RATING CHANGED!

Chapter 23

Of all the scholars, soldiers, poets, and philosophers that Killian Jones had encountered in his long life, some in the flesh and some in books, he most admired whichever wise one of the lot had claimed that true happiness could always be found at the bottom of a drink. (Or if not happiness, oblivion, which sometimes passed as the same thing.) It had worked like a charm before, and thus he had never questioned this very admirable life ideology. But he had now found the bottom of several, and neither happiness nor oblivion were forthcoming. Just exhaustion, guilt, grief, and rage. Worse, those weren't even the strongest of the emotions currently taking apart his insides. That would be the feeling, faint at first but growing stronger with every sip, of complete and total futility.

It had been almost ludicrously easy to escape from the Storybrooke lockup. In fact, his professional reputation was downright miffed that they'd bothered to call it a jail. Captain Hook had trafficked in the dimmest and most disreputable corners of distant worlds, in formidable fortresses and prisons and dungeons where unfortunate souls were never seen again, and some podunk small-town hoosgow did not even merit a footnote. Once free, Killian had seriously considered booking it down to the hospital and shooting the crocodile in the head as he mooned over his tragically wounded love, but the place was crawling with watching eyes and interfering busybodies. He couldn't cut his way through all of them to get to Gold, and if they caught him again, they might stringently increase the nature of his punishment. Bloody Regina was here, after all, and even if she didn't know (he thought) the truth of that little caper with her mother, she would feed him to a dragon quick as spit if he looked likely to make people start asking awkward questions. The appearance of a mysterious stranger trying to murder Gold, of all people, might cause even the most passive of citizens to take a sudden interest in local politics.

Hence, Killian had elected to make a judicious exit. It was enough for now. He'd shot Belle before the crocodile's eyes, shattered the cup just as she was on the verge of remembering herself, and kicked Gold's heart to smithereens well and properly. Perhaps it was better to do it this way. Leave him alive to suffer, the only one who knew who he truly was in a town of cursed automatons, and then return and gun him down at some later date. So Killian told himself, as he hitchhiked to the nearest airport, presented his false passport, and boarded a flight to Vermont without a second glance. From Vermont to Montreal, from Montreal to London, and hence here, one of the dime-a-dozen luxury hotels in Mayfair.

He'd been drinking steadily from the moment he arrived, three days ago, and paid the bartender in thick stacks of pound notes to keep him from asking questions. Killian longed most acutely for oblivion, in fact. But the disadvantage of being a three-hundred-year-old pirate who'd adopted Ireland as his homeland was that it took industrial quantities of liquor to make him black out, and if he did, the constables might be called, his name run through a database. He'd done his best to erase all records of his trip, but one could never be entirely sure. It might get to MI6, and if so, it would make its way back to America. Only undesirable events could proceed from there.

Killian supposed that as long as he kept his nose clean, got into no more scrapes, and returned to Oxford quietly, he would be safe enough. Storybrooke was still cursed, after all; they'd have no hard evidence to charge him with. If worse came to absolute worst, he'd make a call to Wendy. She knew a vast array of important people in the British government: MPs, ministers, secretaries, intelligence services, and so on, and would probably be able to convince them to drop the case, or at least put in a good word with their American counterparts. But doing so would entail revealing that he'd gone after Gold, and that he'd been lying to her for years about it.

Yet therein lay the rub. Killian told himself so stubbornly that he was satisfied with the measure of revenge he'd been able to exact that he finally understood it was because he deeply, utterly was not. And not even for the expected reason. Where had it gotten him? Had it brought Milah back? Had it made him feel happy, fulfilled, whole? Had it stamped some overarching cosmic purpose on his life? Had the sky split, the stars fallen, the world stopped – or started – turning? Had he even been able to breathe without it hurting?

He hadn't. All it had done was end him up here, burning through his money like a bad gambler on a Vegas binge, as he drank from dawn to dusk and only returned to his room when they kicked him out at last call. Once or twice, when he was more or less sober, he'd gone out and wandered London for hours, absurdly tempted to walk up to a bobby and turn himself in. The explanation for why, however, was far more likely to end him up in a psychiatric ward rather than a jail cell, and Killian had no interest in either. He entertained the idea of damning the torpedoes and going back to kill Gold after all; perhaps it would be different if he'd been allowed to finish the job (he still had a lump on his head from where the lass had taken him down). But even that thought held no savor. It just made him want to crawl into bed and not emerge again for another three hundred years.

