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Of course, there are not actually dozens of snipers at the pool, and to be honest Sabrina Moran thinks a little less of Holmes for taking that at face value. Sabrina doubts Jane would ever be able to find that many people she trusted to be here, with guns pointed at her darling detective.
She also hopes Jane would never trust anyone who couldn’t hold their guns steadier than these imaginary snipers seem to. The little red dots currently dancing over Dr. Watson’s semtex vest are actually courtesy of Sabrina with some laser lights and mirrors, as should be made obvious by their magnified flickering movement. Maybe, she thinks generously, Holmes notices but isn’t saying. Or maybe he’s too wrapped up in his boyfriend to tell.
There’s one real gun, of course, hers, and if she knows Jane at all, that’s real semtex. And she does know Jane, she flatters herself, or better than these two do. So when Jane appears to let them go with a warning and they let out relieved breaths, Sabrina sets her jaw and grips her gun tighter. And when Jane reemerges with a declaration in her googliest crazy-voice about being changeable, she has to suppress an unfunny laugh about how predictable her boss generally is.
On the other hand, Sabrina doesn’t know Holmes. She guesses Jane must, after all this time spent obsessing over him. She must know him inside out, she must be able to guess his every move. And yet as she watches the man point a gun at the semtex vest, and Jane stand by dispassionately with nothing more than a reptilian head tilt, she thinks about how well Jane must understand Holmes and she is not reassured.
She sees the look on Jane’s face, and Sabrina cannot promise herself that this woman does not intend to die tonight.
And that’s when she knows.
After Jane makes her final exit and Holmes and his man go home, Sabrina figures she is probably supposed to go back to the hotel. Instead she turns off her phone, finds a pub, and drinks and smokes cigarettes slowly until the sun comes up.
---
When she gets back to the room at last, she finds a black pantsuit laid out on the bed along with a pair of tasteful diamond stud earrings, with the name of a ritzy bar written on the earring card. Sabrina is still pretty drunk and this is funny to her for reasons she can’t quite lay a finger on. But she puts on the pantsuit (dress shirt first, then shoulder holster, then jacket, trouser socks first, then ankle knife, then trousers, taking her time, no hurry) and does up the cuffs with a minimum of difficulty.
There are no shoes to go with the suit because Jane knows she wouldn’t wear them. Sabrina laces her army boots back onto her feet and jams her cigarettes and her wallet into the trouser pockets.
It’s over a good hour later before the cab drops Sabrina at the swanky bar. She finds Jane inside sitting at the bar talking with a tall, leggy woman in dark lipstick. She wonders if she’s meant to be jealous, except even if she ever cared who Jane shagged, this woman is clearly not Jane’s type. Jane’s type is little naïve schmucks that will fall for her game—feeder mice, Sabrina thinks, like you give to a pet snake—and Sabrina. She isn’t worried.
Besides, she knows now.
“Sabrina!” Jane calls her over. “This is Irene Adler. Irene, this is Sabrina Moran, my right hand. Bree, you’d be a somewhat more effective right hand if I could call you when I needed yooouuu.” She ends the sentence in a singsong more threatening than any growl to those who know her, but Sabrina doesn’t flinch.
“Sorry, Boss,” she says without blinking, knowing Jane won’t buy it for a moment, not afraid. “Something must be wrong with my phone.”
“Hmm,” is all Jane says, lifting her eyebrows innocuously, but Sabrina knows better. She smiles blandly and takes a seat, and Jane turns back to her business.
When the meeting is over and Sabrina leaves the bar, she does not go back to the hotel room. She finds projects of Jane’s to supervise, places to be in the evenings. She follows the orders from Jane’s texts without, for the most part, seeing her. She catches naps in the black cars that are sent to her, in the offices of Jane’s businesses with her feet on the desks. She’s worked on less.
She could get her own hotel room, but Jane is certainly monitoring Sabrina’s credit card, and Sabrina doesn’t have enough of a bearing on Jane right now to be sure what she’d do. She might have the card cancelled. She might show up at Sabrina’s new room. She might burn down the hotel.
Worst, she might do nothing at all.
After a few days and nights of this, she gets a text summoning her to a small, high-class club in a ritzy neighborhood that evening. She doesn’t recognize the number, but the address is a place Jane has her fingers in, so she isn’t worried.
As soon as she enters, she knows who has called her there. The woman Jane was meeting with, Irene Adler, sits at the bar in a jade green cocktail dress, sipping from a wine glass.
Sabrina sits down at the bar with her. Is this her life now, a succession of bars? It makes sense, she supposes. She seems to recall that was her life before Jane, why shouldn’t it be her life after?
