Page 20 of Method of Revenge (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #2)

Nothing should have kept Leo awake that night. It had been a long, exhausting day, and when she’d at last settled into bed, she’d closed her eyes with the certainty that sleep would claim her.

Instead, her mind churned. The various outcomes of the investigation had been, for the most part, good. Three murders had been solved, including the Jane Doe that had been weighing on Jasper for the last month. And now, Leo understood why.

The mention of his mother had stunned her, but it was the circumstances of her death that continued to whip up Leo’s curiosity. Beaten to death while carrying a child—Jasper’s sibling. But who had killed her, and why? And had that been when Jasper went into the streets? Lobbing all her questions at him would have only made him regret saying anything at all, so she’d bitten her tongue. He didn’t deserve an interrogation today, of all days.

There would be no avoiding a scandal in the newspapers the next day. Scotland Yard would handle the story of Mr. Nelson’s disappearance the best it could. Leo presumed they would not reveal the truth—that their lead detective had relinquished the suspect to Andrew Carter willingly to save a woman from having her eye cut out. There would be some explanation…that Mr. Carter had battled the arresting officers, that Mr. Nelson had an accomplice waiting to ambush them, or whatever suited the Yard best.

But it would still be a disaster.

The papers would feature the explosion at Henderson she was certain of it. That, and having entered the kitchen at Charles Street to find him bare-chested—a second time in one day at that.

He’d hurried to put on his shirt, though doing so must have irritated the gash along his back and shoulder. However, Leo’s memory would not allow her the grace to forget the image of him, even as briefly as she’d seen it. No, her cursed brain would store it forever with fastidious detail. Details she should not be cataloguing again and again in her mind, as if she were writing a damnable coroner’s report. Specifically, Jasper’s broad shoulders, the lines of definition along his abdomen and forearms, both of which were more muscular than she’d even thought to imagine, and a dusting of golden-brown hair just beneath his navel. A small, horizontal scar on his right shoulder from the shallow swipe of Sir Nathaniel’s sword in January; three moles scattered like a constellation of stars on his left shoulder; and a larger scar in the shape of an arch over his left pectoral.

Leo closed her eyes. All night, she’d been restless, unable to stop raising the image of Jasper’s bare torso. Both viewings of it had startled her to the point of distraction. Now, however, she had the time and privacy to study it for more minutiae.

Every additional exploration ended with that arched scar over his pectoral.

It intrigued her. The rough, warped crest of furrowed skin had clearly not been properly cared for. The Inspector and Mrs. Zhao wouldn’t have allowed for such neglect, so the injury had to have been inflicted during Jasper’s previous life, about which she knew so little, even after his unexpected confession regarding his mother.

The window of her room was brightening with the coming dawn. Leo rubbed the parallel scars on her right palm. Warmth swirled just under her skin at the phantom press of Jasper’s thumb. Had it been her scars that had driven some awareness into him, causing him to release her? He’d done so with jarring swiftness.

Restless and muddled as she’d been all night, she now abandoned her bed with an objective in mind. The thin carpet on her floor pushed the early morning cold through the wool of her stockings as she crossed it toward her bureau. The piece of furniture was old and worn, the drawers stiff whenever she pulled them open or slid them shut, especially the bottommost one, which she rarely used. Recently, however, she’d opened it to store away the Inspector’s file on the murders. It was a fitting place for it, as the drawer was also where she kept the few things held over from her childhood.

Almost everything from the Red Lion Street home had been sold off, Claude had once told her. She’d kept her brother’s pocket watch, which Jacob had treasured for the short time he’d had it. Their father had gifted it to him at their last Christmas together, saying all young men should have one. Next to the pocket watch was the ragdoll Agnes had always held close like an extra appendage, with its yellow yarn hair, embroidered face, and calico dress. The indestructible ragdoll had been suitable for a four-year-old, but Leo had been five years older than Agnes, and so she’d had Miss Cynthia, a china doll, to cherish and care for. And she had, even after Jacob had thrown her to the floor and broken her leg. Leo had taken her doll to the attic, as much to sob about her broken leg as to try to figure out a way to piece Miss Cynthia back together.

The doll was now wrapped in several layers of tissue and tucked in the back of the bottom drawer. Such a childish thing, that doll. But if Jacob hadn’t broken it, Leo would not have been in the attic when the intruders had come. She would have been with Agnes in their shared room. And now, Leo would be with her family in the ground at All Saints Cemetery.

