Dancing With Danger

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “He didn’t,” she informed him archly. “I deduced it.”

  “Deduced?”

  “Yes. Deduced. A verb. It means to arrive at a logical conclusion by—”

  “I know what it bloody means, Mercy, I’m simply trying to imagine how you could possibly have inferred evidence that my investigators had not.”

  Doing her best to keep her animation to a minimum, Mercy informed him about the open window, the boot print, the angle of poor Mathilde’s neck and Raphael’s right-handedness. She even drew diagrams, which—to Morley’s credit—he studied very carefully before he looked up to regard her with new appreciation.

  “I’m going to have to consult the coroner’s report, but if all is as you say, I think Raphael Sauvageau owes you a debt of gratitude.”

  Nothing could have dimmed the brilliance of Mercy’s smile. Not only because her investigative skills had assisted in exonerating an innocent man—well, perhaps innocent was not an apropos word to use in reference to Raphael Sauvageau—but also because she’d have the pleasure of informing said gangster later that night.

  Probably.

  If he showed up.

  “I’m given to understand that Mathilde had an enemy in the Duchesse de la Cour over a theft back in France,” she continued, holding up a finger as if to tap an idea out of the sky. “Perhaps the Duchesse and Mathilde’s dastardly husband, Gregoire, were in cahoots.”

  “Cahoots,” Morley chuckled.

  “What?”

  “No one uses that word.”

  “I use that word.” Detective Eddard Sharpe used that word.

  “You’d have made an excellent detective,” he said with gentle fondness.

  “Thank you.” She primly smoothed her skirts over her thighs and rested her gloved hands on her knees. I was high time someone recognized that.

  Someone other than Raphael, that is. He’d been the first to compliment her on her sleuthing skills.

  Sucking in a deep breath, Morley heaved himself to his feet with the vital exhaustion of a new father and the responsibility of the entire city’s safety on his shoulders. “We’ll look into it.”

  “When?” she inquired.

  “When we’re able.” He ran a palm down his face and glanced at the door through which his wife had disappeared a quarter hour past. “I should go find Pru.”

  “When will you tell me what you find?” Mercy stood as well, thinking she needed to bathe before tonight. “The coroner will have his autopsy done tomorrow maybe, the day after next?”

  “I report to you now, do I?” Morley regarded her with a sardonic glare.

  “I promised Mathilde I’d find her murderer.”

  His arch look softened. “And that is lovely of you, Mercy, but women like Mathilde—who keep the company she kept, and indulge in the vices she enjoyed—they often find themselves in dangerous situations. And they just as often meet such an ignoble end at the hands of men who leave no evidence for us to follow.”

  “There is evidence, Morley, there’s the boot print.”

  “Which is compelling, but not absolute. Any number of men could have left that print, and it’ll be difficult to use something like that to convict in court.”

  Mercy scowled at him. “You’re acting as though you’re preparing me for her murder to never be solved.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  His answer paralyzed her. Morley got to where he was by nabbing and convicting more murderers than anyone in the history of Scotland Yard.

  “How could you say that?” she accused.

  His gesture was cajoling as he placed a warm hand on her forearm. “We are stretched so thin, Mercy. I’m endeavoring to hire more officers, but detectives are difficult to come by. There is a rise in gang violence because the substances of the streets have spilled into the solariums of the wealthy and powerful. I’m putting down migrant riots and trade strikes. We’re in the middle of a crime wave, and I’m doing my utmost to keep hundreds of women and children who are still alive, that way.”

  “What are you saying?” Aghast, she stepped out of his reach. “That the murder of one measly drunken socialite doesn’t merit investigation? Do you agree with Trout when he said Mathilde isn’t worth the trouble it would take to find her justice?”

  “Of course not.” Morley ran frustrated fingers through his hair, tugging as if to pull a solution out of it. “I’m saying an investigation like this is rarely simple and almost never timely. We will do what we can for Mrs. Archambeau, you have my word. In fact, this is just the sort of case the Knight of Shadows takes interest in, eh?”