He was quite thoroughly stuck between a rock and a hard place, Killian reckoned. His long-planned revenge was both not enough and too much at the same time, and he could do nothing to make it better. That was where the sense of overwhelming futility came in. Gods, why, why had he allowed himself to be lured back down this dark, seductive, destructive path again? He'd made a new life here, by his own hard work. A job, an education, a home. And now, because of this, it was worthless. Wasted. All bloody wasted.

He wished he knew where to find a sleeping curse. A hard task, in this land without magic, but not entirely impossible. You could find anything in London, if you looked enough. He knew for a fact, after all, that he wasn't the only one who'd come from another world, and some of those black-market merchants had their fingers in all kinds of pies. Whatever it was, he could pay.

Or, of course, there was the other option. A sleeping curse would certainly supply him with oblivion, but it would also trap him in yet another demented halfway-between for something close to forever. And while it was nothing less than he deserved, it wasn't something he desired. I had it wrong. Instead of aiming to kill Gold, I should have begged him to kill me. Beaten to death with the crocodile's cane, being hit by a car, anything his fertile and morbid imagination could possibly conjure. Die, and finally be reunited with Milah.

Yet when he tried to picture her face, how she would smile to see him again, he couldn't. He'd lost the drawing of her long ago, the last relic of her in his possession, and of course, he could not simply trot on down to a copy shop and have another made. He had the general impression of her, dark curls and blue eyes and earthy humor and sharp tongue and insolent smile, and scattered flashes of memory. But the rest was gone. And worse, he'd never noticed when.

Perhaps he didn't even deserve to see her again. Perhaps it was the sleeping curse for him after all.

And so, perhaps it was time to start looking.

Emma Swan stepped off the airline coach into Gloucester Green, the downtown Oxford bus station, on a shockingly bright and flawless August morning. Everything she'd read on the plane had complained about how England was having one of its wettest summers on record (which had to be quite a record, considering) but apparently, the big man upstairs had given the waterworks a rest for a few days. She'd packed galoshes, an umbrella, a rain coat, and extra bottles of detangling spray just in case; her hair would curl and snag madly in the damp. But instead she put on her sunglasses, hitched up her purse, and headed off to the cab rank.

Once Emma had left her things in the bed-and-breakfast, she walked back to the city centre and made straight for Wadham College, where she'd arranged a tour. It gave her something of a queer turn to see it again; it looked exactly like she remembered, and she could even pick out Felix's window (or rather, what had been Felix's window, as some other student doubtless occupied it now). If she went down the path there, to the gardens, she'd. . .

"Excuse me? Would you be Miss Swan?"

She jumped and turned. A beaming student representative was advancing down the quad walk, hand outstretched. "Welcome to Wadham! I'm Aurora Philips, and I'd love to answer any questions you have. I understand you're interested in taking up a graduate program?"

"That's right. I'm looking into the Master of Science in criminology and criminal justice," Emma lied fluently. "That's my undergrad degree. But I'm also interested in a history course. One of my friends is on faculty here, and he was very influential in my decision to consider Oxford."

"Can't go wrong, I say! Although there are some real witches in the MCR, you'll have to look out for them." Aurora rolled her eyes. "Not that that should scare you off. Who's your friend? You said he teaches here?"

"He does." Emma looked as guileless as possible. "Killian Jones?"

Aurora got an oh him! look on her face at once, and blushed. "Oh yes. He's definitely stolen the hearts of quite a few of us around here."

For no good reason, a hot flash of jealousy burned through Emma, strangling her. Then she exhaled, and made herself smile at the other woman. "I expect so. He does have that effect on people. Do you know if he's on campus, by any chance?"

"I don't think so." Aurora shook her head. "Trinity Term ended the third week of June, and I haven't seen him since. Most of our tutors and students return in late September, Week 0 before the start of Michaelmas."

"Could you possibly direct me to his office, then? After the tour," Emma hastened to add, lest Aurora start to think that these were odd questions indeed to be asking about someone who should have been perfectly capable of supplying the information himself. "I have a few things to drop off for him."

"Of course. Well! Let's get started."

Apparently, it was that easy.

