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“Donny.”

“Fine. Apologies, Miss. It was right rude of me. I’d never really shoot you. Unless, of course, you ran your mouth all over yonder about my brother. Which is precisely why I thought it was a good idea to demonstrate—”

“I understand,” I said, my voice thin. “If I betray your confidence, you’ll kill me.”

“Don’t gotta be so harsh with her,” Gunner said, shaking his head at his mother. “We owe her a lot of lives.”

“We do,” Tess Colson agreed. She stared at me intently. “And it leads me to thinkin’ perhaps there’s hope in all this.” She leaned across the bar top and took my hands in hers. “He believes he loves you. So much so, that it worries me,” she said. “Keeps me up at night. Because love makes men blind—”

“Oy!” Donny interjected.

“—and many a woman would see it as an opportunity to pull the woolover their eyes. I’m prayin’ every night that you ain’t one of them, Nina Harrow. Do you hear me?”

I nodded slowly, feeling as though I watched the scene play out from a distance, spools of guilt and dread twining together. “I love him,” I said. It should’ve felt good to say, but it didn’t.

Tess stretched the moment, discerning, calculating, and I waited with bated breath.

Then she smiled. “Welcome to the family, then.”

Gunner held up his pint to me and downed his drink. “We’re a wretched lot,” he joked. “Try not to hold it against us.” He stood and headed for the street.

I breathed in for what felt like the first time since stepping out of the cold. Then spun. “Wait!” I called to Gunner, just as his hand reached the doorknob. He looked back at me.

“If Patrick gave one brother idium, surely he gave some to the other?”

A grin and a wink in response.

“What is your medium?” I asked him.

“Copper,” he said, tapping his one shining tooth. “How d’you think we made those bloody pipes and drums in the coal works?”

And then he disappeared out into the street, whistling a miner’s song.

I spent the rest of the day in my room, wringing my hands, watching the trolley and wagons and horse carts from the window, following the cap of every man who passed in case it was Patrick, feeling as though the pin of a grenade had been pulled free and time was sprinting toward an impending explosion.

By nightfall, my fingernails were bitten all the way down, and I could hear that freight train bearing down upon me.

CHAPTER 63PATRICK

Baymouth had kept him longer than anticipated, and Patrick walked back through the tunnels with his canary alone, troubled, thoughtful, forehead pinched to a keen ache.

The associate he’d been due to meet with had never shown. Patrick had waited for over an hour before finally deciding that the man must be dead, when a woman came in his place.

A woman completely disheveled, her housecoat badly stained in blood. Wisps of her hair stuck to her lips. “Your man’s been shot,” she said, her teeth bared in a grimace.

Patrick knew what she meant immediately. “A raid?”

“A bloodbath,” the woman countered. “Yesterday. Fire Charmers and all. We barely got the children away in the tunnel.”

His blood boiled. “How many dead?”

“A thousand at least,” she’d said. “More by mornin’.”

Patrick clenched his fists. “Tomorrow, I’ll be waitin’ here at this same hour. I’ll bring as much bluff as can be carried for the injured.”

“Heard a few of the Lords’ men say they’re headin’ north,” the woman said suddenly. “They might be comin’ your way. If they show up, tell your lot to run,” she said, her voice breaking. “There’ll be no beatin’ ’em.”

Patrick had stared at her for a moment, at the ash and blood smeared across her right ear, at the tears shaking at the rims of her eyes.