Forged by Desire (London Steampunk Book 4)

by Bec McMaster

  “Nothing,” Garrett muttered.

  Which was why he felt like she’d punched him hard in the solar plexus, why he felt like he couldn’t quite catch his breath. Or feared he never would again.

  “Bloody hell.” He took the coin from a hidden pocket in his sleeve and looked at it, at that haughty falcon’s head embossed on the silver. Nothing there, either. Nothing to say why she’d been so keen to get it back.

  With a silent snarl he flipped it in the air and pocketed it again. She damned well wasn’t getting it back, not now.

  Not unless she paid the price he wanted.

  Six

  She was a fool who just couldn’t stop playing with fire.

  And now she’d gone and opened Pandora’s box, and clearly Garrett was curious about this—whatever this was—too.

  But just curious? Perry felt a small thrill at the idea that he desired her, yet she knew it wouldn’t be enough. Garrett liked women. And she was never feminine enough for men. No matter how hard she tried to hold herself back and pretend to be just an accomplished young lady, she could never quite manage it.

  She’d seen that look of disappointment in too many eyes to expect more here. And once the challenge was gone, Garrett’s interest would fade. Someone else would catch his eye, and then their friendship—the one thing that had held her together all these years—would be destroyed.

  That was the one disappointment she didn’t think she could ever stomach.

  For the next hour, they worked the streets surrounding the factory. Questioning people. Everyone knew about the murders it seemed, but the facts were skewed. A ghost who’d torn apart three girls. A factory man who’d finally grown weary of his blue blood masters and murdered two of their own. The theories came thick and fast. Steel Jaw, one vagrant whispered. A terror who’d begun stalking the East End months past.

  “Ridiculous,” Perry murmured, but this was the second time she’d heard that name.

  Hague had been adept with biomechanics, after all. Most of his core work revolved around creating truly functional steel inner organs, unlike the crude chest pumps or iron bellows that sometimes worked as lungs. It would hardly be a stretch of the imagination for him to create a new jaw for himself.

  If he lived…

  Growing far too easy to believe that now. Slowly her gaze lifted, locking on the silent brick chimneys of the draining factory at the end of the street. Like a hulking stone-and-steel behemoth, lying in wait.

  Perry couldn’t tell Garrett her theories, not without letting him know how she knew, and then he would want to dredge it all up. The ghost of Octavia Morrow prowled restlessly within her. You always knew she’d never stay dead. Not entirely.

  If she told anyone, it would be Garrett. But…her fists clenched and unclenched. If she told him, then he would be involved. Or rather, he would involve himself. She knew him only too well. Then there’d be a target practically painted on his chest. Perry was never going to let that happen.

  And she had no proof. If it was Hague, how had he gotten to the two girls? Why the factory? Connections… She needed to find connections. Not just dwell on the past and the fact that Hague had once cut the heart out of a girl in Moncrieff’s cellar. Once. He’d taken other organs from the other girls. It wasn’t his modus operandi.

  He was dead.

  Garrett rubbed at his temples, strain showing in the fine lines around his eyes. “I think we’ve gotten all we can. Time to head back. Get some sleep perhaps.”

  Perry only half heard what he said. She was still staring at the factory. She needed to find this mysterious Steel Jaw. Find out if he and Hague were one and the same.

  The thought made her feel violently ill.

  “Of course,” she murmured, wondering just how she was going to manage this.

  ***

  Garrett awoke with a shout.

  Sucking in air, he stared at his hands, at the fading image of blood coating them. A dream. Hell, just a dream. He let out a shaky breath and sank his head into his hands with a quiver. Not just a dream. They never were; they felt so real. A craving for blood and sex, his cock sinking into Perry’s warm flesh even as blood dripped from the gash in her throat.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, dragging himself out of the bed on shaky limbs. Yesterday, what had happened in the alley had been a mistake. It only haunted his dreams more, made him crave her more intensely. More than anything, he wanted to be able to pursue what had happened between them, but he didn’t dare.