Adler smiles at her as she sits down. “I thought we might have a talk, just us girls,” Adler says.
“Moriarty is a girl,” Sabrina points out.
Adler’s smile quirks to the side, a little less sweet and a little more genuine. “Perhaps I should rephrase as ‘the females of the species,” she says. Sabrina snorts and orders a scotch with a wave of her hand at a bottle on the wall.
“Just because I’m a little more human than her doesn’t mean I make the team,” she says, and Irene laughs.
“Who here does?” she says, sipping her red wine. She sets down her glass and gets out a long slim cigarette from a pack in her handbag. “So, Miss Moran. What can you tell me about Jane Moriarty?”
Sabrina pulls out a cigarette of her own, stumpier and cruder than Adler’s, as well as a silver lighter. “Oh, plenty,” she says coolly as she lights up. The scotch is set in front of her. There is a long silence. She takes a drink.
“But you won’t.”
“Nah,” says Sabrina. She offers her light and Irene leans forward to accept. “I’d much more interested in hearing you tell me about this Holmes.”
Adler shakes her head as she takes the first few puffs of her cigarette. “I’ve never met him. I only know what your boss knows.”
“Good,” Sabrina says calmly, looking the other woman straight in the eyes. “Because that’s what I want to hear.”
Adler’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows go up inquisitively. “She won’t tell you herself? Or you won’t ask?” She sounds amused. Sabrina doesn’t answer, just stares steadily at her and sips her scotch. Adler shrugs and leans back against the bar again. “All right. I can understand playing things close. What do you want to know first?”
Sabrina pauses. “He’s… clever, right? I mean, I only saw him once, but I guess she was setting all these riddles for him… He’s almost as clever as her, I guess?”
Adler is giving her a funny look that she doesn’t appreciate, and when Adler speaks her voice is gentler than before. “Yes. Or she seems to think he could be.”
Sabrina nods. “Good,” is all she says. Irene is watching her closely, but Sabrina won’t react to her searching expression. She just finishes off her drink and raises a hand to signal for another.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were the type to drink on the job,” Adler observes.
The scotch appears in front of her and Sabrina picks it up and swirls it in the glass.
“Good thing I’m not on the job,” she says, taking a sip.
“I suppose what I meant,” amends Adler, “is that you seem like the type who is always on the job.”
Sabrina doesn’t answer, just sips her scotch. When the bartender passes by she raises a forefinger at him.
“Hey, start me a tab, will you?” she says. The bartender shakes his head at her.
“Your drinks here are free, Miss Moran,” he says.
She shakes her head back at him. “Not tonight,” she says. “Tonight I’m paying for my own drinks.”
Adler still watches her, but doesn’t ask, and Sabrina doesn’t explain.
“Tell me more about Sherlock Holmes,” she says.
---
In the end, a few days later, Sabrina goes back to the hotel room. She can’t pretend it’s to get her things, since she owns almost nothing that Jane didn’t buy for her except her guns; she’s kept her pay liquid for the day this whole thing fell through. Honestly, it took longer than she’d thought it would.
It’s been a week and some change since the game with Holmes, and normally they would have checked out by now. But her key card works, and she steps inside and switches the light on.
Jane is sitting on the bed.
She is wearing a short gray dress and tall heels purple as a bruise, a diamond necklace draped across her sharp, pale collarbones. Her hair is down straight over her shoulders.
“You’ve been avoiding me, I think, Bree.”
Sabrina doesn’t try to deny it. She sticks her key card back in her wallet and tosses it on the desk, then tugs off her suit jacket. It’s the same as Jane laid out for her to meet with Irene. It’s rumpled and murky-smelling like the rest of her clothes, a sharp contrast from Jane’s crisp grooming and pristine cocktail dress.
“Are you sulking?” Jane says, pouting sarcastically at Sabrina.
“No,” she says calmly.
“Are you quitting?”
“No,” says Sabrina again. “I’ll continue working for you as long as you need me to.”
“Ah, but that’s it, isn’t it?” Jane says with slowly growing delight. “That’s all you’ll do. Oh Bree, are you breaking up with me?”
Sabrina doesn’t react. She grabs the electric kettle and goes to fill it up at the bathroom sink. Jane bounces up and kneels on the edge of the bed, smirking and eyes sparkling like Sabrina has told her a marvelous joke.
“Oh you are! You’re dumping me!” she exclaims with glee. Sabrina tries to walk back past her to put the kettle back on the cord, but Jane darts a hand out and grabs Sabrina by the front of the shirt, yanking her off her balance and over to the bed. The kettle clatters splashing to the ground. Sabrina is larger and stronger than Jane, so when Jane hangs on her shirt Sabrina stays standing and is not dragged down to the bed. She keeps her eyes fixed on the wall over Jane’s shoulder, her face impassive.