Unwrapping the doll for the first time in several years, she was surprised to see the ivory lace at the dress’s hem had faded to yellow. In the attic, Leo had removed Miss Cynthia’s stockings to inspect the damage to her porcelain leg, and all the doll’s accessories had been left behind. So had a few shards of her broken leg. One shard, however, Leo had kept. She’d clutched it in her hand for what felt like hours as she waited, hunched, cold and quivering in the pitch-black steamer trunk. The porcelain shard had been bloody when the Inspector had finally pried open her fingers and taken it from her. He could have thrown it away, but instead, he’d cleaned and returned it to her, telling her to be cautious of the sharp edges.

Leo picked up the shard, the largest of the broken leg pieces. Each of Miss Cynthia’s legs had been cast by the dollmaker using two hollow molds that, when glued together, left a seam down the front and back of her legs. When Jacob had thrown the doll to the floor, her leg had split apart at that seam. And later, when the attic door had opened and one of the intruders had climbed the steps, Leo had reached for the largest and longest shard. It was the whole of Miss Cynthia’s thigh, the curved portion near her hip sharp as a spear.

She ran her fingertip along the edges now; they were still sharp, though not enough to travel more than an inch, at the most, below skin if pushed hard enough. Leo gripped the shard in her right hand the way she had that night. The edges of Miss Cynthia’s broken thigh lined up perfectly with the dual scars on Leo’s palm.

Looking again at the curved end that had once been her hip, Leo drew upon the image of Jasper rising from the hospital bed earlier that evening, his chest on full display. Then again in his kitchen. This time, she didn’t meander through the various details that had made her breath hitch. This time, she went straight to the scar over his left pectoral. The length of it. The shape of it.

Leo dropped the doll and shard to the carpet as cold numbness stole over her. She got to her feet, but the floor seemed to tip sideways as she turned in a circle, her mind racing.

She was wrong. She had to be wrong.

Leo went still. Then, making a swift decision, she picked up the china shard, wrapped herself in her dressing gown, stepped into her boots next to the door, and left her room. The house was quiet. At just past five o’clock, Claude and Flora wouldn’t be awake for another hour or more. If she made noise as she took her coat from the peg in the front hall, she wasn’t aware of it. Nor did it matter. She wasn’t trying to be silent. She wasn’t thinking about anything at all other than that scar on Jasper’s chest.

She put the shard into her handbag and hurried out. Duke Street was calm and slumberous as dawn encroached; a few lampposts were still lit from overnight. Her feet seemed to move of their own accord, her mind briefly touching on the good fortune that she’d plaited her hair into a single braid after her bath last night rather than twisting it into numerous curling papers like usual. She didn’t know if she would’ve had the patience to remove them all before dashing out. As it was, she’d forgotten her hat. It didn’t bother her enough to turn around and go back though. Forward was her only option, down the Strand and toward Whitehall Place. The thrumming of her blood, her breathing loud in her ears, matched the cadence of her feet on the cobblestones.

You’ve never spoken of it, Jasper had said to her a few months back. That night. You’ve never talked about what happened in that attic.

He was right. She never had. Not even to the Inspector, who perhaps should have known about the shadowed figure in the attic.

Jasper had faulted his father for being obsessed with his persistent inquiry into the murders of her family, though Leo had never seen it that way. It hadn’t governed the Inspector’s life. No, it had just been there, lingering in the background, tempting him from time to time, when and if some new piece of the puzzle came into his field of vision.

At first, Leo tried to convince herself the boy in the attic hadn’t been real, that he’d been conjured by delirium and fear. Perhaps she had found her own way into the steamer trunk, and as the Inspector had assumed, sliced open her hand merely by gripping the doll’s broken leg too tightly.

In the end, however, her rational mind could not dispute the truth. Leo could not lie to herself. But she found that she could indeed lie to others. There was nothing at all wrong or suspicious about a little girl hiding in the attic to escape murderers. To admit that one of them had chosen to let her, and her alone, live would have been a different story. She’d been too afraid to breathe a word about it. So, she’d kept it secret. What difference had it made anyhow? It had been so dark in the attic she hadn’t even seen the boy’s face. She wouldn’t have been able to describe him or pick him out of a pool of suspects.