  He gave her a friendly nudge to the shoulder.

  Mercy nodded, more to get rid of him than anything.

  “Let this go, Mercy. Let justice take its course.”

  The Knight of Shadows was an effective vigilante, to be sure, but no one knew how to contact him. He was a man. He did what he liked.

  Oh, she’d let justice take its course...

  Because justice, as everyone knew, was a woman.

  Chapter 8

  “How did this happen?”

  Raphael knew to expect the question, but he never ceased to flinch upon its asking.

  Because it produced a maelstrom of emotion he couldn’t escape.

  Guilt. Shame. Pain. Hatred.

  Most of all, hatred.

  Less toward the men who had done this to his brother, than the one who had brokered it.

  He still seethed.

  Grappled rage into submission as he watched Dr. Titus Conleith palpate his brother’s ruined face for the final examination before tomorrow’s reconstructive surgery.

  Raphael detested everything about hospitals, though this one was nicer than most.

  The glaring awful whiteness of them, the smell of solutions and cleansers. Of shit and blood and food and death. Even the neatness of them rankled. Rows of beds full of misery. Nurses dressed in smart uniforms, their hair held in severe knots beneath starched caps.

  It made him all the more determined to die whilst young and healthy.

  Gabriel was the only soul alive that could get him through these doors.

  If his brother could suffer such indignities, the least Raphael could do was be there.

  He only had to watch.

  They had visited Dr. Conleith several times in the past handful of weeks, and never once had the surgeon savant made the dreaded query.

  How did this happen?

  How did Gabriel come to be without a large portion of his nose? How was it that his ocular bone had split so completely as to cave in, leaving him unable to properly open his left eye? How had the skin of his cheek ripped all the way through, from the corner of his mouth to his temple, only to be stitched together by a drunken hack?

  “Violence.” Sitting on the surgeon’s examination table, Gabriel gave the same short answer he always did. The truth, and yet...

  Not all of it. Not even close.

  The memory—memories were Raphael’s absolute worst.

  And it hadn’t even happened to him.

  The violence.

  Dr. Conleith reached for the stark-white-bulbed lamp, pulling it closer to Gabriel’s face. It illuminated the macabre smile crafted by the tight, uneven line of the scar branching from the corner of his mouth to his hairline.

  Raphael could barely stand to look at it, even after all these years.

  He wanted to strike the handsome doctor for pointing such glaring lights on the ancient wounds when he knew how it distressed his brother. His fingers itched to bloody the stern brow that furrowed with pity as he bent over Gabriel’s expressionless, long-suffering face.

  It was the tension bulging his brother’s muscles and the trickle of sweat running from his shorn scalp into the back of his collar that brought out the instinct to break the doctor’s strong jaw as it flexed and released, as if chewing on a thought.

  Must it be so light in here?

  They visited under the cover of night so as not t
o be so thusly exposed.

  As if he could instinctively sense the rage simmering right beneath Raphael’s skin, the doctor glanced over to where he lingered by an articulated skeleton, holding the wall up with his shoulder.

  To Conleith’s credit, he didn’t seem cowed by the brothers Sauvageau in the least. “I ask not out of morbid curiosity, but occupational necessity,” he explained with his very professional brand of patience. “It appears to me that some of these wounds sustained subsequent trauma, which makes my job a great deal more difficult.”

  Subsequent trauma, what a gentle way to put it.

  Neither he nor Gabriel answered.

  Dr. Conleith rubbed at his close-cropped beard, one with a more russet hue than his tidy brown hair. “Answer me this, then. In regard to the ocular cavity, this was done by an instrument, I suspect?”

  “It was.”

  “Blunt or sharp-edged?”

  “Sharp.” Gabriel’s words were often difficult to mark. His voice hailed from lower in a chest deeper than most men could boast. Protected by dense ribs and muscles built upon what seemed to be other muscle, the register was often so low as to be lost.

