Disbelief warred with distrust over acres of despair within him. And within that bleak, vast landscape a tiny pinprick of light pierced him.
A child? His child?
Had he ever dared to hope for such a miracle?
Did he believe her…about any of it?
How often had he fantasized about finding her? This goddess he’d met in the night. How many times had he wondered if he’d passed beneath her window without even knowing?
And, once again, she’d exploded into his life.
Covered in blood. Quite probably a murderer. And carrying a baby…
Christ, could this situation get any worse?
A sound drew his attention to the door, and Morley looked up to see the most vicious, notorious pirate since Blackbeard saunter in with his hat tilted at a jaunty angle.
The man had come up with him in the East End as Dorian Blackwell, but a brush with death and a bout of amnesia had shucked the identity from him. Since they’d parted after Caroline’s death, he had been christened The Rook on his pirate ship, but had recently married and subsequently shucked his murderous moniker for a brand-new one. Ashton Weatherstoke, the erstwhile Earl of Southbourne.
Known to his friends simply as Ash.
“Can you believe that wedding?” Ash tugged at the collar he wore impossibly high to cover the scars left by the lye meant to dissolve his body in the mass grave he’d crawled out of twenty odd years ago.
Morley stood to shake his hand, grateful for a friendly face on this, the rottenest moment of his adult life. They’d come so far from their days as street rats together, but some things never changed, like the man’s impossible sardonic wit.
“I wasn’t aware you were invited,” Morley said. “I didn’t see you there.”
Ash smirked. “Oh, I was and declined the boring invitation, but it’s all over London in the space of three hours. An Earl falling over dead at his own wedding? Whispers of foul play? What a bloody debacle, eh, Cutter?”
Morley lunged past his friend and slammed his door closed, whirling on the unfashionably tanned and brawny man who wore a smart suit as loosely as his devil-may-care smirk.
“I told you never to call me that,” he snarled.
The smile widened to that of a shark’s. “It’s your name, isn’t it?” He held up his hands against the onslaught of irritation burning from Morley’s glare. “I’m sorry, I’ve tried, but I can’t call you Carlton with a straight face.” These last words were strained through a chuckle as if to elucidate his point.
“Call me Morley, then, everyone else does.” He returned to his desk to straighten the papers he’d upset in his haste, arranging them into tidy piles. One in need of signatures. One in need of written correspondence. One in need of dissemination to his clerk as signatures and replies had already been made.
Amidst all the chaos, he needed order. He needed it to think. To decide what to do next.
He needed to control the outcome.
What he didn’t need was interruptions, even in the form of just-discovered long-lost best mates with murderous reputations of their own.
“Debacle,” he muttered. “Doesn’t even begin to describe what happened this morning.” Looking up, he leaned on his desk with both fists, too agitated to sit down. What word could he possibly use? Catastrophe? Disaster? Nothing seemed quite strong enough.
Three stories below where they stood, a lone woman was locked in a secret cell.
A murderer? A mother?
His lover.
What to do with her was his only pressing concern.
“Is there a reason for your visit, Dorian?” he asked shortly.
“I told you never to call me that,” the pirate sent him a black look that might have had a lesser man begging his pardon. Or his mercy.
Both of which he famously lacked.
“It’s your name, isn’t it?” Morley shot back the man’s own words.
“Touché.” Hard, obsidian eyes softened by scant degrees as Ash wandered about his spacious office. He read the commendations on the walls, looked at his certificate of knighthood, his army medals, a broken bayonet, a bullet that had been dug out of his thigh in Afghanistan displayed in a shadow box made by his regiment.
Catalogues of a life they were supposed to have lived together. A life that was stolen from them by the vagaries of fate.
The black eyes softened to something more filial and familiar. “Speaking of the man who took my name when I was presumed dead, Dorian is about to join us for a chat.”
