"Well?" said Manda, when Emma had closed the door behind her.

"Untie me," he repeated.

"But can I trust you? Will you promise not to go around blowing things up, or threatening the lives of innocent people?"

"Innocent-?" Jack started incredulously, but he broke off, trying to get a hold of himself. "No, Manda, you can't trust me. Look what happened to the last girl who did."

"But that's just the point," said Manda. "It's because of what you did to her that I know I can trust you. Because I know you loved her. I know it's hurting you worse than anyone."

She went to a desk at the foot of the bed and threw open one of the drawers, seizing a fistful of envelopes in each hand.

Jack stared at them. They were old and discoloured, and yet the sight of them stabbed into his eyes as though they were the most dazzlingly white things in the room.

He knew them as he knew his own skin. They had been with him through the monsoons of India, the rank mists of the terai, the salt tang of the Mediterranean. They had spent long nights under his pillow, or folded reverentially in his saddle-bag. They were yet another part of his past that he had thought he would never see again.

"You had these sewn up inside your coat," Manda explained. "I was with Ellini when she found them."

She backtracked a little, perhaps sensing his bewilderment. "You gave her your coat to wear when she was up on the rooftops, remember? And she fell, and it got caught on some barbed wire, and the lining ripped open. And all these letters started showering her like a snow-storm! She wanted to destroy them, but I wouldn't let her."

"She wanted to-?"

"Oh, she didn't want you to remember her," said Manda, waving the letters impatiently, and letting a few of them cascade to the floor. He winced to see them being treated so carelessly. But then he remembered throwing Sam's letter out of the mortuary-window on a rainy night, and realized that he deserved so much worse than this.

"She didn't want you to be hurt when she died," Manda went on, oblivious to his discomfort. "Which seems ironic, given everything that's happened since. These letters are the reason I knew I could trust you to help me with the slave-girls. And you confirmed my suspicions last night. You could have fought me, but you didn't, did you? I saw you hesitate. And it's because I was kind to her."

Jack laughed. "Not even close."

She lowered her hands – still stuffed with letters – to her sides. Jack's eyes followed them with the same anxious tenderness he used to feel when he was watching Ellini.

Good god, did he still want them? Did he still want her? Bad enough when it was just horror and pain, but there was desire underneath, wasn't there? Twisted into bitterness by the impossibility of its ever being fulfilled.

When he thought about her glowing and smiling in front of that mirror, or giggling underneath him on the rooftops, kissing his nose, his jaw, his cheekbones – anything rather than his lips – and telling him not to make her think, not to make her be serious. When these moments came back to him, the longing started thrashing about in his stomach like some starved and baited beast. And that, in turn, made his stomach churn with nausea, because it was feelings like these – from men like him – that had got her captured and abused in the fire-mines. 

He couldn't stop wanting her, and he couldn't stop hating himself for it.

"You didn't spare me because I was kind to her?" said Manda, the colour draining from her cheeks. When this happened, her freckles became starkly visible, like stars coming out at dusk.

"No."

"Well then, why-?"

"I'll show you," said Jack. "Please put my letters down first."

She seemed surprised to realize she was still holding them. She shook them impatiently back into the drawer and came closer.

He waited until she was less than a foot away from the bed, and then he slid both his cuffs off the end of their headboard-bars and snatched up the truncheon from the bedside table. 

Manda let out a yelp, leapt backwards, and fished a gun out of the still-open drawer. Jack recognized it as the same Colt Single Action Army revolver he'd had on him last night. He was quite proud of her ingenuity, even if he wasn't proud of her technique. She was holding the gun at arm's-length, as though it disgusted her. He could see the barrel weaving about as her hands shook.

"I've been tied up many times before," he said, looking at his reflection in the shiny truncheon. "Sometimes just for fun. There isn't always a way out, but if there is, I tend to find it."

He stood up and stretched his aching arms, the handcuffs still dangling from them. "Although, can we just take a moment to appreciate how difficult that was? I had to work each of the cuffs through that maze of patterns without looking, without letting you see what I was doing, and at the same time as hearing some very distressing emotional news. It was tricky."

Manda gaped at him, still holding the gun at arm's-length. He decided to take pity on her.

"This is just to prove a point, Manda. Nothing to be frightened of. Why don't you try firing that gun?"

"What?"

"I'm ninety-eight per cent sure it won't hurt me."

"Well, I'm afraid that's not good enough!" Manda shrieked. "I need to be one hundred per cent sure I won't hurt someone before I fire a gun!"

"You see, this is why it becomes very silly for you to threaten people with guns."

He put the truncheon down on the bedside table, where it went back to looking shiny and suggestive, prodding his thoughts down paths they really didn't want to tread. Then he slid his left hand-cuff further up his arm, exposing the older, thicker shackle at his wrist.

"Did you wonder about this?" he asked her. "Did you even notice it? Apparently, its presence around my arm makes me unkillable by everyone on earth except for one specific person. Someone she chose. Someone she trusted. I didn't kill you last night because I thought it might be you. I'm now almost certain that it isn't."

"What?" said Manda, looking put-out, in spite of all this new, bewildering information. "But – who did she trust more than me?"

"The French girl. Did you know they were lovers?"

But he didn't give her time to reply. He didn't want to dwell on it. He was ashamed of how much he'd dwelled on it before. 

"Now, I will protect the slave-girls," he said. "And maybe I'll even be doing it for all the noble reasons you were naïve enough to assume. But I'm not staying alive any longer than I have to, and I am not what you would call sane. I never asked anyone to believe I was nice, but it happens so often, and it ends so badly, that I am now resorting to the expedient of telling them plainly that I'm not. Learn the lesson and we'll get along fine."

Manda listened to all this rather petulantly. He could tell he hadn't convinced her. She lived in a world where love reformed you, rather than twisting you into a depraved bundle. Besides, she had to think the best of people, didn't she? That was her profession. How was she supposed to weep for their misfortune if she accepted how much they deserved it?

"You'll excuse me if I'm sceptical about all these prophecies of doom," she said tartly. "Last week, the one thing in the world destined to kill you was that black arrow, and it ended up killing Ellini instead."

She had a point, of course – a cool, devastating point, because it contained the words 'killing Ellini'. But he had an answer for it.

"The black arrow was given to me by an Indian Sadhu, who said it would be the weapon which would one day destroy me. He didn't say kill me. I assumed, in my comparative innocence, that they were the same, but I know better now. You don't have to kill someone to destroy them. If I'm not sufficient evidence of that, take a good look at Sam the next time you meet him."

"Stop saying that!" said Manda, stamping her foot on the carpet. "Sam's going to be fine!"