The House of Love and Death by Andrew Klavan

Author:Andrew Klavan [Klavan, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781035904495
Publisher: Head of Zeus

PART THREE

A FOOL FOR LOVE

I remember running across the campus through the dark. To get to Madeleine’s office. To get that code off her computer so the Division could protect our weapon, uncover the spy. It’s very vivid in my mind to this day. I can feel the cool autumn night even now as I tell it. I can smell the changing leaves. See the Gothic campus buildings in the lamplight all around me. Spires and arches looming black against the starry sky. I remember the sound of my own feet, fast on the winding pathways. My breathing, the sound of my breathing, also fast.

But you know what? For the life of me I can’t think why I was running. Why it all seemed so urgent, I mean. I mean, no one knew I was there. No one knew I had a lead. There wasn’t much chance of anyone else getting to the code before I did. Why was I running?

I wonder, Margaret … Maybe this is being too deep, too psychological about it. But I can’t help wondering if I was running away more than toward something. You know? I can’t help wondering if I was running from that moment in Madeleine’s apartment, when I was lying with my head in her lap, looking up at her. That moment when the look in her eyes changed and everything shifted inside me.

I knew it was dangerous to fall for her. It was dangerous to have any feelings for her at all. For one thing, I thought I was immune to these kinds of emotions. I thought I was too busy nursing my torch for Charlotte to fall in love again. That was part of the story I told myself about myself, part of the reason I had become what I was. Me and my broken heart—that’s what had made me the man who shot Snowstep, who had killed him in cold blood. Yet here I was under cover, pretending I was the man I would have been if none of that had happened. Was it possible I was also that man somehow, that I was also the man I was pretending to be?

Crazy, right? Madness. The make-believe and the reality all swirling together. What is madness if it isn’t that?

Maybe that’s what I was running away from.

I ran to the building where Madeleine’s office was. A massive forbidding castle of a place on one end of the quad, with two square towers lowering on either side of its central wall.

I glanced around quickly. A pair of students went walking by, boy and girl, her twittering voice trailing behind her like a night bird’s song. Then I was alone. I hurried up the front steps, stone steps. The doors of the castle were locked, but locks were nothing. I was trained to get past them. I was through the door in a moment.

Inside, the place was dark, vast, empty. Creepy—because dim security lights were on in the high ceiling and threw long shadows across the yellow tiles on the wall.

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