Emma toured the grounds, gardens, chapel, library, great hall, and middle common room of the college with Aurora, who chattered away happily the entire time, filling her in on facts from the ordinary (it had been founded by Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham in 1610) to the incomprehensibly British (it had placed fourth overall on the Norrington Table, which was apparently something to be very proud of). It also had something of a reputation as the Berkeley of Oxford colleges, meaning that its politics were decidedly to the left and its characters notably eccentric; hearing this, Emma could see why Killian had blended in so well. But to her surprise, she found that it charmed her too, making her sad that she was here on completely false pretenses. She felt almost as if she was home, as if it was a place she could be very happy, and even more oddly, part of that was because of, not despite, knowing that he was here as well.

What the hell? Are you out of your damn mind? She was here to arrest him, not to do – do whatever had just flitted through her head. God, one hot makeout session in a dim corner of a Boston bar, and suddenly her hormones were wreaking havoc. Wasn't it bad enough that she'd already completely dropped the ball by letting him get away? Not just once but twice? James thought she was going to get fucked hard (not like that, Jesus) and she had to prove otherwise. Once they'd questioned Killian, if they found no solid basis to charge him with, they'd let him go. But not until then. Justice had to be served. He'd actively tried to kill at least two people. Kill. That wasn't the same as stealing their lunch money or giving them an Indian burn.

"Miss Swan?"

Emma shook her head hard, snapping herself back to the present. "Yeah?"

Aurora looked puzzled, but once more had the courtesy not to enquire. "Sorry, but here we are." She gestured to the door behind her, K. Jones tidily embossed on the brass nameplate. "If I let you in, you can go ahead and drop off those things you have for him?"

Oh, crap. She couldn't do what she needed with Aurora hovering solicitously outside. Emma made a production of fishing through her messenger bag, rustling papers, then frowned. "Damn, I must have left it at the B&B. Sorry. Another day. Thanks, you've been very informative."

Aurora assured her that it had been no trouble at all, thanked her for considering Wadham and hoped to see her soon, and waved her down the walk. Emma headed the few blocks to Blackwell's, killed some time at the café, and then, several hours later in the afternoon when she hoped to have a freer hand to operate, returned to the college and slipped furtively up the stairs.

A quick look to either side confirmed that the coast was clear. She extracted a low-tech implement from her bag and went to work. A few moments later, the lock clicked open.

Emma hurried inside and shut it firmly behind her. She was having the oddest sensation that she'd done this before, that at some point she'd been in his office (not this one, perhaps at BC?) in search of clues. What she'd found, if she'd found anything, she couldn't say. But no matter. She didn't have unlimited time. She pulled his swivel chair up to his sleek black desktop computer, fired up her thumb drive, and went to work.

Most of his hard drive was exactly what you'd expect from a professor: emails from colleagues and students, copies of syllabuses and graded essays and lecture notes, journal articles pertaining to research interests, invitations to faculty functions, paper bibliographies, and reading lists. But as Emma parsed through the data, she found two interesting things – or rather, one interesting thing and one interesting non-thing. There was an encrypted file hidden deep in a subfolder entitled only, "Research." The rest of the folder showed in its properties that almost half a gigabyte of space was being used, but there were no other visible files.

Emma's eyes narrowed. Very interesting. Very, very interesting. It might have been wiped, but she had the serious stuff, could retrieve data from a machine even if it had been deleted. She entered in a few commands, waited as the transfer bar flashed up, and when she opened the copied folder on her thumb drive, there were now several dozen more entries.

She decided to start with "Research." She unzipped and uncompressed it, which didn't take long, and overrode it when it asked for a password to open the file. So even on his private computer, Killian Jones had been scrupulously careful. She was getting warmer.

It opened. She was expecting it to be a meaningless mishmash of binary symbols, but it wasn't. It was perfectly comprehensible. Close to three hundred pages of comprehensible, in fact. And as she scrolled through it, she felt her breath catch in her throat.

This, beyond any doubt, was what Greg had been reading from in the car. The dossier of information about Storybrooke, a curse, and the catalogued instances in the world of what the file bluntly called "magic." So Tamara and Greg had either obtained a copy from Killian, or stolen it from him. He must have spent years putting all this together, disguising it as research for legitimate academic pursuits, digging who knows where for who knew what, assembling a road map for whatever he had just tried to do the other night. It was either the world's most offbeat and demented fantasy novel, or. . . there was actually some kind of horrible truth in it.

