‘Yes?’

‘Didn’t I see you die just a couple of days ago?’

Lord Guantes looked sincerely confused. ‘You must be mistaken. I’ve been delaying any meetings with you until I could trap you in an inescapable situation, with overwhelming resources. Plus a few hostages, just in case.’

‘How flattering,’ Irene replied coolly. Were there multiple Lord Guantes on the loose? And if so, which was the real one? ‘And will your wife be joining us?’

‘My dear wife is busy with . . . another project,’ Lord Guantes said, far too much relish in his voice.

Irene had descended to the first floor by now. Far too close for comfort, and easily within gunshot range. One of the few reasons that she wasn’t trying to run – which every instinct was screaming at her to do – was that Lord Guantes was having too much fun gloating. He was trapped in his criminal archetype. One couldn’t gloat at a corpse. The corpse simply wouldn’t appreciate it properly.

She suspected that his wife would have shot Irene as soon as she came into range, but then Lady Guantes had always been the more sensible of the pair. What a good thing she wasn’t here. ‘Might I ask what project?’

Lord Guantes stroked his beard. He was in a dark suit and overcoat, like the other men, but his were an order of magnitude more expensive and better-cut, and black gloves sheathed his hands. ‘You may ask. But I think I’d prefer it if you asked while on your knees.’

She’d reached the ground floor now and was standing level with him. ‘I confess I’m puzzled. You found me here – and I still don’t know how you managed that. Did you pay library staff across London to watch out for me?’

‘Come now, my dear. That would be rather too expensive for one little Librarian.’ The fact that he knew something which she didn’t visibly soothed him. ‘My wife had a token which allowed her to locate you, that’s all – and I borrowed it.’

‘I didn’t realize something like that could work on Librarians.’ The Library brand on Irene’s back blocked or defused magic specifically directed at her. It should have stopped anyone from scrying her location.

‘I think we can say that this specifically works on Librarians.’ His mouth curled in an unpleasant smirk. ‘Now that you’re safely down here – Reuben, anything to be found above?’

Irene followed his gaze upward. Half a dozen men were leaning over the balcony on different floors. ‘No trace, sir,’ one of them answered. ‘She was the only one up here.’

‘Yet you came with company.’ Lord Guantes inspected Irene thoughtfully. ‘Where is she?’

‘Who?’ Irene asked innocently.

He snapped his fingers. A couple of the men stepped forward to take her arms, pinioning her. ‘The woman who entered here with you. I assume it was Lord Silver’s niece. Where is she?’

Irene resigned herself to the inevitable. ‘Safe.’

He backhanded her across the face. Irene’s vision blurred, and she swallowed blood. ‘Miss Winters,’ he said, his voice all calm persuasion and reasonableness. ‘That was to make a point about your current helplessness. I could have my men beat the answer out of you – but I think I’ll get quicker results if I shoot these hostages. Now let’s try again. Where is Lord Silver’s niece?’

Irene tried to look desperate. ‘If you’re after her and I tell you, you’ll have no reason to keep me alive.’

That smirk twitched across his face again – an expression that not only said, I know something you don’t know, but also, I know something which is really going to upset you when you find out. ‘Oh, I have a very specific, very definite reason to keep you alive, Miss Winters. But it would spoil things if I told you too soon. So in the interests of saving these other library staff, where is Lord Silver’s niece?’

The man with the gun raised it to the hostage’s head.

Irene took a deep breath, and sagged, doing her best to look defeated. ‘I took her into the Library.’

‘You what?’

‘That’s not very grammatical,’ Irene said, and earned another slap for it. No, she thought, waiting for the ringing in her ears to die down. This isn’t the ‘real’ Lord Guantes. The one I knew in Venice years ago, the one I killed, would have tried to overpower me by will alone. This physicality would have been completely beneath him. And the one I surprised recently, he seemed physically weak. It’s as if they’re all imperfect copies of the original, flawed in one way or another, physically or mentally . . .

‘What you’ve suggested is completely impossible,’ Lord Guantes declared, breaking in on her speculations. ‘Fae can’t enter the Library.’

‘Maybe not through force,’ Irene said. She managed a smirk of her own. ‘But with the willing cooperation of a Librarian, who knows what could be possible?’

Lord Guantes frowned, perhaps weighing the chance that Irene was lying against the fact that Catherine simply wasn’t to be found.

‘Which is why I’m here,’ Irene said brightly. ‘Waiting for you to catch up . . . I thought we should talk.’

Lord Guantes stared at her, then converted the blank look into a patrician sneer. ‘How this goes, Miss Winters, is as follows: I will ask questions, and you will answer them.’

‘As you wish,’ Irene said with a shrug. ‘I’d thought you might want to know more about how I granted a Fae access to the Library, to compensate for the fact that I killed you. Then we can forget this whole confrontation, no harm done.’

‘You thought you’d killed me,’ he corrected her. ‘A serious wound, but as you can see, I’m perfectly alive.’

‘So it seems,’ Irene agreed. ‘But the Lord Guantes I used to know – he would have been interested in the possibilities here. Admittedly we didn’t have much of an acquaintance; our only real conversation was when you were trying to break my will and turn me into your slave . . .’ She was gambling desperately, and her hand was weak. ‘Even the Cardinal can’t get Fae agents into the Library. What if you could?’

‘Very well. Explain your methodology.’

‘Reveal all my secrets – just like that?’

‘Unless you want me to shoot the hostages, yes, just like that.’

‘But if I tell you how it’s done now, then my leverage is entirely gone,’ Irene argued. ‘And then you’re free to do whatever you want with me. Kill me, sell me into slavery, shove me off a cliff . . .’

‘Really, Miss Winters, are you trying to give me ideas?’

‘I’m only making a point. I might leave something important out if I think you’re just going to kill me – or your hostages – anyway. It makes revenge look like rather a short-sighted option. I thought you were a long-term thinker.’

She could see the calculation in his eyes. ‘Is this a serious offer to negotiate, then?’ he asked.

‘My options are . . . being chased by you for the rest of my life, which will probably be short and messy, or coming to some sort of arrangement that will satisfy you. Or killing you, of course.’ The more she could play to his archetype as schemer and manipulator, the more likely he’d be to believe what she was saying.