  The reason they often created the fiction that Gabriel couldn’t speak or understand English was twofold. One, because people spoke more freely around someone who might not mark them.

  And the other, because speaking caused Gabriel discomfort.

  The stitching done to his mouth and cheek had been of such terrible design, it’d taken the ability to part his lips very well without fear of tearing the wound anew.

  “So sharp, but not as sharp as the instrument that tore the cheek open, is that correct?” The doctor used his thumbs to lift the lip up toward the exposed nasal cavity.

  Gabriel, a man who’d undergone more pain than even Raphael could imagine, gave a grunt of discomfort.

  Raphael pushed away from the wall, taking a threatening step toward the doctor, who’d turned his back.

  His brother held out a staying hand, planting Raphael’s feet to the floor.

  “I’m sorry for any discomfort,” the doctor said gently as he released Gabriel’s face and stepped away to wash his hands. “I was testing the elasticity of the skin.”

  “It was lumber.”

  Conleith turned around, his hands frozen with suds, as if he’d not heard Gabriel correctly. “Pardon?”

  Raphael’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. They never spoke of it. To anyone.

  Ever.

  “Long and square cut.” Gabriel stretched his arms out wide to show the length of the wood that had caved his face in. “The kind used to build houses. Does that...change anything? Will you still be able to operate?”

  Though Gabriel was his elder brother, larger in every respect, Raphael felt such a swell of protectiveness, he swallowed around a gather of emotion lodged in his throat, threatening to cut off his breath. Not even when they’d been young had he spoken with such uncertainty. With such hope and dread laced into one inquiry.

  “Of course.” The doctor answered in his quick and clipped tone. “Without question.” He turned back to the sink to finish scrubbing his hands.

  From his vantage, Raphael watched the doctor work diligently to school the aching compassion out of his expression.

  It was appreciated.

  Conleith obviously knew enough about men to realize that those who led a life such as theirs equated compassion with pity.

  Pity was an insult.

  And insults were answered.

  Must have learned that in the Afghan war, where he’d earned his hard-won reputation by reportedly stitching together men even more broken than his brother.

  Though that was hard to believe.

  “Explain to me, Doctor, why you must put Gabriel through more than one procedure. This wouldn’t be to make it seem as if the fortune we allowed you and your wife to keep was worth the trouble... ”

  The seams of the midnight-blue shirt strained over Gabriel’s shoulder as he lifted his arm to jam a finger in Raphael’s direction. “Do not intimidate the doctor,” he commanded in their heavily accented French.

  Raphael made a rude gesture and answered him in kind. “Does he look intimidated to you?”

  The man was in no danger, and not only because he was the only surgeon who could perform such procedures in this country, but because he was married to Mercy’s beloved eldest sister.

  The idea of doing anything to cause her pain produced an ache in his own body.

  “It’s a valid question.” Conleith strode to the skeleton held upon a post next to Raphael, whose nose looked alarmingly like his brother’s. “Since your wounds have been healed for years, I’ll need to re-break some of the bone in your cheek and then use a panel of sorts to sculpt it back together per a foundational technique pioneered by the Italian doctor, Gasparo Tagliacozzi.” He showed on the skull where the break would occur and where the panel would be fitted. “I certainly have reason to hope that this will help with the terrible headaches you’re plagued with. However, the procedure is new and complicated and could take several hours. I shouldn’t like you to be anesthetized much longer than that, the risk of you not...regaining consciousness is too high.”

  Gabriel’s chin dipped once. “I understand.”

  “Subsequently, Dr. Karl Ferdinand von Gräfe has shown me how to take skin from another part of your body, and not only shape you an entirely new nose, but also cut open your badly healed scar tissue and graft it so you will be able to speak and chew more easily.”

  “Where will the skin be taken from?” Gabriel attempting to furrow his brow was a terrible thing to behold.

  More ghastly than normal, in any case.