Heart pounding, Emma scrolled to the end. The last words in the file stood alone on the page, bolded and underlined, hitting her hard in the chest.

I think she's the one to break it.

Break what? The curse? Did he and August move in the same circles, get obsessed with the same conspiracy theories? Now that she thought of it, this could just be a retread of the old chestnut about how the Knights Templar/Freemasons/Illuminati/shadowy mystical organization of your choice actually controlled the world. Shouldn't necessarily be taken seriously.

Nonetheless, to say the least, Emma was rattled. She closed out of the file, telling herself that she'd come back to it later, and began to comb through the others. These were just as interesting, if not more so. And indeed, once she'd opened and decrypted them, she realized that she had hit the jackpot. These were a full set of records for a false identity, and a surge of vindication flashed through her. Peter C. James. Passport. Mobile phone. Airline tickets. Government ID.

Credit card number.

It only took Emma a few keystrokes to run its recent transactions. At the top of the page, dated three days ago, was a charge from some exorbitantly expensive hotel. She Googled the name, found that it was a five-star place in London Mayfair, and felt her heart beat still faster. This was it. She had him. If she booked it out of here and caught the Oxford Tube, she could take him down tonight.

Fingers shaking, she closed the session, ejected the drive, and spent a few minutes making sure everything looked exactly as it had when she entered – she was not about to fuck it up now. Then she headed out, decided against the bus due to the afternoon traffic, and boarded the next train to Paddington Station.

Tonight, Jones.

Tonight.

Today, Killian's fourth at the hotel, had begun like any other. He slept until noon, staggered out of bed like a corpse from its grave, and went to canvass the city. He'd heard through the grapevine that the Dragon had a local supplier hereabouts, and while it was such a ridiculous name that ordinarily he would have severe doubts about its legitimacy, he'd come across it quite often in the course of his research. Based in Phuket or Bangkok or some other Far East city, and a connoisseur of the sorts of items in which he had a present interest. If you could afford to pay, of course, and Killian could. He'd pay just about anything at this point. But seven hours of searching on the hot, crowded London streets had provided less than the ghost of results, and his head was aching bloody worse than usual.

The only solution, of course, was the liquid one. As he slid into his customary seat at the bar, he noticed the bartender giving him the fish-eye, but a casual flash of a twenty-pound note soon had his libation supplied. He lifted it to his lips and took a long slow slug, letting it burn all the way down. Maybe he'd simply stay here until he'd spent the last of his money – it would take a while, he wasn't hard up, but it could be done. Then acquire the sleeping curse and a convenient spot where he wouldn't be found, if ever, for years. Somewhere in Scotland, perhaps. Or Ireland. Aye, Ireland. Go home to die. Become part of the tapestry of wild green legend, myth, lost lovers sighing in the dells, a land of faeries and fays and thin borders between worlds. It would do.

Killian finished his first drink and took his second. This one he put away much more slowly; he had to pace himself, and he sank deep into a reverie, hearing none of the conversations around him, the flow of well-heeled, glittering patrons through the bar, restaurant, and lobby, out to fancy cars taking them to fancy places. What did he need to worry about? He'd brushed away his tracks. No one was going to find him here.

No one.

And then, like the girl in the red coat, his eye drawn like a magnet from among the countless, faceless others, he saw her.

Somehow, he couldn't even be surprised.

He was very nearly relieved.

As she crossed the floor toward him, doubtless in the belief that she was being supremely clandestine, he smiled and spun his stool toward her. "Lass," he said, as if they'd been planning this all along. "Very good. Let me finish my drink, and you can get on with arresting me."

She thought she was bloody tough, had an inscrutable mask, but she really should never take up organized gambling; she had a terrible poker face. "What are you talking about?"

Killian shrugged. "That's why you're here, isn't it? I don't suppose you found yourself in the company of four large men with guns, and a bugged earring, by accident. Remember our last intimate encounter in a hotel bar, darling?"

The color of her face suggested that she did. So did he, all too well. She tried to clear her throat, with a sound like a small animal being strangled, then took a seat. "I want an explanation."

"Of how to arrest me?" Killian took another sip. "It's very simple. One cuff goes around one wrist, the other around the other. I don't mind being tied up if you're the one to do it, love."