  You selfish bastard. Wanting to seduce her, even now, knowing what was happening to him. He had to stop this…this…whatever it was between them.

  By the time he’d recovered well enough to check his blood levels, the faint morning sunlight was beginning to seep through the steel slats that covered the window. His CV levels held at sixty-eight percent. Every day he waited for the brass spectrometer to spit out his reading, wondering if today would be the day they finally hit seventy.

  Not today. Garrett splashed himself clean, then dressed swiftly and made his way downstairs, even though few others would be up and about. Night was a blue blood’s haunt, though the job often forced him to keep odd hours.

  The moment he entered the dining room, he knew she was there. Those smoky gray eyes met his, dark shadows circling them. Perry looked as well-rested as he did, hunched over a mug of blood-laced tea with her feet tucked up on the chair.

  “Did you get any sleep?” she murmured.

  “An hour or two. Maybe.” Garrett gave her a nod, tearing his gaze away from her and toward the sideboard. He helped himself to a flagon of blood. The instant he put his lips to it, the world shifted, his vision darkening.

  Bloody hell. He drained his glass. Then another. Only then did the sharp, gut-clenching ache recede enough for color to come rushing back into the world.

  “Where do we start?” Perry asked, pushing the newspaper aside.

  Business as usual, then.

  Garrett leaned his hip against the sideboard. He didn’t quite trust himself to sit beside her. “I’m waiting for Gibson’s final autopsy reports. Larkin and Hayes should be back this morning, hopefully with some information about our debutantes—their regular movements, who saw them last, that sort of thing.”

  It was different from the way he usually managed an investigation, this delegation of tasks rather than running the footwork himself. He didn’t know if he liked the waiting or not. He’d spent half the night trying to compile data into something that resembled a theory and still had nothing. “Anything occur to you last night? You look like you’ve barely slept, either. Something keeping you awake?”

  “Bad dreams,” Perry murmured, rubbing at her chest absently.

  Here in the guild she often stripped out of her coat, leaving only the billowing black sleeves of her silk undershirt and the hard leather of her armored corset. Leather straps and gleaming silver buckles crisscrossed the corset, hiding a virtual arsenal. Hiding too the faint hint of curves that he knew existed there.

  Somehow not being able to see her breasts made him want to strip her naked even more than a gaping display of flesh would have. Perry was a mystery; he wanted to uncover her, wanted to discover every little secret she owned, like an archaeologist unearthing a hidden treasure.

  “Anything you wish to discuss?”

  One dark brow arched. Of course Perry didn’t want to discuss it; she never discussed anything personal with him. His jaw tightened. He was beginning to realize just how one-sided this relationship was.

  Then she sighed, her gaze dropping to the bleached timbers of the table as she stared through it. “The girls… Finding them like that. I just kept seeing them. All night.”

  “We all have our moments.” His had been a particularly nasty fire down in Abbott’s Lane. He hadn’t been able to get the stink of the dead prostitutes out of his nose for weeks. “Do you want a sabbatical?”

  “Of course not. I’d rather find the bastard who did this.”

  Garrett nodde
d, his gaze dropping to the paper. “Let me guess…it’s the talk of the town?”

  “Surprisingly not,” Perry replied, giving the paper a nudge toward him. The tension was leaving her shoulders, as if she thought she was safe now. Talking work, rather than anything personal. “The prince consort’s upcoming exhibition has stolen the front page.”

  Garrett crossed to the table and shook the paper out. “You sound almost put out.”

  “Frankly, I’m not. Doyle’s already chased three journalists from the door. You’re going to have to give them an interview shortly, or they’ll begin making up all manner of nonsense. And then we’ll have both the front page and a murderer named something ridiculous like the ‘Phantom of Factory Five.’”

  His lips thinned. That was one part of the job he wouldn’t relish. “Do you honestly believe the rubbish about ghosts?”

  “No. But in my experience, newspapers rarely concern themselves with facts.”