“Come the fuck again?” Morley straightened. “The Blackheart of Ben More, King of the London Underworld is coming here? To my office in the middle of the day?” His jaw locked against the rest of the sentence, hissing the last of these through clenched teeth.
“Former King of the so on and so forth. He’s reformed, remember?”
“Allegedly,” Morley muttered.
Ash waved him off. “It’s a central location for us to meet, and we’ve information for you and Detective Inspector Argent to investigate in both your vocational capacities.” He bucked his brows rather meaningfully.
Morley rubbed at the tension tightening at the base of his neck. “The last time the Blackheart of Ben More was in these walls, I tied him to a chair and beat him within an inch of his life.”
“That isn’t exactly how I remember it.” As if summoned by his title, the subject of their conversation let himself into Morley’s office with nary a knock and left the door wide open behind him as he stopped abreast of Ash, his very own doppelganger.
Morley’s fingers still itched to throttle the man often. Or, like now, punch the vaguely superior expression from his features and blacken the obsidian eye that wasn’t covered by the eyepatch.
But alas, he could not. Morley and the so-called Blackheart of Ben More had established a truce recently—well, a ceasefire—for the sake of the man they both called brother.
The real Dorian Blackwell—now Ash—and an orphan named Dougan Mackenzie had been locked in Newgate Prison together as boys. Because of their similar looks, black hair, and dark-as-the-devil eyes, they’d been christened the Blackheart Brothers in Newgate, and the infamous moniker had followed them through a menagerie of miseries and misdeeds.
Upon Dorian’s supposed death in prison, Dougan Mackenzie, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a pedophile, assumed Dorian Blackwell’s identity and release date.
He lived as Dorian Blackwell for two decades, as the reigning King of the London Underworld, whilst the real Dorian, having crawled out of a mass grave with no memory, lived as the Rook, King of the High Seas.
However, when Ash reclaimed his memory, he saw no great need to reclaim his name from his good friend, as his life with Lorelai Weatherstoke was the epitome of his happy ending.
When all was said and done, both Ash and Dorian decided to live with names they’d adopted instead of the ones they’d been born with.
Only Morley and Argent were the wiser. And all the more befuddled for it.
However, since Morley also lived under an assumed name, he could hardly cast aspersions.
People in glass houses and all that.
Dorian strode up alongside Ash with his hands resting comfortably in his pockets. He bumped the pirate with his elbow in a show of camaraderie. An extraordinary thing, as Dorian famously hated to be touched by all but his wife, Farah.
Though the Blackheart Brothers looked much alike as young men, time had separated them somewhat. Standing side by side as they were, it was easy to tell them apart. Ash wore his hair close-cropped, and his skin was swarthy and weathered by years at sea. The grooves branching from his eyes and the brackets of his mouth were carved deeper into features more savage than Dorian’s pale, satirical visage.
Despite his eyepatch, Dorian remained as handsome as the very devil. He displayed more spirit and mirth than his piratical counterpart, wore his hair down to his collar, and outweighed Ash by perhaps half a stone.
“H
ere’s trouble,” Dorian greeted Argent with a slap to the shoulder as the amber-haired man strode in holding a coffee and a paper.
Argent cast his previous employer a congenial nod. He at least, turned to shut the door behind him, cutting their conclave of reprobates off from an increasingly curious detective branch.
“Christ, almighty,” Morley said by way of salutation. “I’ve no time for trouble if you’ve brought it to my doorstep. Not today.”
“Well, considering the exsanguinated Earl you’ve cooling in your morgue, I’d say we’ve arrived in the nick of time,” Ash went to the window and opened the drapes onto Whitehall Place, uncovering an unfettered view of the spires of Parliament. “We’d meant to discuss Commissioner Goode with you after the wedding, but it seems that needs must.”
Morley’s lips compressed. “What about him?”
“Something is rotten in the State of Denmark,” Dorian quoted significantly. “And the closer we come to the Yard, the more it stinks to high heaven.”