Jane slips Sabrina’s dog tags out of her shirt and wraps the chain slowly around her hand, tightening and pulling down until the chain digs into the back of Sabrina’s neck. Sabrina stands erect as long as she can, and then Jane gives the chain another half turn and her balled fist is pressed against Sabrina’s throat. She tugs again and Sabrina’s knees buckle and hit the edge of the bed, her back stooped.
“Oh Bree,” Jane murmurs, her lips pressed to Sabrina’s ear. “Just when I think nothing can surprise me anymore.” She slips a small hand into Jane’s white shirt, and then jerks the shirt open, popping off at least a couple buttons.
It’s fine. It’s not Sabrina’s shirt anyway. Jane bought it.
Moriarty bought it.
Jane pulls herself up by the dog tags and kisses Sabrina hard. Sabrina does not kiss her back.
“Are you jealous?” Jane whispers against her mouth. “You shouldn’t be. You’re the only one for me, love.”
Sabrina almost laughs, because that means so little, is both true and not true at all. She almost laughs except there’s nothing funny about any of this.
She isn’t jealous that way. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have Jane, that much she’s sure of by now, that’s not what this is about. It would be so much easier if it were. Sherlock Holmes and Jane Moriarty could shag in the street if they wanted, in Jane and Sabrina’s bed, on top of the bar at Sabrina’s favorite pub while Sabrina has a drink, she wouldn’t care. Jane can shag who she likes.
Sherlock Holmes isn’t the problem. The game is. The game is going to take Jane from her, fritter Jane away mind and black soul until there’s nothing left for Sabrina. The game will probably leave Jane dead, a high-powered bullet straight through her lovely face or her flesh falling out of the sky with ash and rubble like meaty confetti. And that’s fine, that’s Jane’s business. But it doesn’t have to be Sabrina’s business too.
Jane is pushing her down on the bed, Jane’s hands are roaming over her, Jane is speaking words that are bizarre in her mouth, joke normal-people words meant for normal lovers, impossible to be taken seriously, whispered with a smirk against Sabrina’s skin.
I’m here.
I’m yours.
You’re beautiful.
Sabrina lies unmoving and looks up at the ceiling.
---
She barely sleeps that night, turned away toward the too-bright clock on the nightstand. So she knows it is exactly 2:12 in the morning when the mattress dips with Jane’s rising, when Jane pulls her dress back on and grabs a couple of things and slips away, closing the heavy room door behind her with a quiet click.
It is 3:05 when Sabrina’s eyes close, and shortly after that she sleeps.
She wakes up at 6:00 precisely without an alarm anyway. She retrieves the kettle from the floor where she dropped it last night, fills it and plugs it in. While she’s waiting for the kettle to boil she opens the door to get the paper from the hall.
The headline is the death of a Cabinet member as a result of a firebombing of his house late last night. It is not a loss, in Sabrina Moran’s opinion. The man was a dried-up, misogynistic old bigot who didn’t even have the decency to sit there and be useless like most politicians, had to put real effort into being a force against progress, a force against the disenfranchised. It made Sabrina mad every time he was in the news.
Jane never cared. Jane thought it was hilarious that Sabrina did. And Sabrina gets it, she’s not some crusader for the right, she’s a hitwoman, a murderer, and she likes it that way. But Jane Moriarty has never been anyone but Jane Moriarty, doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that not everyone has the connections or the talents or the intelligence to live outside the law. Most people have to live in the world for a while at least, and it’s a world run by men like the man who died burning last night. Sabrina has been the dyke in a barrack full of men. Sabrina knows.
And all right then, she knows it’s for her. The photo under the headline might as well have had “to bree love jane xoxo” spraypainted on the kerb in front of the blazing house. She imagines this is Jane’s idea of a romantic night with flowers sent to the room the morning after. “Darling I’m sorry, I know we can make this work, have some assault and an assassination.” The bombing is, Sabrina admits, an uncharacteristically lavish show of affection, but on the whole the tone is consistent with their normal relationship.
Or their former relationship.
The kettle boils and Sabrina throws the paper on the table to go make her tea.
---
To be honest, very little changes. She is still Jane’s right hand. She still follows Jane everywhere, handles her business, does what she’s told. She still shares Jane’s bed, since Jane only books rooms with one bed. But if she has to be in it at the same time as her boss, Sabrina stays firmly on her side and pretends she is alone—even when Jane crawls over to her side, clambers onto her, nestles her grinning face in the crook of Sabrina’s neck. She doesn’t do it often. Sabrina supposes sex became less fun for Jane when Sabrina stopped fighting her. (It’s always been a fight. A fight has always been what they both wanted.)