  That stole a smile from him. Most people couldn’t tell when she was jesting. Not an inch of her expression or tone ever changed. Only through years of familiarity had he aligned himself with her dry sense of humor.

  “Exhibition,” he murmured, scanning the front page and a grainy photograph of a pair of handsomely dressed foreigners stepping down from the rail of what looked like a dirigible. Garrett looked closer. England had sunk its resources into the seas, building steam liners and the enormous iron warships they called Dreadnoughts, but many foreign countries preferred air travel to the sea. From the military cut of the men’s dark uniforms and the heavy fur hats they wore, he suspected they were from one of the more northerly European countries. “I’m surprised we weren’t given the contract for security.”

  The prince consort had vowed to stun the nations with a display of fine British technology and all the wonders the Empire could offer at his exhibition. Garrett had loosely followed the news in the papers, but he’d lost track recently. “Opening this weekend,” he murmured. “Exclusive to the Echelon and their invited guests for the first week, then open to the public for a shilling entrance fee after that.”

  “What’s caught your attention?” Perry could follow his mind as easily as if she held a map.

  One could only wish the opposite was true. In that, she was distinctly female.

  “‘The Russian ambassador,’” he read, “‘the Scandinavian Embassy, several Bavarian and Saxon dukes…’ There are a lot of foreigners in the city at the moment.” He frowned, something tickling his mind. “What am I forgetting?”

  “With an event like this, there’ll be all manner of welcoming balls and social niceties planned,” Perry added promptly. “Both Miss Fortescue and Miss Keller could have come into contact with our foreign visitors.”

  “No. That’s not it.” Garrett closed his eyes, racking his brain. Where the devil had he seen something about foreign nobility? His eyes shot open. “The factory logbook. A week ago. A party of noblemen was escorted through. Some bloody names I couldn’t pronounce without mangling them fiercely.”

  “It should be in the evidence locker by now. Scoresby collected it.”

  “Excellent.” He folded up the paper and discarded it on the table as Perry uncurled herself from the chair.

  The storage facility was located in an adjoining building. The yard between was almost empty at this time of day, with only a stable drone spluttering over the cobbles, its circular brooms sweeping away the debris. The automaton moved with swift efficiency, courtesy of Fitz and his mechanical meddling.

  Pushing into the library, Garrett nodded to the warden and strode to the locked clockwork doors that opened into Storage. Dozens of interlocking gears covered the heavy brass door. The only way to open it was to correctly turn two or three gears, so that the whole thing would turn. Turn the wrong one, though, and it would lock tight.

  “One would presume the draining factory party was comprised of Russians or the Bavarians or Saxons.” Perry followed him inside. “The Scandinavian verwulfen clans would have little interest in learning how to collect and store blood.”

  “I’ll send Hayes and Larkin out to check the docking records at the airfields to see who arrived and when.”

  “I thought you liked Sykes for the murders.” She closed the door behind them.

  “I do. But I’m going to keep all the possibilities open.”

  Storage was a set of rooms with cold iron lockers in rows. A good thing they kept new evidence compiled in the lockers nearest the doors. Tugging out his identity card—a square brass card with ridges and indentations in it—he slid it home into the slot on the nearest locker. Metal teeth crunched through the matching holes in his card, and then the locker opened.

  The logbook was heavier than he remembered. Garrett flipped through the pages, with Perry peering over his shoulder, her body nestled close to his. The moment he caught her faint vanilla scent, his body went still.

  Sometimes he could forget her or the cursed heat of the craving within him. And then she would do something to draw his attention back to her, even something as innocuous as standing beside him.

  He breathed her scent in, tasting the vanilla oil on his tongue. Sweet. Where did she wear it? A touch to her wrists and the side of her throat?

  Garrett swallowed hard. He tried to blink away the flashes of dark shadow that threatened to consume him. “Count Mikhail Golorukov, Countess Yekaterina Orlova, Prince Pyotr Demitzkoy, and Duchess Elizabeta Kalovna.”

