evening that have not come to pass.
Getting to this point was so easy that it nags at him, louder now that they are away from the party chatter and the music. This was too easy. Too easy to identify her with the bee and key and sword draped obviously and gaudily around her neck. Too easy to get her talking. Too easy to bring her upstairs, to a location without witnesses save for the city outside the window too filled with its own concerns to notice or care.
It was all too easy and the ease of it bothers him.
But it is also now too late.
Now she stands by the window though there is not much of a view. Part of the hotel across the street, a corner of night sky with no visible stars.
“Do you ever think about how many stories are out there?” she asks, placing a finger on the glass. “How many dramas are unfolding around us right at this very moment? I wonder how long a book you would need to record them. You’d probably need an entire library to hold a single evening in Manhattan. An hour. A minute.”
He thinks then that she knows why he is here and that’s why it was so easy and he can’t afford to hesitate any longer.
There is a part of him that wants to remain in the charade, continue playing this part and wearing this mask.
He finds he wants to keep talking with her. He is distracted by her question, thinking of all the other people in this city, all the stories filling this street, this block, this hotel. This room.
But he has a job to do.
He takes his weapon from his pocket as he approaches her.
She turns and looks at him, wearing an expression he cannot read. She lifts her hand and rests her palm against the side of his face.
He can tell where her heart is before he strikes. He doesn’t even have to look away from her eyes, the motion is so well-practiced it is almost automatic, a skill so honed he doesn’t have to think about it though here and now the not thinking bothers him.
Then it is done, one of his hands pressed against the neckline of her gown and the other against her back to keep her from falling or pulling away. From a distance, viewed through the window, it would appear romantic, the long thin needle piercing her heart a detail lost in an embrace.
He waits for her breath to catch, for her heart to stop.
It does not.
Her heart continues to beat. He can feel it beneath his fingers, stubborn and insistent.
She continues to look up at him, though the expression in her eyes has changed and now he understands. Before she had been weighing him. Now he has been weighed and left wanting and her disappointment is as obvious and evident as the blood running down her back and through his fingers and the still-beating heart beneath his hand.
She sighs.
She leans forward, leans into him, pressing her drumming heart against his fingers and her breath, her skin, all of her is so impossibly alive in his arms that he is terrified.
She reaches up, casual and calm, and removes his mask. She lets it fall to the ground as she stares in his eyes.
“I am so very tired of the romance of the dead girl,” she says. “Aren’t you?”
Dorian wakes with a start.
He is in an armchair in the captain’s quarters of a pirate ship upon a sea of honey. He tries to convince his mind that the Manhattan hotel room was the dream.
“Did you have a nightmare?” Eleanor asks from across the room. She is adjusting her maps. “I used to have nightmares and I would write them down and fold them up into stars and throw them away to be rid of them. Sometimes it worked.”
“I will never be rid of this one,” Dorian tells her.
“Sometimes they stay,” Eleanor says, nodding. She makes a change to the gold silk and collapses the maps again. “We’re almost there,” she says, and she goes out to the deck.
Dorian spends another breath in a remembered hotel room before he follows her. He takes the knapsack she has given him containing a few potentially useful items, including a flask full of water though Eleanor claims he spent enough time in the honey that he shouldn’t be hungry or thirsty for a while. There is a pocketknife and a length of rope and