She avoids the issue as much as she can by taking up a mostly opposite sleep schedule from her boss. It works out surprisingly well since they both sleep very little. She can feel Jane measuring her whenever they’re in the same room, so she avoids that too. Sabrina gets the impression she’s foiling Jane’s attempt to make a new game out of her. Good. Or maybe this all gives Jane exactly what she wants to know. Who can tell?
(Sabrina can tell.)
They don’t eat room service crosslegged on the hotel bed anymore, or go out to eat and pretend to be normal to amuse Jane, talking about the news and the weather and playing footsie under the table. Sabrina goes out to eat by herself, or buys food and brings it back to wherever they’re staying at the moment, to be eaten in as solitary a manner as possible. They do not talk about (Jane’s) life and (Jane’s) philosophy. They discuss business if they discuss anything. Jane chatters sometimes, as she did, but Sabrina does not acknowledge her. It does not dissuade her boss.
That’s what they are now, employee and boss again, like it always should have been. Sabrina is aware Jane thinks she’s sulking. Jane thinks this because she is, herself, inclined to sulk. Sabrina is not sulking. She’s just putting things as they were, fixing what she had disordered. Taking back her advantage.
Moriarty does not trust her less for it. One day, one of Jane’s people rats on his little operation. Sabrina, who is attending the meeting on the subject in the offices of one of Moriarty’s warehouses, is unclear on the nature of the operation. Drugs, or smuggling, or money laundering. Maybe the fencing of stolen jewels. It doesn’t really seem to matter. The narc will not survive the night, whatever they endangered.
“But we figured out who it was, and we’ll take care of it,” the contact sitting across the table from Jane is saying. “Don’t even worry about it. Things are under control.”
“If things were under control this wouldn’t have happened,” says Jane sweetly, her nostrils flaring just slightly. “If things were under control we wouldn’t be talking right now. If things were under control I’d already have your ribcage in the boot of my car!” she snarls, jumping up and slamming her hands on the table. “You’ll take care of it? Why did you come to me if you hadn’t already taken care of it? Why would you think this is the order in which things ought to be done?”
“I’ll do it! I’ll get it done! Right now!” whimpers the contact, shoving his chair back and leaping out of it, edging toward the door. Sabrina smothers a yawn and reaches down to unsnap her boot knife.
“No, you won’t,” snaps Jane, withdrawing from beast to frustrated businesswoman with an irritable straightening of her blouse cuffs. “You’re off the job. You’re out of a job. Get out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” breathes the thankful little cockroach, and skitters out the door and out of sight in a matter of seconds. Jane closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose.
“Bree, go kill him please. And wrap up this loose end, that’s a darling. See if there’s anything else to this, too, take care of whoever they might have told. Not the police, obviously, all the relevant ones are on my cheque, but I’m sure there’s someone else that knows.”
“Ribcage?” says Sabrina.
“Oh, if you like,” Jane replies, waving a hand dismissively. “Although put a tarp down if you do put it in the car boot.” She shakes her head and sighs. “If I could just have a whole platoon of you I wouldn’t have this problem,” she frowns.
Sabrina smiles before she can catch herself. “Got it, Boss,” she says, slings her rifle case over her shoulder, and goes to do her job.
It’s just a job.
---
It is summer and Sabrina starts finding herself on rooftops more and more. She is (understandably) very good at finding the right combination of interior and exterior staircases, open to the public or not, to get her to the roof of any building. It gives her somewhere within on-duty distance to go to get away from the flats and hotel rooms that feel so small with Jane in them.
It’s been months and this together-but-not limbo feels like an over-tight uniform coat in desert heat. Any other person Sabrina has ever ceased to love she was never obligated to see again. But you can’t just leave an employer like Moriarty without expecting a bullet through your head; you are either benevolently dismissed or you pay a hefty retirement fee to someone who can fake your death.
It looks like you can’t leave a woman like Moriarty so easily either. It is obvious as time goes on that Sabrina might have broken up with Jane, but Jane never broke up with Sabrina. Jane doesn’t care for her precisely, Sabrina knows, has always known. But she’s Jane’s. That doesn’t seem to have changed despite Sabrina’s lack of consent.
The air inside their rooms is too full of possession to breathe sometimes. And so she goes to the roofs.
She comes back one night to their current place, a flat in a skeezy highrise in Birmingham. She’s just finished a job—which went successfully, but if she texts Jane telling her that, Jane will text in return “Why else would I pay you?” So instead she just texts Back.