“Out with it, both of you,” Morley barked. “I don’t have time for your cryptic dramatics today.”
“No time for corruption in your own department?” Ash’s black brow arched, and he speared Morley with a meaningful look.
“We’ve information that the ironically named ‘Goode’ needs a bit of moral direction,” Dorian informed him with no small amount of smugness. “Who did we think of but your august self, Morley? This place is your life and your wife, and the shadows of justice your mistress. Goode’s the perfect man to ruin, especially for your career. You could rise and take his place.”
Morley shook his head, rejecting the very idea. On today of all days? Could he not escape the name Goode? “Why would I do such a thing? What have you heard?”
Ash turned from the window. The light reflected off the lye burn scars that crawled up his neck and clawed at his jaw. When he spoke, it was with a great deal less inflection than his more demonstrative counterpart. “Goode’s nobility was built hundreds of years ago on the import of lumber to our little island, but I have it on good authority that his shipping company is smuggling more than just wood. There’s a plant being hailed in the Americas as the new drug of the century.”
“The coca plant,” Morley nodded. “I’ve heard of it. It’s not exactly illegal to ship it here, and it’s widely used therapeutically.”
Dorian made a disgusted noise. “It is illegal if the substance isn’t declared at customs, and if it’s not being delivered to doctors, but instead distributed to obsessed ghouls by coppers who are little better than bookies handing out beatings if they’re not paid on time.”
Morley looked from Dorian’s one good eye, to Ash, and then to Argent, who studied the dark-haired men intently from where he held up the far wall with his leaning shoulders. “You’re sure of this?” he asked.
Ash nodded. “I’m certain the plants are coming from his ships. Though where it’s being refined into cocaine, I couldn’t tell you.”
“And I’m certain the drug is being leaked onto the streets by your officers,” Dorian insisted. “In the poor and rich boroughs alike.”
“How certain?” Morley pressed.
“As sure as we are that you’ve nothing to do with it,” Ash said. “And we’ve all the evidence you need to open up further investigation. However, since this man is your only superior, and you’ve no quiet way to investigate your own officers, I’d suggest the Knight of Shadows conduct the inquiry.”
The Knight of Shadows. Did he want to be the sort of man who policed his own?
Was he truly so ignorant about what the Commissioner might be doing behind his back?
Morley stared at the three men who stood in front of his desk. Three men who’d once been three boys beaten down by the very laws that were supposed to protect them. They’d forged a bond together as teens in Newgate Prison that nothing on this earth could pull asunder.
Morley’s own path had taken him on an entirely different road. A road that became a line between them. A line as tangible as the desk behind which he stood.
Alone.
They’d always stand together, those three. And no matter how much they trusted him, Morley never saw the insides of those prison walls and would thereby forever stay on the outside of their coterie.
On the other side of the line.
He’d been fine with that because his life had become one of order and regimentation where theirs were chaos and anarchy.
Cutter had followed the laws of the streets once.
But Carlton could not. He didn’t exist without boundaries. He wanted the boundaries drawn in no uncertain terms so he could see exactly which parameters he was supposed to work within. He was a man forged in the meat grinder of war and then polished by the police force.
Except lately, the lines had been blurred by the Knight of Shadows. And he’d leapt over one particular line so far, he couldn’t see it anymore.
And the consequences were about to be cataclysmic.
He lowered himself into his high-backed leather chair. The legs of which no longer felt so dense and steady. As if he could topple from his throne at any time. “I hear what you’re saying, and I agree that this demands further investigation. But…there is a complication in regards to me.”
“Do tell.” Dorian’s eye sharpened, and he was instantly rapt. “You are a famously uncomplicated man.”
Morley let that go for now. “I’ve become a bit…” He cast about for the right word. Embroiled? Consumed? Obsessed? Entangled? “Involved with Commissioner Goode’s daughter.”
Argent perked to that. “Which one? Doesn’t he have several?”
