Free Unraveled by Courtney Milan

all the men employed by the police force,” she said quickly.
    Likely, that was the truth.
    “I don’t think you should have anything to do with someone,” he said.
    “Of course I shouldn’t.” She stood up and paced away. “Especially as he didn’t even want the list. I don’t like having games played with my safety. But—”
    “But you’re in over your head, and you’ve someone else to watch over. It’s not easy surviving by yourself.”
    “I—yes.” She looked at him, her eyes crinkled in puzzlement. “I wouldn’t have imagined you would understand. It is, after all, just one of those excuses that you decried the last time we spoke.”
    Smite had his own experience of Bristol life, decades old now. But he simply shook his head. “It’s always difficult when responsibilities tug you in different directions.”
    “Difficult.” She let out a sigh. “I feel like Antigone, operating under two incompatible directives.”
    Smite froze. “Antigone.” He glanced up at her. “How do you know Antigone?”
    She waved a hand. “I was raised by actors. You shouldn’t be shocked that I have some passing familiarity with plays.”
    “Passing familiarity, yes, but… Antigone has not yet been translated from the Greek.”
    “One of the members of our troupe was translating it.” She delivered this airily, with no sense of how remarkable that might have been.
    There were only a handful of scholars who could have even attempted such a thing. Men who translated ancient Greek were fellows at Oxford. They didn’t traipse about the countryside putting on performances for rural audiences.
    It wasn’t often that Smite was rendered stupid. “But… You were truly raised by actors?” It didn’t come out as quite a question. He’d already noticed that over the course of their conversation, her accent had drifted toward the learned tones of an Oxonian. Her vocabulary was far beyond what he would have expected from a poor seamstress.
    “It’s not so hard to understand.” She peered at him. “Are you sure you’re well?” Before he realized what she was doing, she reached out and set her hand against his forehead. A brief flicker of her fingers against his temple—nothing more—and he was transported to a darker place. He was spitting out cold water, his hands rigid and aching from holding fast to wood. The light above him danced and dazzled—
    “Ouch!”
    Her cry brought him back to the present. He was warm and dry, no matter how quickly his heart raced. He wasn’t there . He was in a garret room, sitting next to Miss Darling. She’d touched his face, and he’d grabbed her hand. He hadn’t squeezed too hard, thank God. She was breathing quickly and looking at him as if he had perhaps passed over into lunacy.
    He let go. “Don’t fuss over me.”
    She flexed her hand gingerly.
    “Will you be back, then, looking for records?”
    She shook her head surely—but stopped halfway, her eyes focusing elsewhere. “Actually,” she said, “I will need to find out what happened with George Patten. The gaol—how would one go about getting the records there?”
    “One needs to be a man of some standing in the community,” Smite said dryly. “Or one has the portcullis shut in one’s face.”
    Instead of looking disheartened, Miss Darling simply nodded. As if she were contemplating—
    Smite narrowed his eyes. “Thinking that you could pretend to be yet another person? No. I don’t think so. Consider the improvidence of committing fraud while you are inside a gaol.”
    “Of course,” she said, all too obediently. “You’re quite right.”
    He’d bet Ghost a romp through a manure pile, that she was making plans at this very moment. But what was to be done? He couldn’t watch the gaol himself. He could send warning.
    But there was another option.
    An odd impulse, nothing more. It had absolutely nothing to do with that wretched awareness of her that kept creeping out at the most inopportune