"No. Not that." She was tense as a high wire, the Swan girl. Could barely look at him. "Of what happened in Storybrooke. What you did to. . . Belle."

"I don't see that I owe you one." Another drink. He felt almost weightless. Perhaps that bloke with his philosophy of drunken happiness hadn't been off the mark at all.

"Killian." The sound of his name jerked his head toward hers, locking their eyes. "I think you do."

"Why?"

"You said you wronged me."

"I did."

"And?"

"And what?"

"Don't you want to make it up?" She slid closer. Gods, she smelled bloody intoxicating (not as if he needed any help in that direction). "And it may interest you to know that I'm alone this time. No men with guns to call in."

"It was unwise of you to tell me that." He let her see his teeth when he smiled.

"Really?" A slow arch of her eyebrow. Moving closer still. Bloody hell, hadn't the bint ever heard of personal space? Aye, aye. Pot, meet kettle. Filthy hypocrite he was. "Are you planning to do something you'll regret?"

Their gaze far too long and far too charged, his intentions much too explicit, his self-control too ragged, his heart too broken. He couldn't have given a steaming damn about what was right, necessary, or proper. If she kept looking at him like that, with that fall of pale blonde hair, those haunted eyes, that half-healed bloody scrape on her face (who had hurt her? He'd kill them) that fragile skin, that visible heartbeat, he was going to pick her up and have her right bloody there on the bar. Couldn't be responsible for what he'd do. "What if I am?"

Unbelievably, she smiled. A smile just like his, raw and bloody. Gods, what a woman. Gods. Not yet twenty-three, and yet sometimes she seemed even older than him. She picked up his drink and helped herself. "What makes you think I'd let you?"

His eyes never moved from hers, watching her as if she was the last woman on earth, on the last night of life. Perhaps she was. "Likely you wouldn't," he granted her. "Never met a tougher or a stronger or a more stubborn lass in my life. Walls a mile high, of course, so we have to bother with this tiresome palaver about which of us has been hurt more, which of us has done the other more wrong. Words. Words. Words. Bloody words. You think so, don't you?"

She stared at him. He must be drunker than he thought. "What are you – "

He leaned over the bar and kissed her.

She was shocked, of course. Shut down there on her island, where nobody touched her and she touched no one, any invasion was hostile, and her hand came up with ideas of pushing him away. It never got there. Instead, his hand tangled in her hair and the other slid down to the small of her back, pulling her against him at full length. Her opened mouth tasted of the tang of his drink, her gasp stolen away, their breath and tongues mingling, wet and soft and slow and deep, as he kissed her as he hadn't kissed a woman in several lifetimes. He didn't care who was looking. He no longer cared about anything at all.

After a transcendent minor eternity, she jerked back from him, but not that far back. Their noses still touched, his mouth browsing her jaw, as he never let go of her, as he escorted her away from the bar, into the lowlit hotel corridor beyond. "You know," he whispered, his dark stubble brushing the smooth skin of her cheek, "it's strange. I don't regret this at all."

She shuddered in his arms. "No," she said weakly. "No. I didn't come for this."

"Liar." He kissed her ear, exactly where he'd used his teeth to steal her earring.

"Bastard." She shuddered again.

"Lost girl." His voice was almost tender.

She had no answer for that. Only her eyes spoke back to him, laid bare and broken in the truth.

"No," she whispered, one final defense. "No, I don't have a room."

"Well." Killian felt her, her heartbeat, her body, her breath, her soul. "It so happens I do."

The door shut behind them, and they were in each other's arms.

Dim glow from the London summer night striped through the closed curtains, turning everything into soft twilight, as Killian unbuttoned Emma's blouse and shed it to the floor, then unhooked her bra as well. Topless, she was even more beautiful, as his fingers traced the shadows on her skin and his mouth searched hers with tenderness and thoroughness and care, as his thumbs traced the smooth flesh of her breasts and circled her nipples until they went stiff. He bent to take one in his mouth, exploring that marvelous cleavage, kissing her until she trembled and moaned, kissing her until she melted, until he could feel something in her snap. She fumbled back at him, almost ripping his shirt in her need to get it off him, and ran both hands up the lean, dark-furred muscles of his chest. She was mumbling something incoherent that might have been his name.

