Free Cain His Brother by Anne Perry

feet away. “He's got a dislocated shoulder. I've put it back, but it slips out if he leans on it when he sits up to retch.”
    “Poor little creature.” Callandra sighed. “He looks no more than ten or twelve, but it's hard to tell.”
    “He said he was sixteen,” Hester replied. “But I don't suppose he can count.”
    “Did it happen recently? The shoulder, I mean?”
    “I asked him. He said he got across Caleb Stone and got beaten for his cheek.”
    Callandra winced. “There's a woman on the far end with a knife scar on her face. She said that was Caleb Stone too. She didn't say why. He seems to be a very violent man. She sounded still afraid of him.”
    “Well, I don't suppose we'll see him in here,” Hester said dryly. “Unless he gets typhoid. Nobody comes to pesthouses to collect debts, however large-or to exact revenge either.” She glanced down the dark cavern of the warehouse. “No revenge could be worse than this,” she said softly. “Go and rest,” Callandra ordered. “Or you won't be fit to work when I sleep.”
    Hester obeyed gratefully. She had not dared to think how tired she was, or she could not have continued. Now at last she was free to go into the small outer room, where there was a pile of extra straw, and let herself sink into it in the darkness, away from duty, the sounds of distress and the constant awareness of other people's suffering. For a moment she could forget it all and let exhaustion and oblivion overtake her.
    But the straw prickled. It had been a long time since Scutari, and she had forgotten the feeling of overwhelming helplessness in the face of such enormity of pain, and she could not so easily blank it from her mind. Her ears still strained for the sounds and her body tensed, as if in spite of everything Callandra could say, she really ought to go and do what she could to help.
    That would be futile. She would become too worn out to take her turn when Callandra and Kristian needed to sleep. She must fill her mind with something else deliberately, force herself to think of some subject which would overtake even this.
    It came unbidden to her mind, in spite of all her intentions to the contrary. Perhaps it was the fact that she was lying awkwardly in a small, strange room, close to the end of her strength, both physically and emotionally, but thoughts of Monk filled her, almost as if she could feel the warmth of his body beside her, smell his skin, and for once in their lives, know that there was no quarrel, no gulf, no barrier between them.
    She flushed hot to remember how utterly she had given herself to him in that one consuming kiss. All her heart and mind and will had been in it, all the things she could never ever have said to him. She had not seen him since the end of the Farraline case. They had continued in the heat of that desperate conclusion, so involved in it that there had been no time to feel more than a glancing moment of awkwardness.
    Now if they met again it would be different. There would be memories neither of them could ever discard or forget. Whatever he might say, whatever his manner now, she knew that for that moment when they had faced death in the closed room, he had left behind all pretense, all his precious and careful self-protection, and had admitted in touch of aching and desperate tenderness that he too knew what it was to love.
    Not that she deluded herself the barriers would not return. Of course they would. Rescue, and a taking up of life again, had brought back all the differences, the shadows which kept them apart. She was not the kind of woman who excited him. She was too quarrelsome, too independent, too direct. She did not even know how to flirt or to charm, to make him feel gallant and protective, let alone romantic.
    And he was too often ill-tempered. He was certainly ruthless, highly critical, and his past was full of darkness and fears and ties which even he did not know, perhaps of violence he only half thought in nightmare,