The night wind came off the surface of the River Thames, damp and cold, and pulled Charlotte's hair loose.
She paid no attention to the strands whipping across her face. She simply stayed as she was, eyes fixed on Russell without blinking.
Russell looked back at her. The whole scene carried a heavy, insistent sense of deja vu.
For no reason at all, he thought back to that afternoon, when the student from the paper had asked him: "What do you think of Charlotte?"
He'd answered without a second thought. She's my partner, obviously.
But now, standing on this bridge, in the cold wind of a winter night, with Charlotte looking at him like this—
Russell had the sudden sense that if someone put that question to him again, here and now, he wouldn't be able to give the same answer half so easily.
Charlotte was something more than a partner to him.
What exactly, though… even Russell couldn't say.
All he knew was that he was a greedy, insatiable creature with nothing in his head but himself.
"In the future, huh…" Russell repeated the phrase, drawing the words out, buying himself a little time to think.
Charlotte nodded. She saw straight through the clumsy stalling, but she was in no hurry to push him.
"In the future," she said, leaning on the words, and then went quiet.
Russell was silent for a few seconds.
In the end, he sighed.
"Charlotte," he said, helplessness all through his voice, "that question is even harder to answer than the last one."
Why put a poor, miserable university student on the spot like this?
Was there any hope left for this world at all?
"Why?" Charlotte asked.
"Because who can say what the future holds?" Russell let out a long breath and looked out over the water. "For all I know, I make you a promise with one breath and lie to you with the next, because of something or other. I don't generally like making promises I can't guarantee."
Charlotte listened without answering, watching the side of his face, waiting for him to go on.
"And there are all kinds of lies," Russell continued.
"Malicious ones. Kind ones. Lies told to hide something, lies told to protect something… Suppose I'd caught some incurable disease and had two days left to live, and everything you'd been seeing was just me holding myself upright. How would you define that one?"
He said it, and then he smiled.
Charlotte still said nothing, as though she meant to stay silent until she got an answer.
Russell sighed again.
The silent treatment was a terrifying weapon.
"I'll try," he said, and his voice came out more serious than before.
"Try?"
"Mm. Try."
"Try at what?"
"I'll try not to lie to you," Russell said, looking at her.
"And if there's really no way around it, then I'll try not to let you find out."
He was the first to laugh at his own answer.
"What kind of promise is that," he said, shaking his head as if mocking himself, and turned to look off to one side.
"…It'll do," Charlotte said quietly.
Russell blinked.
"It'll do?"
He turned to her, thrown.
"Mm," Charlotte nodded. "That answer. It'll do."
He was quiet for a moment, then laughed.
"So does that mean I passed?"
"Work it out yourself."
Charlotte pushed herself upright off the railing and turned back the way they'd come.
Russell watched her go, then hurried after her.
"Heading back already?"
"Mm."
"Didn't you just come out for some air?"
"I've had my air."
"Fair enough."
Russell fell in beside her, hands stuffed in his pockets, and they walked toward Baker Street.
Neither of them spoke the whole way, but this silence was not the same as the one on the way out.
On the way out, each of them had been carrying something private.
Now it was the sort of silence where both of them understood and neither had to say so.
At the door of 221B, Charlotte stopped.
"Russell."
"Mm?"
"Today—"
Charlotte paused.
"Thank you."
Russell raised an eyebrow.
What was there to thank him for?
He wondered, but in the end he let the question go unasked.
"Don't mention it." He shrugged.
Charlotte pushed the door open and went inside.
Mrs. Hudson had already gone to bed. The lamp in the sitting room was still burning, left on for the two of them.
Charlotte climbed the stairs one step at a time, paused at the landing, and only then went into her own room.
Russell went into his.
A faint trace of scent still hung in the bedroom, and the bed was a wreck — the quilt bunched into a knot, the pillow shoved off to one side.
What a terrible way to sleep, Russell thought.
Whoever ended up sharing a bed with her someday was in for a real treat.
He bent down, smoothed the quilt flat, straightened the pillow, and lay down on top of it.
There was a fragrance on the pillow, faint enough that it might not have been there at all.
It smelled like coffee, and also like black tea, with paper somewhere underneath.
Could that honestly be called a fragrance?
