Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Thirteen: The Kraken

Most of the buildings in Northaven were new. The town had been built, almost from scratch, around the ruins of an abandoned village on the Yorkshire moors. In some quarters, the paint was still tacky to the touch, and the scaffolding was heaped up like an unlit bonfire, ready to be carted away. 

The warehouse on Cantonment walk must have been part of the abandoned village. Jack would have suspected it was an old barn, but for its improbable height. It was four storeys of rickety wood, missing floorboards, exposed beams, and timber propped up around the walls to no particular purpose. And yet the place had called to Jack. He had seen possibilities in its decrepitude – ways to terrify and intimidate.

He had tied Robin's unconscious body to a chair on the top floor of the warehouse, under the exposed beams of the roof. Up here, the floorboards had rotted away to form a jagged-edged hole three feet across. Jack had positioned Robin's chair right on the edge of it, but facing away. He wouldn't be able to see the abyss yawning just behind him, but he would sense it – from the currents of air, the prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. If he leaned back – or if Jack pushed him ever-so-lightly – he would crash through three floors of rotten timber and endure death by a thousand splinters. Robin wasn't afraid of physical pain, but he was certainly afraid of disfiguring injury.

At least, that was what Jack had thought, before he'd taken the man's shirt off.

He had wanted to inspect the shirt – find out what special properties it had that would stop the passage of a bullet – so he had removed Robin's jacket and fancy waistcoat. 

The notches in his flesh were purple with cold, and at first Jack had thought they were part of an elaborate tattoo. But then he held the candle closer – without caring whether the flame burned him – and saw that they were meticulous knife-cuts.

They had the look of self-inflicted wounds. They were tidy and regular, not too deep, but deep enough. They looked as though they had been put there to be felt in the darkness, so he could count with his fingers, the way you did with rosary beads. But there were dozens – perhaps hundreds – like the scratches a prisoner might make on his cell wall to count the days of his imprisonment.

Jack didn't want to look at those scars, but he didn't want to put a bulletproof shirt back on Robin either, so he buttoned the waistcoat and jacket over his bare chest, and kept the shirt for closer inspection.

It seemed to be ordinary linen – not even very well-made, because the stitches were larger and more haphazard than the kind you saw on machine-sewn garments. But he couldn't tear it, or pierce it with a knife. Perhaps it was bespelled. Perhaps Myrrha had given it to him – although the idea that Myrrha would give him something so plain and badly-sewn was almost unthinkable.

After a while, he set it aside, his head swimming, because it reminded him of his unpiercable skin when he'd been wearing the bracelet.

He had to compose himself, he knew that. Robin, when he woke up, would be watching for a reaction from him. Robin would smirk if he flinched, would look triumphant every time Jack punched him.

But it wasn't easy. Perhaps it was Simonelli's warning about the giant octopus that had put the image in Jack's head, but he felt as though there was a huge sea-monster thrashing about in his stomach, its many-suckered tentacles furling and unfurling, slapping at the surface of the waves.

He was very angry – with Robin and Ellini. It was starting to dawn on him that he'd been kept alive all these months just to be tortured – that Ellini had given him his memories back, slapped that shackle round his wrist, and then forgotten about him, while she went gallivanting about the countryside with Robin, learning to dress fashionably and walk with her head up.