Her whole body had gone numb by the time she reached Charles Street. In a blink, she had walked the quarter hour there. She couldn’t recall a single passing horse or carriage or person. It was as though she’d been moving through a thick brume, the rest of the world shrouded and muffled.

Her fingers shook as they reached into her handbag for the key the Inspector had given her several years ago. He’d said he couldn’t stand the thought of his doors being locked to her, should no one be at home when she came calling. Only once had she used it, and that had been when Mrs. Zhao had been away, nursing her sister back to health for a week. Leo had stopped in during the day to surprise the Inspector with a mince pie she’d purchased at a bakery for his supper. Later, he’d confided that it was even better than Mrs. Zhao’s, though she’d known that to be a lie.

Leo inserted the key and turned the lock. The door opened with a soft click, and she closed it again behind her. The house was still asleep. Though it had only been a handful of hours since she’d last been there, to Leo, everything had changed. She was an intruder in an unfamiliar house.

In her dreamlike state, she took the carpeted steps to the first floor, her hand sliding along the banister, and then she turned down the corridor. Jasper wouldn’t have taken the Inspector’s old bedroom. He would have kept his own, the one he’d chosen all those years ago. At the time, Leo had been staying two rooms down the hall in another guest room, and she’d been skeptical of the boy who would be joining her. He was so quiet, and his face was ugly, swollen, and discolored from a terrible beating. He wouldn’t even tell them his name.

Her heart thrashing against her ribs, Leo came to a stop outside his door. She twisted the knob. It was too bold. Too improper. He’d be furious. And yet none of that would be enough to stop her from entering his room and getting her answer.

She wanted to be wrong. She needed to be wrong, and she would risk his censure for it.

The blue light of dawn reached inside his room, between window dressings that hadn’t been drawn together. Leo’s eyes went straight to the four-poster, where Jasper lay on his stomach, his bruised and gashed back bare. He was asleep, arms raised above his head on his pillow. The sight stripped away the dreamlike state she’d been existing in and planted her firmly in reality.

She had entered Jasper’s home. His bedroom. With a prickling of intuition, as if her eyes alone had touched him, he awoke. Lifting onto his elbows and twisting his head toward the door, he saw her—and then he bolted up.

“Leo?” His voice was hoarse from sleep. “What in hell are you doing in here?”

He leapt from the bed, the linen sheet that was covering him slipping briefly before he caught it and held it higher. He wasn’t dressed at all underneath, but Leo didn’t startle at the sight of him as she had in the kitchen. She walked toward the bed, her attention solely on his chest.

“How did you… You can’t be in here,” he stammered while hurrying to wrap the sheet around his waist. “I’m not dressed, Leo, what the bloody hell are you doing?”

She couldn’t think of what to say or how to explain that she’d needed to see that scar again. No words would come, so she didn’t bother with them. She rounded the corner of the bed and stopped within an arm’s length from him. Frozen to the spot, Jasper’s alarm was complete.

“Leo,” he said, quieter this time and without the same panic as before.

She stared at his scar. It was just as her memory had fixed it, right down to the jagged apex of the crescent. She opened the kiss lock on her handbag and reached inside for the shard of porcelain from Miss Cynthia’s broken leg. Jasper stood stock-still as she lifted it and aligned its sharp, curved end against his scar. The end she had plunged into the shadowed figure in the attic sixteen years ago.

The shapes were one and the same.

Jasper’s chest began to rise and fall on rapid breaths. He covered her hand, flattening it and the shard of porcelain against his chest. The pounding of his heart reverberated against her skin. Leo stopped breathing as finally, she looked up into his face. His constant expression of brooding indifference slipped. Dread fired through his eyes.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” she whispered. “Tell me it wasn’t you.”

He kept her hand sealed against his chest as he took faster, shallower breaths. He didn’t ask her to explain her meaning. Because he understood perfectly. Leo tore her hand out from under his, her fist closing around the shard again.

“You …you were the boy I stabbed.” Tears stung her eyes. “ You were the one who put me in that trunk.”

Jasper’s lips parted, but he said nothing. Leo backed away as the floor, the whole world, felt as though it was disappearing from underneath her. He reached for her, and she slapped his arm away.

“Don’t touch me!”