Russell's mind began wandering off in all directions.
He shut his eyes and found that sleep wouldn't come.
So he opened them again and sat up, meaning to go out to the sitting room, pour himself a glass of milk with two spoonfuls of honey stirred in, drink it, and then sleep the greatest, mightiest, most thunderously perfect sleep of his life.
But the instant he swung his legs off the bed and started to rise—
Russell's eyes went, without any thought at all, to the space beneath it.
He didn't know why he looked. It was some inexplicable instinct, or maybe just muscle memory.
As if something had taken hold of him, Russell slowly bent down and looked under the bed.
The leather trunk he used to store his clothes still sat there in the shadows, quiet and untouched.
And yet Russell frowned.
The trunk wasn't where his memory said it should be.
The difference was very slight.
On any other night he probably wouldn't have noticed.
But it happened to be tonight, with his attention drawn to its finest point and [Investigation] running at full stretch.
Someone had moved the trunk.
Russell reached that conclusion with barely a moment's hesitation.
So who would have moved it?
The answer seemed obvious enough.
He reached out, dragged the trunk into the open, and opened it in the moonlight.
His neatly folded stack of summer clothes lay quietly inside.
They'd been gone through.
Again the conclusion took him no time at all.
Russell drew a deep breath and leaned back against the wall.
"So I'm under suspicion."
He murmured it, then let out a soft laugh — a laugh with relief in it, and something close to reassurance.
So that was it. That was what had been off about her these past few days.
And here he'd assumed she was dying of something incurable.
"Oh, come on. All that, and it was only this?"
He shut the trunk as he spoke and slid it back where it belonged.
The Phantom Thief outfit had been upgraded with Malice Points long ago, from a plain set of clothing into something far more portable.
For which he had Mrs. Hudson to thank.
If she hadn't come into his room hunting for clothes for Charlotte, the idea might never have occurred to him.
Russell lay back down, staring at the ceiling, muttering to himself.
"When did she start suspecting me, though…"
The question turned itself over in his mind.
He'd hidden it well enough, surely.
When had the look in her eyes changed?
After they came back from Buckingham Palace? Or from the Hannigan case?
His thoughts began to run backward, like a projector rewinding, flipping through the last few days frame by frame.
And somehow, in the end, he arrived at the sight of Charlotte lying in his bed that evening.
Russell smiled.
Looking back on it now, there was something in that scene he couldn't quite put a name to.
If all she'd wanted was evidence, she could have walked out the moment she finished with the trunk.
She hadn't.
Not only had she stayed, she'd lain down and fallen asleep.
And she'd slept deeply. Soundly.
What did that mean?
That Charlotte's suspicion of him and her trust in him existed side by side, at the same moment.
Strange, and yet it made perfect sense.
She suspected him, and still she was willing to stay near him.
She was testing him, and still she stood by the river and asked whether he'd lie to her in the future.
She could have pushed him away, and instead she chose to sleep in his bed.
During the interview that day, Cloris had asked him: "What kind of person do you think Charlotte Holmes is?"
His answer at the time had been: "She's trouble."
But now, if he had to answer again—
the more accurate answer would be this:
She's trouble you can't stop worrying about.
"What a contradictory person," he said softly.
Her, and himself along with her.
Russell rolled onto his side and looked at the moonlight coming in through the window.
Still no sleep.
He watched the darkness outside without a word.
He had a feeling he really was in for a sleepless night.
In that case—
Russell sat up again.
He crossed to the window and let the moonlight fall over him completely.
The night wind blew, and the shadow at the young man's feet seemed to wake, climbing his trouser legs, spreading upward inch by inch.
There was no chance Charlotte would ever find his Phantom Thief outfit.
Because it was right there beneath his feet, inside his own shadow.
That was the upgrade Russell had spent a thousand Malice Points on.
It had left physical form behind entirely, taking his shadow as its vessel. The smallest flicker of will was enough to call the shadow up over him and complete the transformation.
Within a few breaths his pajamas were gone, and in their place was that familiar, flamboyant Phantom Thief outfit.
"Haaah—"
Russell let out a long breath, planted a hand on the windowsill, and vaulted out.
If he wasn't going to sleep tonight, then nobody was.
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