Her phone beeps almost immediately. It just says good. Sabrina goes up to the roof.
She is not expecting to find Jane when she gets there. Jane is facing away from her, lying on her back on the cement roof, looking up at the sky with her arms folded behind her head like she is stargazing in a grassy pasture. There are, of course, no stars to gaze at, just city glow reflecting off hazy sky.
Sabrina just stands in the doorway, shocked for some reason, as if she thought rooftops were a place Jane could not get to. (Screams and police sirens. A bottle of wine. A kiss.) Jane doesn’t speak or acknowledge her arrival though she certainly knows, so Sabrina just stares at her.
After a minute she bites off the thoughts and stuffs her hands in her trouser pockets.
“Wasn’t expecting you to be out here.”
“I know.”
After a moment’s hesitation she walks past Jane, dropping her rifle case on the ground behind her. She sits on the edge of the roof and swings her legs over the side. She doesn’t know what Jane sees in the black sky, but this is the view Sabrina likes—the lights of the city below, not the heavens.
She can feel Jane behind her, not moving, not making noise. Sabrina takes a deep breath in through her nose and then blows it out, staring down at the lights of Birmingham. She pulls her cigarettes out of her shirt pocket, lights one, takes a drag. Behind her, Jane breathes. Sabrina can feel her in her lungs.
---
“I’ve got a job in Paris that I need to oversee,” Jane says one day. “You’re coming with me.”
“I thought I was supposed to be handling the incoming shipments tomorrow,” says Sabrina, frowning. It would not be unlike Jane to make Sabrina responsible for two things at once and then be angry with her that she wasn’t there for both of them.
But Jane says “I’ve already got someone else on it,” and pulls open a drawer to start packing a bag. So Sabrina does the same.
They dress in “normal people” costumes—jeans and boots for Sabrina, a nice traveling skirt and trainers for Jane—and take the train that night. They sit next to each other, Sabrina at the window looking out, Jane tapping tranquilly away at her tablet computer. They are not touching, not looking at each other. Sabrina knows they look like they are together anyway. They always have. They are so opposite each other in everything, size and coloring and posture and manner, that they could only be a matched set. And Sabrina is so attuned to Jane, that even as they are the inverse of each other they move together, blink and breathe together, so that they look like two people with one mind. It will probably always be that way.
Their destination for the night is not a hotel or a flat (though Jane does have at least one flat in Paris) but just a vacant floor in an office building. Out of her suitcase Jane pulls two tightly-rolled sleeping bags and lays them out on the floor. Probably two only because sleeping bags don’t come in queen size, Sabrina thinks.
Jane is still tapping on that tablet when Sabrina crawls into her bag fully clothed and falls asleep.
---
Sabrina wakes up at 6:00 AM (London time) to find Jane sitting on the floor by the floor-to-ceiling window with her tablet again, back against a cement pillar. Sabrina can’t tell if she ever slept—her trainers are lined up neatly next to her sleeping bag like Sabrina’s boots next to hers, but it’s no more or less rumpled than it was last night—but she looks as serene and well-rested as she always does.
In the daylight Sabrina notices for the first time a telescope on a tripod set up next to Jane, pointed toward the window.
“So when you said ‘oversee’…” says Sabrina, scrubbing her fingers through her hair. Jane looks up and smiles dazzlingly.
“There’s some custard creams in the bag. We’ve got another hour before it starts.”
Sabrina gets up and goes over to dig in Jane’s bag. “Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what
‘it’ is.”
Jane doesn’t answer. Sabrina finds the biscuits. They’re a little crumbly but they’re something. She munches on them as she pulls her boots back on. It’s the illusion of the play-acting clothes and the different city, she knows, that makes this feel like things used to. But she knows they’re not, she isn’t fooled, so she pretends that makes it safe to relax into it for now.
She failed to pack a book, so she exercises while she waits for whatever Jane’s big job is. Pushups, and crunches, and lunges, and she’s halfway through another circuit when Jane chirps “It’s time!”
Jane is jumping up to point the telescope at the opposite high-rise building as Sabrina comes over, stretching her shoulders.
“Now are you going to tell me what this is about?” she says, while Jane busies herself adjusting the focus.
“That company,” says Jane, pointing at the building her telescope is trained on, “just started its workday about ten minutes ago. It’s just gone completely under and nobody in that building knows it yet.”
“What sort of company is it?”
Jane pulls her eye away from the telescope to look at Sabrina as one looks at a hopeless case. “It’s the corporate headquarters for an air filter producer. It hardly matters.”
Sabrina shrugs. “Is that what you’ve been doing since last night? Taking this air filter producer under?”
