Matthew knew exactly which name she meant, even though she had avoided saying it herself.
He noticed that as well.
She was so close that he could feel her breath through the cloth over his face.
Until that night in Vidal’s study, he hadn’t said Sabine’s name aloud since he was sixteen, and now that he had, it seemed like everything was simply moving too fast for him to catch up.
And this woman seemed to care a lot about the name.
Perhaps she even knew where Sabine was now, or whether she was still alive.
In twelve years, nobody had been able to tell him even that much.
His heart was still racing, and now it had far more to do with her question than with the struggle.
He couldn’t answer her.
To explain where he had heard that name, he would have to tell her about the night desk at the Voss, and after that, it wouldn’t take her long to work out who he was.
And nobody could ever find out that the Gentleman was Victor Voss’s son.
He was still deciding how much he could safely say when the door at the top of the stairs opened.
Someone switched on the lights, and the cellar was suddenly bright.
“Careful on the steps!” Rupert called.
“It’s just down here!”
“Okay, you guys,” said a girl’s voice, “we’re going down to the secret cellar.”
Matthew recognized that voice from the sale.
It was Coco, the girl who had claimed the comb, filming herself as usual.
The woman took her arm away immediately.
The racks hid them from the stairs for now, yet Rupert was obviously heading for the far wall, so she slipped away between them without a sound.
Matthew had come in from upstairs.
He had climbed the drainpipe to the balcony of Vidal’s bedroom, the same way he had left the first night, then gone down the back stairs while everyone danced.
With Rupert and Coco on the cellar stairs, that way was closed now.
That was when he felt cold air on his face, coming from the corner where she had gone.
When he followed it, he found a small window standing open near the ceiling, and she was already climbing out through it.
Behind him, Coco was talking to her phone.
“And this, you guys, is the secret safe where they found my comb!”
“Wait, you have to see this part,” Rupert said.
“You pull the wrong bottle and… ta-da! The police walked right past it!”
“Babe, it’s freezing down here.”
Matthew got his shoulders through the window on the second try and pulled himself out onto the frozen grass.
On the terrace above him, a few guests were smoking, all of them looking at their phones.
She was already across the lawn, heading for the side wall, away from the road.
She looked back once, saw him coming, and ran.
He had come tonight hoping the safe held something else from the Empty Case, but it had been as empty as the one in 707.
The only thing he had found tonight was her, and she knew something about Sabine.
That was valuable too.
He had let her go the first night they met.
Tonight, though, he wasn’t going to do the same, so he went after her.
Below the villa’s garden, the old town ran down the hill to the lake, its roofs steep and crowded together, with ice along every ridge.
She dropped over the wall onto the nearest roof, and Matthew followed.
She crossed the tiles as fast as she could, without a moment’s doubt.
Her fighting skills might be poor, but she had obviously done this many times before, Matthew thought.
The only reason he could keep up with her was that he had been climbing over roofs like these for years himself.
Even so, his own foot slid on the ice at one point, and he only just caught himself.
When she jumped a narrow gap between two houses, he jumped it after her.
When she went around a chimney, he went the other way and nearly met her on the far side, which only made her run faster.
At some point, a light came on in an attic window just below them, and they both froze against the same chimney until it went dark.
Her shoulder was pressed against his arm the whole time, and he could hear her trying to breathe quietly.
Then she was off again, and so was he.
Far below, the lights of a tram were moving slowly along the shore of the lake.
At the end of the row, there was nothing in front of her but a drop of four floors to the street.
She stopped there and turned to face him.
Matthew stopped too, a few steps away along the same ridge.
They were both out of breath, and for a while neither of them spoke.
There were windows all around them, so when she finally did, she kept her voice low.
Matthew did the same, since he had no wish for her to remember what he sounded like.
In a whisper, he couldn’t tell much about hers either.
“Will you tell me now how do you know that name?”
“Only if you tell me how do you know about the knot,” he replied, not willing to lose.
“I asked first.”
“I asked more politely.”
“Then stop following me.”
“Happily, once you tell me where you learned that knot.”
She didn’t answer that.
Instead, she glanced down at the street, and he could tell she was looking for a way off the roof.
“We could take turns,” he said, trying to take her mind off escaping.
“One answer each.”
“You first,” she taunted.
He was actually tempted.
He thought about telling her just a little of it, that Sabine had been kind to him once, when he was a boy, but even that little would lead her straight back to the Voss, and from there to him.
So he said nothing, and neither did she, while the music from the villa came faintly down the hill.
At last she turned to go along the edge, toward the corner, where the low roof of a shop stuck out over the road.
Her foot slid out from under her on the ice.
She went down the tiles toward the drop without making a sound, which immediately frightened him.
For a second, he was sure he would be too late.
He threw himself after her and caught her by the back of her jacket at the very edge, with her legs already hanging over the street, four floors down.
Her weight dragged him forward until his knee struck the gutter, but he managed to brace himself against it at the last minute.
She grabbed his wrist with both hands to hold on, right where she had bitten it the first night.
It hurt, but he didn’t let go.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then he pulled her back up the tiles onto the ridge, and she ended up against him, with his arm still around her.
“Are you hurt?”
She didn’t answer, though he felt her test her weight on the tiles, and she seemed steady enough.
He kept holding her.
Her eyes were very close to his above the mask, though in the dark he couldn’t have said what color they were.
She was smaller than she had seemed in the cellar, and her heart was going as fast as his own.
She had also gone completely stiff against him.
This woman had been nothing but trouble ever since the night they met, so in that very moment, he decided that was what he should call her.
“Say thank you, Trouble.”
“Let go, Your Grace.”
Nobody had ever called him that, and he very nearly laughed.
He let go, and she was gone as soon as he did.
She ran along the edge to the corner and dropped onto the shop roof, then down to the pavement, just as the last tram came past.
By the time Matthew got there, she was standing on its back step, and the tram was carrying her away along the shore.
She didn’t look back.