  “They’re definitely Russian,” she murmured in a small voice that drew his attention.

  Something about her expression warned him that she’d noticed his withdrawal. Hopefully not the reason for it. “How do you know such a thing? I couldn’t tell a Bavarian designation from a Russian one. I can barely pronounce either.”

  A little shrug that could have meant nothing at all. “I read the papers.”

  “Well.” He snapped the logbook shut. “At least we have some names to ask questions about—a connection between the Echelon and the factory. I’ll send Larkin to inquire quietly into Golorukov and Demitzkoy.”

  “I wouldn’t presume that the killer is a man.”

  “Not that I doubt you—or any other woman—could kill someone, but statistically the chances are higher, you must admit.” He started toward the door.

  “In normal circumstances I might agree with you. But we’re dealing with the Russian court. Both men and women are allowed to be infected with the craving there, and each is equally as dangerous as the other. They make the Echelon look like a bunch of lambs. Or so I’ve heard.”

  Garrett held the door open for her. “Fine. Then we shall quietly investigate all of them. And their retainers. And anyone else they happened to bring. Satisfied?”

  “I’m simply trying to be thorough.”

  The memory of her hands skating over his abdomen the day before shot through his mind. Garrett took a deep breath. Thoroughness was her forte. “Well, we certainly can’t accuse you of being slapdash. What next?”

  “It’s Tuesday,” she said.

  “Followed closely by Wednesday, yes.”

  Perry glanced over her shoulder, the weak light from the library’s sconces dappling her face with shadows. “Lynch shall be arriving shortly for our appointment if you’ve no current need for me.”

  The door jerked out of his hand, the gears springing out and rotating into a variety of higgledy-piggledy positions. “How could I forget?” Garrett murmured. Lynch and Perry sparred every Tuesday morning at ten o’clock. “If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ll chase Dr. Gibson down over those autopsy results.”

  Seven

  The feel of the hilt in her hand was a welcome respite. Perry slid the weapon—an elegant rapier, in a style similar to that preferred at court—from its rack and let its weight balance on her fingers. She stared down the long sliver of its blade, wrapped her fingers firmly around the hilt, then stepped back.

  Perfectly balanced.

  The room had been an orangery befo
re the building became home to the guild headquarters. Lynch had ruthlessly stripped out all of the plants and transformed the room into a boxing saloon of sorts. Heavy matting protected some of the floor, and boxing bags swung from the iron rafters. The ceiling and most of the eastern wall were made of glass, through which one could see the denseness of London stretching into the distance.

  It was empty of Nighthawks now, for Lynch despised being a form of entertainment. Every Tuesday morning he booked the room for the pair of them, and others knew better than to enter.

  The only witnesses were Rosalind, who Lynch could never say no to, and Charles Finch, the enormous bruiser who presided over the room as the weapons master. Rosalind crossed the floor in a swish of dark green taffeta skirts and peered out through the glass windows, her leather gloved fingertips pressing lightly against the glass panes. Rain patterned the glass, distorting the view of the city.

  As usual, Lynch’s head turned to track Rosalind. He did that often. As if just the sight of his wife was a pleasure in itself. A small, wriggling worm of jealousy bit at Perry, but she’d long since accepted that no man would ever hold her in such regard. And though she might have dreamed of it, whenever Garrett looked at her lately, it was with a sense of wariness, as if he was trying to puzzle something out about her.

  Yesterday had changed nothing. For one blissful moment, there’d been a hint of something between them, a dangerously seductive glimmer of something more than friendship. He’d given her that smile, the predatory one he reserved for ladies he was pursuing, and then all of a sudden he’d reverted to the friendly distance he’d been holding her at for most of the last month.

  “Shall we begin, Your Grace?” Tension coiled within her, just begging to be unleashed in one way or the other. “Or would you prefer us to leave you alone with Rosa so you may stare at her ever so prettily?”

  Lynch shot her a long, slow look. “If you call me ‘Your Grace’ again, I’ve a mind to take you over my knee.”