That makes Jane smile again, pleased and faux-modest. “You flatter me. I’ve been at work on this project for days. But yes, I was adding the final touches. They’re quite ruined.” She picks up her tablet from the ground and, with an elegant flourish and a huge impish grin, taps a single button. “And now the president knows.”
She looks through the eyepiece and waits eagerly for a minute, then giggles delightedly. She beckons Sabrina over to the telescope; the man Sabrina sees through the window looks shellshocked and ill, and is staring unmoving at his desktop computer.
“Did he have any clue this was coming?” Sabrina asks, curious.
“Just enough for him to believe the numbers,” Jane smirks. “Just enough to start giving him ideas.”
“Ideas?” says Sabrina, but the thought is interrupted by the man rousing himself from his stupor. “Hey, he’s moving.”
Jane reclaims the eyepiece with a gleeful shout. “Already? My, my. Good show, sir. I like decisiveness, it shows strength of character.”
“What’s he decided?”
Jane pulls away from the telescope and doesn’t answer. She presses herself against the window like a child against a toy store display, scanning outside for something. After a minute or so she jams a finger against the glass to point at something on the street below.
“There! There he is!” she squeaks. The company president is down there all right, moving like a sleepwalker out onto the pavement.
“What is he—?”
“Shhh!”
He pauses on the kerb like he’s waiting to cross the street. Sabrina figures out what’s going to happen one half second before he steps in front of a passing bus.
Jane whoops like her team just scored the winning goal. Sabrina looks at her. She is standing with her open hands splayed against the glass, her head back, laughing. Sabrina looks back down at the rapidly growing chaos below. Back up at Jane. Sabrina smiles.
“It’s so easy,” Jane is saying. “His wife at home ready to leave him at the drop of a hat, and a little business misfortune. That’s all it takes. Ordinary people are so wonderfully predictable.”
“This wasn’t a job at all, was it?” Sabrina says. “This was a holiday.”
Jane beams at her and pulls her hair back in an elastic. “I’m ravenous. Let’s get breakfast.”
And because Jane is wearing trainers and Sabrina is wearing jeans and it is Paris, they pack their things back up and go out to get breakfast. They find a nice café where they drink coffee and eat pastries and talk about the news and the weather.
---
Back in London Sabrina busies herself with some of Moriarty’s ongoing projects and departments, doesn’t go back for a while to the swanky hotel suite Jane is staying in at the moment. She imagines it has helped her shake off Paris, whatever malaise settled on her there and made her stupid. When she returns to Jane a couple weeks later, she feels it tug on her bones again (Jane’s laughter, her brilliance and her pride, éclairs in the autumn air surrounded by ordinary people that Jane could order to their own death with a thought and a tablet computer) but she tells herself she doesn’t.
She gets too comfortable. She knows that Jane is trying to pull her back, of course she knows. But she forgets for a while. Then one November morning she wakes up to a bottle of expensive scotch on the dresser. It takes her a few seconds to realize it’s Remembrance Day.
Every year. Every bloody year. It’s Jane’s weird sense of humor, or maybe her weird sense of romance, her arbitrary sentimentality. Sabrina isn’t that broken up about fallen fellow soldiers—it was probably their fault if they got shot or blown up, and they’d signed up to get shot or blown up anyway. But there’s a bottle of scotch there for Sabrina every year, as if she needed to toast the dead or drown her sorrows. Or maybe just as excuse for Jane to still buy Sabrina’s drinks.
She rises from bed, strides over to the dresser, picks up the bottle, turns around, and throws it with all her strength at the opposite wall. It shatters over the headboard and the bed is showered in scotch and broken glass.
---
She is more careful after that. It’s usually too cold to spend much time on rooftops now, so Sabrina has to pick between Jane’s rooms and the hotel bar, if there is one. It does, however, mean that Jane can’t come up and sit with her on the roof in the warm dark when Sabrina has the hardest time not wanting her there.
The air in the rooms is prickly, the air in the bars heavy and bitter. Both remind her to be uncomfortable, to be distant and suspicious and professional. She does a very good job of it for a while.
On Christmas Eve, Irene Adler shows up again. She has a brief closed-door meeting with Moriarty that afternoon, and then that evening she texts Sabrina.
Any Xmas plans?
Hell no
Drinks? Same place?
Sure
Adler is already there, in the back instead of at the bar, wearing black and drinking red wine again.
“Consolations on your unfortunate passing,” Sabrina says as she sits down with her drink.
“Well, you know. I’ll try anything once, and I hadn’t given being dead a go yet.” She takes a draw of her cigarette. “It’s starting.”
“What is?”
