Page 14

“W ould you pay feckin’ attention?”

dragged his gaze from Miss Morrow’s belongings and focused on Nolan Kelleher’s disgruntled face. “You drone on so much, I stopped listening.”

Kelleher’s nostrils flared. The two of them had never been close, despite living together for the better part of six years almost a decade ago in Briseis. It was amazing how much could remain hidden within the same walls when no effort was put forth.

, however, had put forth quite a lot of effort back then to sift out all Kelleher’s secrets. Being an integral part of a secret society would do that to a man, make him thirst to fill his arsenal with the secrets of his fellows—just in case.

“Rochford wants your work to have results sooner rather than later. He’s getting impatient, pressing Lynch and me to put pressure on you.”

“Is it grand being Rochford’s lapdog? Does he scratch you behind your ears and offer you treats?”

Kelleher’s ears were turning red and suppressed a smile. “Just because your proposition for Achilles House was accepted and my ideas were not, does not make you better than me, Murdoch.”

“There, there, Kelleher. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” stood and rounded his desk, unintentionally pulled toward Miss Morrow’s things on his side table. “Message received.” He made a purposefully disrespectful and flippant hand motion for Kelleher to leave. Which he did, in a huff.

closed and locked the door before returning to the abandoned satchel. For a long moment, he stared at it. And then he was opening it, pulling out a notebook, then another and another.

An hour and two glasses of whiskey disappeared before he realised how engrossed he’d been. Ariatne Morrow was no dolt. Her notes were thorough, her sketches clean, her ideas unique. To his surprise, his favourite pages were the ones where she had clearly been distracted or bored in classes he surmised were too simple for her and she’d drawn little fairytale creatures. Wills-o-the-wisp and trooping faeries, gargoyles and dragons.

One notebook was entirely filled with abstract ideas about the Plague cadavers she’d cut into and had no idea he knew about. Her observations were astute and accurate, but her foolishness to carry around anything of the sort. . .

He came to his senses and put everything back in order, but paused to look over the book titles in her bag, chuckling when he realised none of them were textbooks, but fiction titles. The Iliad, To the Lighthouse, Vanity Fair , a new title: The Secret History , and only one he had not read himself: The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde.

scribbled the title on his blotter and left for a night at Achilles House.