They stood locked in each other's embrace, kissing with all the fierceness and fragility of the beautiful broken idiots that they were, until he finally stepped back, took her hand, and led her to the bed. He sat first, and she came down onto his lap, straddling him, their eyes locked as they both understood that they were at the point of no return. He waited. As ever, he wouldn't go further if she wouldn't have him. Tonight, of all nights, with her, like this, it might well kill him, but that appeared to be a likely outcome anyway.

The air was thick, the spark almost tangible.

She met his eyes again. Hers were huge in the dimness, lambent, bright as the stars of Neverland. Her face was pale, but resolute. And she gave the tiniest of nods.

He surged forward, a dam inside him shattering, all his hunger and all his grief and all his need flooding to the surface, desperate to see her, touch her, taste her, worship her, with every nerve and every sinew and every shred of his old, dark, battered soul. His hands were shaking almost too hard to control them as he got the rest of her clothes off, laying her out beneath him, a perfect alabaster figurine atop the quilts. He was still more terrified that she might tell him to stop and push him away, but she didn't. She pulled his head to hers for an even more frantic kiss. And then, slowly, his mouth traveled down the length of her body, from breasts to belly, finding at last the slick sweetness between her legs.

She jerked. He put a hand on her hip, steadying her, and set to his work. He was drunk on her more than anything, exploring her, teasing her folds, her sensitive nub, the almost translucent skin on the very inside of her thigh, the fine blonde thicket on her mound, every blessed damned inch of her. When he brought his hand down instead, she was as wet as a spring rainstorm. His finger slid up inside her, into her hot, pulsing depths, and he nearly fainted.

It wasn't enough. He needed her, he needed all of her, and he could no longer hold back. She helped him as he clawed away his remaining clothes, until they were both in their skins, naked to each other in the darkness in every way that mattered, and he stroked her a few more times until she moaned out loud, then hissed. "Killian. Now."

He kissed the words from her mouth and lowered himself on top of her, her legs wrapping around his waist, her back arching like a cat's, both of them so bloody hot for each other he thought the bed was about to catch afire. His tip pressed at her entrance, and she made a noise so animalistic he thought he'd hurt her. Then she grabbed his arse in both hands, repositioned him, and pulled him down, easing his hard length into her inch by inch.

Killian made an inhuman noise of his own, sliding deeper and deeper until there was nowhere left to go, until he was far inside her and she was pliable as clay in his arms, when there was never enough of her to kiss, as they rolled their hips to straighten out the fit and he was already starting to move, in ragged, jerking thrusts that would have shamed a schoolboy at his first time. He wanted to be a better lover for her, wanted to impress her with his cosmopolitan panache and amorous skill, but all he could bring to her was hunger, desperation, devotion, awe. Gods, she was so sweet and tight and slick. He drove into her again, finding that sweet spot at the back of her spine, relieved that he hadn't forgotten everything. Her nails clawed at him, her breath emerged from her in stuttering, punching bursts.

Emma moaned, then cursed, then began to gasp his name, over and over like a mantra, as he could do nothing but fuck both of them into hot white blindness. They rolled over and over, entangling and incinerating, as he kissed every inch of her his mouth could find and she returned the favor, as he thrust her hard into the mattress and she braced her heels, pushing back on him, rasping them together and harder and hotter still. They must sound like a pair of newlyweds jostling the bed until the wee hours. He didn't care. Time didn't exist. Nothing did. Only her.

The end came when he was barely ready for it, and he jerked, gasped, swore a blue streak himself, and lost it entirely. He vanished into her skin like it was his, riding out the most intense orgasm he'd ever had in his life, shaking and shuddering as if caught in a terrible storm at sea. Her arms were wrapped around his back, anchoring him, holding him there, as they went down together and drowned. A mermaid. Bloody hell. Gods. What a woman.

They lay there for the longest time, until he finally recollected himself sufficiently as to slide out of her and collapse on the bed as if his spine had been removed. She made a small noise and nuzzled closer, and they started to kiss again, their mouths wet and bruised, their throats imprinted with the marks of the other's teeth, their scent mingled earthily, his hand sweeping down the long line of her spine. It was some time longer before either of them attempted to speak. It was him who managed it. "It seems you've already taken me prisoner, lass."

Emma stared hazily back at him, her eyes low-lidded and heavy through her long lashes. "You're still a murderer," she whispered. "You have to answer for it."

"Suppose I do." Killian stretched out, hands behind his head, gazing up at the ceiling.

