important.”
“What is this message?” Roman asked.
“That isn’t your concern,” Shane countered. “But you will need to be quick about it, without Dacre or his other officers noticing. There will be a man wearing a red anemone pinned to his lapel in the crowd. This envelope needs to be handed directly to him. Once you do that … leave the courtyard immediately.”
“Why?”
“Trust me. You won’t want to be there.”
Roman was quiet. He didn’t trust Shane, but the warning sat like smoke in the air.
“Do you agree to do this?” the lieutenant asked, impatient. “Or should I present Iris’s letters to Dacre now?”
Roman studied the envelope in his hand. He didn’t know what to think of this situation; he could be delivering a message far worse than the ones he had been dutifully typing up for Dacre. But after so many weeks living in fear and ignorance, the truth was coming to light. Shane was not devoted to Dacre any more than Roman was. And Roman was not the mole; Shane truly was, if he had worked his way up in rank with the sole purpose of betraying the god he claimed to serve.
What does he want? Roman wondered, but then realized Shane might be involved with the Graveyard.
“I’ll do it,” Roman said. “But I would like Iris’s letters back.”
“You can keep the letters on the floor.”
The old letters. The ones she wrote before Roman was torn away from her. The ones that Shane couldn’t use as leverage over him.
“Where did you find them?” he couldn’t resist asking.
“At the B and B, just after we took Avalon Bluff. I was clearing the space for Dacre’s arrival and found them in an upstairs room. I read them and thought they were … quite moving, you could say. So I decided to keep them for a rainy day.”
Roman couldn’t tell if Shane was being honest or mocking him.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. They were both holding something over the other, and Roman needed to adapt. He needed to learn the steps to this new waltz.
“My typewriter,” he said, slowly rising. His feet throbbed with pins and needles. “I need it to type the confession.”
“You can write with a pen,” Shane said. “And I’d avoid making a claim on that typewriter. He’s growing more suspicious by the hour. Don’t make him doubt you. Don’t give him any reason to start you at square one again.”
Roman had no reply to that. He walked to sit at his desk, a motion he had done a hundred times before, but this time it felt different. His hands felt weathered as he found a sheet of paper and a fountain pen from the drawer.
His heart was pounding. Worry and disgust shot through his veins, made his mouth dry.
Soon, he had promised Iris. This would all be over soon, and he would take her to the places she longed to go, as if life had never been interrupted.
Soon.
That promise was beginning to feel fragile, unattainable. A ship that was gliding farther and farther out to open sea.