Jasper held up his one hand that wasn’t gripping the sheet in compliance.

“They sent me,” he said, haltingly. “They sent me to the attic to look for you.”

Leo’s chest caved in.

He took a starting step forward, but she scuttled back, utterly repulsed, feeling as though she might be sick on the floor. He kept his arm raised in surrender.

“Who?” She shuddered. “Who sent you?”

He closed his eyes. “The people I was with. My family.”

His family ? She gaped at him.

“But I heard you crying in the dark, and I couldn’t do it,” he said. Her vision went watery and hot.

“What couldn’t you do?” Though she asked, in her heart, she knew. And she was more afraid to hear him say it than she’d ever been of anything else in her life.

Jasper scrubbed his hand through his hair and down the back of his neck. He wouldn’t look at her. “Kill you.”

A whistling sound built in her ears. It scraped down her body, hollowing her out. A solid wall in her throat barricaded her lungs from gathering more air, and a poisonous thought sank through her.

Her voice broke. “Did you kill my family?”

Jasper’s eyes flared. “No.” He came forward, reaching for her and then blocking her battering arms as she tried to slap him away. “No, no, Leo, I didn’t kill them. I didn’t!”

She screamed, and he backed off.

“But you were there. You were with the people who did. Your…your family . My God, Jasper…” She stared at him, her heart breaking. This wasn’t the Jasper she knew, the one the Inspector had known and loved.

He stalked around her toward a tall wooden wardrobe. As he pulled clothing from it, her tears dried in a snap. Leo wanted to hit him; she wanted to hit him hard . She wanted him to hurt like she was hurting.

“Why have you done this? Why have you been lying?” All this time, all these years, he’d lied. To her, to the Inspector, to everyone . “Who are you?”

Jasper held still, the clothing in his hand forgotten. When he turned toward her, Leo knew his face, yet somehow, she’d never seen him before.

“You know who I am, Leo,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “I don’t know you, and Reid isn’t your name. You never did say what it was, did you?” A thought tolled through her, flattening her pulse. “My God, is Jasper even your given name?”

He scrubbed his jaw and hesitated. He was scared . Even if he’d been fully clothed rather than draped with a bed linen, he would have still appeared exposed and vulnerable.

“You don’t want to know what my name is.”

She had to hold herself back from striking him this time. It was a physical urge that rushed into her arms and hands. She barely suppressed it. “Do not presume to know my mind better than I do. If I say I want to know your name, then by all that is holy, I want to know it!”

Slowly, he put on his shirt. But his hands fell away from the buttons, as if his arms were too heavy. “James.”

She stared at his hands, uncertain if she could ever look him in the eye again. His name was James . Not Jasper. Leo began to shiver. She was afraid to ask her next question but couldn’t leave until she did. Until she knew everything.

“And your surname. What is it really?”

He hung his head, his hands flexing in and out of fists. He strangled a word, barely able to get it out. Then tried again.

“Carter.”

Leo stopped breathing. “What?”

No. This was wrong. It was all wrong.

“That is my name.” He met her eyes. “It’s James Carter.”

The words shoved her squarely in the chest. Leo staggered backward, thinking she might fall. But she didn’t. She stayed upright as she whirled toward the open bedroom door, or what she could see of it through hot tears.

“Wait, Leo. Wait, please. Let me explain.” He followed her from his room, but she couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t breathe.

Carter. James Carter. An East Rips Carter? Bile filled her throat.

Finally, she reached the bottom of the stairs and flung open the front door. An inward gust of cold March air shuttled over her.

“Leonora, please . Stop.”

The use of her full name bungled her legs. He hardly ever called her that.

He’d stopped moving in the center of the stairs. Any further down, and with the door wide open, as it was, early morning passersby might see him wrapped in a sheet. Her leaving like this, so early in the morning, would appear ruinous. And that was exactly what it was. Leo felt ruined, her heart shredded irreparably.

“Leave me alone, Jasper—James—whoever you are. I never want to see you again.”

He took another step down. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do. Stay away from me.” Leo stormed outside and slammed the door behind her, and as she went, everything she’d always known shattered.

Thank you for reading Method of Revenge , the second book in the Spencer & Reid Mysteries! Please leave a rating and review on Amazon to help other readers discover the series.

Don’t worry—there isn’t long to wait to find out what happens next!