She shifted, pulling herself closer again, as if she couldn't stand the loss of one inch of contact between them. She curled up against him, her head on his shoulder, but he could feel the tension in the hand that rested low on his stomach. "I'll give you one chance. Convince me."

"Convince you? Why? Of what? That I have something left to live for, or that there was an excuse for what I did? If you're interested, there was."

He expected her to ask, but she didn't. She reached out and ran her thumb up his right forearm, circling the tattoo. The heart, the sword, the name. He hadn't even thought she'd noticed it. "This." It wasn't a question. "Milah."

Throat too tight to speak, he nodded.

"Who was she?"

"Someone who I loved, who loved me, and was murdered horribly for it."

It didn't take her much longer than before. Sharp as a blade, indeed. "Gold."

"Aye."

"And Belle. . ." He could hear her putting the pieces together. "That was why you shot her. Because you wanted Gold to feel what it was like to lose a woman he loved, right in front of his eyes. I was right. It was about justice. Your idea of it."

"My idea of justice is the same as any man's, love." His voice was sharp, sharper than he meant, and he sat up suddenly, knocking her away. "Rotten as my heart may be."

She kept on studying him with those astonishing agate-green eyes, cool and shrewd. He knew that look; she was hunting for something. Putting her walls up again as well, no doubt. Then she said, "How do you know Tamara and Greg?"

"I don't."

A curve of her mouth plucked up. She had a very distracting dimple. "Liar."

He sighed. "All right. Fine. I encountered Tamara briefly, during my previous exertions to get to Storybrooke. Strictly professional relationship, and far from friendly. Her and her lunkheaded sidekick's notion to kidnap me was, I assure you, entirely their own."

She mulled on that, and seemed to decide , for the moment, to accept it. "How do you know August?"

"Who?"

"August Booth. The writer."

"I don't know him. Only read his book, once. The Real Boy. Why?"

Her eyes flickered again, shadowing their thoughts away. Even after what had just happened between them, she hoarded herself like a miser. "He's somehow in on this."

Killian shrugged. "No concern of mine."

"If you say so." She propped herself up on an elbow. "You knew me, didn't you. Before."

He raised one eyebrow, inviting her to elaborate.

"What do you know about me?" It was half a demand, half a plea.

"Only bits and pieces." He decided that she wasn't about to tackle him just now, and lay back down beside her. "You were. . . different, when we first met."

"Was I?"

"Aye." He kept looking at the ceiling. "You were called Emma Nolan, then."

Almost imperceptibly, he felt her stiffen. Could feel her resisting it, the knowledge, everything it implied, and could not blame her. Had a brief and ludicrous thought that it was nearly like Belle, struggling to remember herself, teetering on the very edge of shattering. Emma was so stubborn, so bloody stubborn, and yet he understood why. Whatever had happened to her, whatever had broken her, didn't dare allow her to hope. It was even worse to have false hope and then get her heart stomped on again. But at last, in the faintest breath of a voice, she said, "Was I?"

"Aye," he said again.

"So it's true." She shifted her position. "I don't know how or what or where or why or pretty much fucking anything. But this. . . life, this person that I. . . I'm not. Who I thought I was, I mean. It's a lie. It's a lie, and I can't – "

He sat up. It was too much for her to take in at once. He didn't want to drop it on her like this, to break her. He held out his arms. "Lass, I – "

She didn't come to him. Swung her legs off the bed and bolted upright, a fury in the flesh. She blazed, an avenging angel, stiff as a board from head to toe. "Don't touch me."

"Emma." He made a move after her. "Gods, woman. Will you bloody just – "

"Will I bloody just what?" Her fists were clenched, hectic spots of color burning in her otherwise dead-white cheeks. "Just accept that I've been fucked over in every kind of way, that I. . . that I might actually have some kind of destiny, some puppetmaster playing with my life and messing with my head and screwing me over for their own amusement? Is that supposed to make me happy? All this time – if it's true – if this is true – then I – then I – "

She stumbled on the words, chasing them like escaped birds, and could get no further. He saw a thousand cracks running up her, moved to catch her just in time, and pulled her hard against his chest as she buried her head in his shoulder, as she tried to hit him, as she came undone, as her back broke, as he held her tighter, as she gave up fighting. As her walls crashed down, as her scared, abandoned child could carry the burden no longer, as she let go, as she sobbed.