Morley swallowed, knowing that once this was out in the open, he could never take it back. It would be painful to endure their reactions, but possibly worth it if they could help him see through his pall to a course of action.
“The one whose wedding was interrupted by a murder,” he muttered.
“Swift work, Morley,” Ash exclaimed. “That was only what, three minutes ago?”
“Hours—”
Ash didn’t appear to listen. “She’s not technically a widow, so you don’t have to wait the requisite year—”
Morley interjected. “No, you idiot, it was before today. Three months before.”
Dorian gave an exaggerated gasp and clutched at his lapels, adopting an overwrought conservative, blustery affect. “An affair, Morley? A Chief Inspector and a knight of the realm. How utterly reprehensible.”
“Morally derelict, I dare say,” Ash added with a lopsided grin.
“Quite right,” Dorian thumped him. “What will they think at church?”
Morley didn’t even have it in him to rise to their japes as he buried his head in his hands. “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. I’ve locked her in one of the cells downstairs.”
A protracted silence caused him to look up, but he didn’t find the astonishment he’d expected.
In fact, these hard men with terrible reputations seemed to be fighting back almost proud smiles. “If I’m honest, Morley, a bit of kidnapping is no insurmountable impediment,” Ash shrugged. “Show us a man in this room who hasn’t had to lock his lady-love in some form of prison before she’d consent to be his wife.”
“It was a Scottish castle for me,” Dorian said with no little nostalgia.
“I’ll see your Scottish tower, and raise you a pirate ship,” Ash bragged.
“Closet,” the monosyllabic Argent added.
Each of them shared a chuckle and, not for the first time, Morley was hit by a wave of sympathy for their wives.
“What happened?” Ash asked Morley, after wiping his smile from his lips with the back of his hand.
Morley pressed two fingers to each temple and worked in circles. He was about to regret this, but he needed to confess. To purge the sin that’d been weighing on him for so many weeks.
Because it’d been so long since he’d been so lost.
“Have any of you heard of the Stags o
f St. James?”
Ash and Argent shook their heads, but Dorian nodded. “Noble women pay fortunes for their sexual services. Madame Regina, who runs my brothel, suggested we recruit a few from Henrietta Thistledown.”
Morley cleared a gather of shame from his throat. “Well, I was out one night, just about three months ago…”
“Being a vigilante?” Dorain asked.
“Investigating,” he corrected.
“No one else investigates with a mask, but do go on.”
Once again, he let that go. “My investigation of some murdered men took me to Miss Henrietta’s, where they’d worked as stags. I was in the garden and Miss Goode sort of…mistook me for…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the bloody word.
Ash’s mouth fell open. “A prostitute?”
“Is she blind?” Dorian’s nose wrinkled as he raked him with a disbelieving glare.
Morley sat back in his chair, cursing himself for saying a damned word to any of them.
It was Argent who leaned forward, his expression fascinated. “And?”
“And…we…” Morley flicked his hand out in a gesture that could have meant anything.
“Holy fucking Christ, you didn’t,” Dorian shook his head as if begging him to deny it and hoping he wouldn’t.
“I need to sit down.” Argent groped for the chair across from his desk and settled his hulking frame into it.
“I need a drink.” Ash went to the sideboard next to the door.
Dorian stayed where he was, staring at Morley. “You deflowered a Baron’s daughter, no, a Commissioner’s daughter—your boss’s daughter—before her wedding and got her to pay you for it? Christ, Morley, I’ve misjudged you all this time. Color me bloody impressed.”
“Don’t,” Morley warned.
“Oh, don’t be cross.” Dorian waved his leather-gloved hand at him. “I’m certain you did it properly and thoroughly as you do everything else and then made up for it with piles of guilt and self-flagellation and sleepless nights and all that rubbish.”
Morley crossed his arms. “I’m not discussing this with you further.” He never flagellated himself, bastard didn’t know what he was talking about.
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