Zoë Archer - Sweet Revenge

“America, eh?” Lazarus said. “Never been there, myself. They say it’s nothing but Puritans and rowdies.”

“Got the rowdy part down,” Jack said. “So maybe I’ll fit in.”

“You could become one of those cowboys I’ve read about.” Harriet’s eyes lit up with excitement. “A Stetson on your head and a six-shooter on your hip.”

Jack snorted. “Had enough of guns, and I ain’t wearing that stupid hat.”

“What are your plans?” Eva broke from her reverie to stare at him intently.

Jack stood quickly, his chair tipping back and falling to the ground with a loud clatter. “I don’t bloody know.” He threw the money, passport, and tickets onto the table.

Silence. Everyone looked back and forth between him and Eva. Her face was a tight mask, clear of any expression.

Finally, she pushed away from the wall, walked past him, then up the stairs leading to the next floor.

Jack left the parlor, aware of all the Nemesis folk watching him. For all that he was bone weary, he took the steps two at a time.

Eva waited beside the window in his room. As he entered, he shut the door behind him. The walls in this damn building were made of paper and excuses, so anyone would be able to hear whatever he and Eva said, but he didn’t want to help out the eavesdroppers.

“We knew this was coming,” she said.

“Doesn’t make it easier.”

“No,” she said quietly, “it doesn’t.”

He’d taken more than his share of hits. Hell, he couldn’t even remember the first time he’d felt a punch. They were just part of his life. He’d even lived with the agony of Edith’s death.

So he knew what pain was. But thinking of not having her beside him, not hearing her voice, not feeling her hands on him or knowing all her sharp, clever thoughts … it was like someone had come along and torn him open and everything inside was shredded and bleeding. The way she looked at him now, she felt the same pain.

No—they couldn’t suffer like this.

“We can make it easy, though,” he said.

She looked baffled. “How?”

He gripped her shoulders. “We stay together, you and me.”

“What?”

“Come with me. To America. Or wherever you want to go.” The more he talked, the more sense it made, the more excited he got. “Canada. Australia. Hell, I’d go to Nigeria if that’s what you want.”

She said, so quietly he barely heard, “I don’t want to go to Nigeria.”

“Anyplace. Just name it.” He spoke quickly, urgently. God, why didn’t I think of this sooner? “We make a good team, you and me. In every way. It don’t matter that you’re an educated lady and I’m just Bethnal Green trash—”

“You’re not, ” she insisted, angry on his behalf. “You’re one of the finest men I know, and if you or anyone else calls you trash again, I’ll punch them right in the face.”

He grinned. “There, see? Brandishing your fists like a born fighter. We’re meant to be together.” His mind churned. “I can start a boxing school. You can tutor, and…” It came to him then, and the moment he thought of if, he felt a rightness he’d never known. “We’ll be married.”

Her face went white, and she twisted out of his grip. One hand pressed to her stomach, she said, “Stop. God, stop. No talk of leaving England, or marriage.”

“So I ain’t good enough for you.” He spat the words like acid.

Her cheeks turned an angry red. “Damn it, that’s not what I meant!”

“Tell me what you do mean.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and drew a shaky breath. Collecting herself. “What you’re offering me—it’s so tempting.”

“Then give in to it.”

Taking her hands from her eyes, she spread them open at her sides. “Nothing’s that simple, Jack.”

“Never said it would be simple.”

“And my work here, with Nemesis?” she demanded. “I’m supposed to just walk away from it?”

“I … don’t know.” He hated saying these words, but he had no answer, no solution.

“But you want me to choose. Nemesis or you.”

He swallowed hard. “Maybe I do.”

She shut her eyes, said nothing for a long while, and in those moments, fresh and unfamiliar hope broke apart into nothing.

The raw pain in her face cut him deep. She held everything inside, kept herself shielded, but not now. In this room, with him alone, she was exposed. Suffering. Her pain rang through him, metal against bone.

When she opened her eyes, they gleamed wetly. “It’s got to be Nemesis, Jack. It always has to be Nemesis. I’ve dedicated everything to our work. That’s my choice. I’m staying here.”

There was a strange rushing sound in his ears. Someone had wrapped metal bands around his ribs, because he couldn’t breathe. He turned away from her and stared out the window, but all he saw was emptiness.

“And now you hate me,” she said, sounding far away.

“Can’t do that.” He looked back at her, but the sunlight had bleached his eyes, and she was a ghost in the middle of the room. “But you need to do something for me now.”

“Anything,” she answered at once.

“Tomorrow, when I leave, I bet you’re going to go somewhere, someplace that’s your favorite, the place that always cheers you up.”

She thought about it, then gave a small smile. “The British Museum.”

“Take me there now.”

“Been quite tight-lipped about your interest in museums.”

“Never gone to one. But when I think of you tomorrow, and the days after that, I want to be able to see you. Want to picture you where you’re happiest.”

Her smile faded away.

Then she took his hand, and together they left his room. No one in the parlor said anything as Jack and Eva came downstairs. They kept quiet, too, when he and Eva left headquarters.

Instead of taking a cab, Jack and Eva walked to Bloomsbury. He’d passed the huge building on Great Russell Street before, but hadn’t ever had an interest in going inside. Now, with Eva beside him, he climbed the stairs and walked between the big columns out front. It was an odd place, full of people but surprisingly quiet. Eva seemed to know exactly where to go.

She led him through a maze of rooms, each one stuffed full of old things, chipped statues, and big slabs of carved stone. Part of him wanted to linger. He didn’t have much experience with things that were old but also valuable. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to dig all this out of the dirt, drag it across mountains and over the water so that people like Jack could get the smallest look at what it meant to be alive thousands of years ago.

But he barely looked at the objects and stones in the different rooms. It was her that interested him, the way her gaze moved over everything, how he could see her thoughts forming.

“It’s always so peaceful here,” she said softly as they walked. “So orderly.”

“Not like it is outside.”

She smiled at that. “When I see these Assyrian friezes,” she murmured, “or Egyptian sarcophagi or Roman statues, it makes me think that, for all the transience of our lives, there’s something of us that’s eternal. Something remains, even when we are turned to dust.”

He stared up at a very tall statue of a man wearing a strange wrap on his head, with a long, pointy beard, and stone eyes that saw nothing. “The bloke who carved that,” he said quietly, “nobody made a statue of him. But a thousand years later, here we are, looking at something he made. So he ain’t really gone.”

“So long as we have this,” she said, looking at him, “we can remember.”

* * *

They spent several hours at the museum, going slowly from gallery to gallery. Neither spoke much. But she didn’t want words, and he didn’t, either. It was enough to be in the museum with him. He’d be with her, even when she came back alone.