“The thing with Sherlock Holmes. That Moriarty started last year. She was just putting her pieces in place. She’s not really letting me in on any of it that I’m not directly part of, of course, but I’m getting the impression that this is where it begins.”
It comes as a bit of a shock to hear Holmes’ name again—she hadn’t thought about him for a long time, even though he had been the reason she’d decided to pull away from Jane. Jane, she realizes, has not mentioned his name once since the first talk with Adler. Has deliberately avoided mentioning him. She has apparently never stopped playing her great game, but she has not let Sabrina see a moment of it.
There is nothing Jane does not let Sabrina see.
“When?” Sabrina says, gripping the edge of the table with one hand.
“Soon, I’m sure. All I know is she’s bringing herself to Holmes attention again through me. It smacks of an opening salvo.” She looks solemnly, measuringly at Sabrina. “I thought you would like to know.”
Sabrina stares down at her drink.
“Thank you,” she hears herself saying. “I’m sorry I can’t stay. I have to make a call.”
Adler just nods, understanding. “Good luck, Miss Moran.”
Sabrina leaves her. When she gets outside she pulls her phone out of her pocket and dials her boss.
“In a meeting, Bree.”
“I’m just letting you know that I’ll be taking some time off.”
“How much?” She doesn’t sound surprised.
“A while.”
“All right,” says Jane. She must have been expecting it. It makes Sabrina even angrier.
She hangs up. She does not go back to the hotel for clothes or her rifle. She just pulls her coat tighter around her and walks to the train station.
---
She goes across the water to Cork, where her father was from, and where she used to visit relatives with her family. The relatives are gone now, which is good because she does not want to see relatives. She just wants to be in familiar streets, surrounded by familiar brogues, sleep in rooms and in beds Jane has never slept in.
She gets a flat. It has one room and a bath. She sleeps on a pallet on the floor and in the morning makes tea in the kitchenette. All day she sits in the flat’s one wooden chair and smokes and reads books from the public library, or goes out jogging, or sits in the park, and in the evening she goes drinking in pubs alone, or she goes drinking in pubs and talks to old men, or she goes to the cinema. Sometimes she picks fights and goes home bloody.
The new year arrives and slowly goes stale. One month passes, and then another.
Jane does not call her.
She knew Jane was playing her all this last year. Of course she knew. Jane is always playing everyone. But with Sabrina Jane always knew she knew, it was all clear and honest in its deception, it was a magic trick done with sleeves pulled back, and if Sabrina falls for it, for quiet evenings on roofs and day holidays in Paris, it’s her own fault.
She does not know why the fact that she is not an exception shocks her. She imagines she is probably being shocked because it’s easier to be than other things.
She only thinks about it in small bits, a little at a time. And day by day, in library books and freezing jogs and beers in seedy pubs and bloody noses and cut lips, she comes to understand, and then to believe.
And then she does what she has spent the last year failing to do: she gets over Jane Moriarty.
So when in March she finally gets a call from Jane, she answers it.
“Break’s over, Bree. Back to work.”
“Yes, boss.”
She returns her library books, gives her landlord back the key, and goes back to London.
---
“You’ll have to manage operations for a little while,” Jane is saying as she pulls a skirt suit out of the hotel wardrobe and settles it into a garment bag sitting on the bed. “I’ll be going to prison.”
She pauses in her task, and then pouts at Sabrina. “Aren’t you going to ask why?”
“I didn’t figure it was really my business,” replies Sabrina calmly, her arms folded.
Jane sighs a longsuffering sigh and puts away another suit. “See, this is what I thought would happen. I give you a little time to get your head together and this is what you do with it, decide we’re not each other’s business.”
There’s nothing Sabrina has to say to that, so she says nothing.
“Why are you going to prison, boss?” says Jane, in a bad too-low mimic of Sabrina’s voice.
“Well, Sabrina,” she answers herself, and she stops and smiles, a pleased, sunny smile. “I’m going to kill Sherlock Holmes.”
The plan isn’t quite so cause-and-effect as that, Sabrina is glad to hear; the day Jane Moriarty actually gets caught for murder will probably be the day the Thames springs a leak. The truth is much more impressive, very Jane all over. Sabrina almost wishes she could go along to the Tower dressed like a tourist too and take pictures as Jane is escorted away, but she has a crime empire to run in her boss’s absence.
The trial goes off without a hitch. Of course it does. Sabrina drives the cab that picks Jane up from detention--that is, that picks Ericha Brook up from detention. When they're a few blocks away, Sabrina looks in the rearview mirror at her boss. She can't help it.
"Congrats on the acquittal," she says.