  The doctor hesitated. “Usually from the arm, but because of your tattoos, we’ll have to take it from your back.”

  “All right, Doctor.” His brother stood, and it still surprised Raphael to note that Conleith was every bit as tall as the towering gangster, if only three fourths as wide.

  Not that Titus Conleith was a diminutive man. Indeed, he was strenuously fit, but Gabriel should have been named Goliath. Or Ajax.

  As he’d the proportions not often seen on a mortal.

  “Tomorrow night, then.” Rather than offering his hand, Gabriel nodded to the doctor, who seemed to understand that he’d rather dispense with the pleasantries.

  He turned away from any sort of audience as he affixed the black mask over his features. It stayed put by way of a strap that encircled the shorn crown of his head like the band of a hat, and settled down over the left side of his features with a frightening, if familiar, prosthetic shape of a man’s face.

  It always reminded Raphael of someone attempting to break free of a black marble statue.

  After, Gabriel donned his long black coat, drawing up the hood to hide as much of himself as possible.

  The observant doctor bustled around, rolling his shirtsleeves down his forearms and affixing the cufflinks to allow them the semblance of privacy. “I like my patients to bathe and scrub as clean as possible and also to forgo meals the day of a procedure, if possible,” he said. “Sometimes the anesthetic can cause nausea, and I shouldn’t like you to aspirate whilst asleep.”

  With these last few words, he opened the door to their private room—a courtesy not afforded to many patients, no doubt—and escorted them out the door and into the night.

  Both brothers enjoyed a simultaneous inhale of crisp February air as they melted into the familiar darkness of the streets.

  They’d always been creatures of the shadows.

  But perhaps not for much longer.

  “For a moment there, I thought you were going to tell him about the pits,” Raphael prompted. “About everything.”

  It wasn’t cold enough to lift his collar to shield him, but Gabriel did it anyway as he ignored any mention of the pits. “The two procedures will set everything back. We’ll need to make other arrangements.”

  “I’m not worried.” Raphael lifted his
shoulder and watched the billow of his breath break as he walked into it. “What are a few more days? No one will be looking for us.”

  Since Raphael couldn’t read his brother’s expressions, he’d learned to pick up on other cues, some as subtle as mere vibrations in the air between them.

  The set of his boulder-sized shoulders, the number of times he cracked his knuckles, as he was wont to do when brooding. “I still don’t know if we can pull this off without bodies to confirm our deaths.”

  Raphael elbowed his brother, feinting at shoving him into a gas lamppost. “Find me a body that could pass for yours, and I’ll gleefully murder him and enjoy pretending it’s you.”

  Gabriel didn’t even pretend to be amused. “It is hard for me, knowing I will not be awake to oversee things.”

  Clutching at his heart, Raphael acted as though he’d been skewered. “Your lack of trust wounds me, brother. Fatally, I expect. I should not have to fake my death.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Gabriel snarled, searching the empty night for interlopers.

  The Fauves didn’t haunt this part of town.

  Sobering, Raphael rested his palm on Gabriel’s shoulder, the one from which the real mantle of leadership rested.

  As the face of the Fauves, Raphael was an effective figurehead. Sleek and elegant, dangerously charismatic, cunning, and collected.

  And, admittedly, not difficult to look at.

  But few knew that he was the tip of the blade wielded by his brother.

  Gabriel wasn’t just muscle, as most suspected, he was might.

  He was master.

  Because of the rules by which they’d always lived.

  The rules they now carefully planned to leave behind.

  “I have it well in hand, brother.” Raphael squeezed the tense muscle before releasing it, wishing he could say more.

  Wishing he had more time with the only person he loved in this world.

  Gabriel’s chest expanded with another measured breath. “Tell me again.”

  “Once you are recovered enough to travel, you will retrieve your new papers from Frank Walters and go to the Indies. I have transferred our enormous fortune to St. John’s Bank in Switzerland, where I will retrieve it. After, we will meet in Antigua and from there go to America using our new identities.”