"It's far from over," Jane replies, unmoved, tapping on her phone. "Drop me at Baker Street, and then after I'll need the Whitechapel flat. I expect a reporter will find me there soon enough."
Sabrina does as she is told.
---
The absence grates for some reason.
Not the running of the crime empire, that’s simple enough, it more or less takes care of itself. But as Sabrina waits for the trial she’s all but twitching. The three months on her own in Cork was fine, but the time between the trial and the conclusion of Moriarty’s project is different—Jane should be here, in the well-furnished Chelsea flat where she’s left Sabrina.
It’s not like the place holds memories—it’s just one of so many places of Jane’s, barely used. Maybe it’s just the attitude of the place, the subtle lavishness of it, designer rugs and bedcovers instead of designer skirt suits. She should be reading Sylvia Plath out loud on the bed and tapping away at her phone and complaining about the smell of Sabrina’s cigarettes.
Instead she is mostly being Ericha Brook somewhere in Whitechapel, and then later getting domestic with some little reporter girl. She’s in deep cover so there isn’t room for their old routines. She sends texts now and again instructing Sabrina in this or that, and also messages—e-mails, voicemails—keeping her updated on every part of the plan, from her arrest at the Tower onward. This part is strange, and for a moment Sabrina wonders if it’s somehow Jane’s attempt to make up for leaving her out of the loop for so long. But that’s unlikely.
There are a couple of meetings—to interview assassins, at one point—where Sabrina is summoned to sit at Jane’s side and look intimidating like old times. But they do not talk to each other during or after, about anything including the texts. The meetings last for maybe half an hour and then Jane is gone again, disappeared into Ericha, and Sabrina returns to the empty flat.
It’s not that Sabrina wants her here. It’s just that she should be here.
---
One late June morning she gets a text that just says tomorrow. Sabrina stares at the text for a full five minutes before she gets up to go put on another kettle.
Sabrina makes the calls to set up the other two assassins. Then she calls it an early day and goes back to the flat. She sits on the roof of the building all day, smoking, drinking coffee, sipping scotch, watching the sun slowly inch toward the skyline. By the time it’s dark, she doesn’t know if her head is buzzing more from the nicotine, the caffeine, or the alcohol. When the sirens start wailing through the streets, they might as well be in her head.
She doesn’t know what time it is when a slim hand comes to rest on her shoulder.
“Did you miss me, Bree?” comes a familiar mocking voice behind her. Sabrina shakes the hand off without looking up. It’s hard to shake it off, like she’s dangling off the edge of the roof instead of sitting by it, and carelessly shrugging away the offer of a rope up. She takes another drink and pretends her hands aren’t shaking just a little.
The hand returns to her shoulder, but this time curls around it so that long fingernails dig sharply into the skin. Her flesh sings.
“Oh, come on, darling,” Jane purrs, low and dangerous. “Didn’t you miss me at all?”
“Actually,” says Sabrina, still without looking up, taking a drag on her cigarette, “I hardly noticed you were gone.”
The hand on her shoulder reaches up and plucks the cigarette from between Sabrina’s lips, and at first Sabrina thinks that Jane is just stealing it to smoke. But then she feels a bright burning pain in the side of her neck, and she gasps before she can help it, before she can grind her teeth down over the breath. Then there’s a mouth over the burn, and it feels as hot as the cigarette was. It doesn’t help the pain at all. It isn’t meant to.
She tries to pull away but the hand goes to her hair, the sharp nails to her scalp. Sabrina tries again, tries to pull from the heat of Jane’s mouth, the heat of the still-red cigarette, but instead pulling turns into being pushed, forward, forward, toward the edge of the roof and the hazy glitter of lights below.
Somehow she ends up on her back, her shoulders against the edge of the roof, her head hanging over. Jane is mouthing, biting. She’s working the buttons of Sabrina’s shirt open with one hand as she goes, but she’s not saying anything, not muttering or humming or giggling, not making any sound at all. It’s not like Jane, this silence.
Sabrina listens to that silence as hard as she can, her head tipped backward. The upside down landscape is half full of bright city and half full of dark sky; London, inverted, turned into stars after all. Jane, her other hand still fisted in Sabrina’s shirt, takes a long drag on the cigarette, bringing it bright again, and lifts her head to blow the smoke into the black.
Sabrina could be dizzy from the scotch, or the smokes, or the coffee, or the blood flowing to her head. But she’s not. She’s dizzy from Jane.
She could never get over Jane Moriarty. Jane will always make sure of that.
---
She's still climbing the stairs to her post the next morning when she hears the shot. She doesn't need to see it to know who it fells.
She only pauses a moment in her ascent, her foot posed on the next step.
Then Sabrina goes and does her job.