But in this—God rot his soul—Broderick was correct.
Their establishment could crumble as easily as Black’s club had. The difference between them? That man had a title behind his name and a fortune beyond his gaming hell. What do we have?
She stopped and eyed the mound of clothes she’d heaped upon the bed. This would be nothing more than a business transaction struck between Cleopatra and the peerage. It was no different from the contracts they signed with their liquor distributors or wheat suppliers. For the gentleman who sold his title for their fortune would be a partner in a business endeavor and not much more.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Come in,” she called.
Regina Spark, affectionately dubbed Reggie by their family, rushed inside. “What happened?” The ethereal woman who swept in had been more like a mama trying in vain to tame her unruly daughters. Concern gleamed bright in Reggie’s aquamarine eyes. “Cleopatra?” Reggie demanded impatiently, moving over in a whir of noisy, drab skirts. That sudden movement knocked her chignon loose, and several loose curls fell down her back. “What did he de―” Her gaze alighted on the stack of garments, and her words trailed off. “It’s you,” she breathed.
“It has to be me,” Cleopatra said tightly, and resumed gathering her belongings.
“It does not.”
Cleopatra glanced over, and Reggie flattened her lips into a hard line.
“Why need it be any of you?”
Older than Cleopatra, Reggie had been rescued years earlier by Broderick, and she had devoted her loyalties, services, and friendship to him and his siblings ever since.
“You know my brother,” she explained matter-of-factly.
“Yes, I do,” the woman muttered. The details surrounding that night Broderick rescued Reggie from the streets were ones Cleopatra had never gleaned from either of them, and she’d lived long enough in St. Giles to know not to pry or probe. “I will speak to him.”
“I’m not afraid of a man, Reggie.” Civilized society might be bound by laws and rules, but Cleopatra and her kin had gotten on without those societal dictates. “I’d kill a man before I let him hurt me.” She’d done it before . . . for herself and her sisters.
Reggie’s expression darkened. “Sometimes it is beyond your powers, and spending a life forever bound to one is vastly different than what you speak of.”
What I speak of. Cleopatra knew not what the other woman’s life had been like before she’d joined their gang, but her tendency to skirt descriptive words and truths told of a different rearing than Cleopatra’s.
“I am going to speak to him.” Reggie spun on her heel and stomped over to the door.
“You’ll not speak for me, Reggie,” she said in solemn tones, willing the other woman to understand that this was Cleopatra’s decision and she’d own it.
“I’ll not let him send you there—”
“I volunteered myself.” No one made Cleopatra Killoran do anything. Not even the siblings she loved and would sacrifice her very life for.
Reggie opened and closed her mouth several times, and then a sigh slipped out. “Of course you did.” She strode over. “Here,” she said with her usual mothering, taking the blue satin striped gown from Cleopatra’s fingers. She proceeded to organize the piles into day dresses, undergarments, and ball gowns . . . ball gowns that had been useless scraps before, but now served a purpose. “I have it,” she muttered, slapping at Cleopatra’s fingers. It spoke volumes to the bond between them.
Cleopatra hitched herself to the edge of the bed and allowed Reggie to oversee the task at hand. They all had their distractors. Cleopatra’s was the tread of her own steps. Reggie had always been an organizer.
“What happened?” Reggie asked, fetching Cleopatra’s trunks. She dragged one back to the bed.
Cleopatra lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug. “They tried to renege.”
Stooped over that massive trunk, Reggie awkwardly lifted her head.
“Black’s wife was determined to honor their word,” she explained, answering that unasked question. She proceeded to share the details of that meeting.
The door exploded open.
Both women looked as one to the glowering boy. He’d already found out. Another Diggory bastard without a definite birthday, Stephen was likely just nine or ten years old, but he possessed a temper to rival most men.
Reggie released the gown in her hand and wordlessly backed out of the room.
Stephen slammed the door. “I hate you.”
Regret suffused her breast. “You don’t hate me.” One of Diggory’s many bastards, Stephen had been a snarling, snappish, beastlike boy until Broderick had taken him under their care. “If you did, you wouldn’t be here,” Cleopatra said with more gentleness than she’d ever let another person hear from her. She shoved her armoire doors closed.
“Well, then I hate you . . . for now,” Stephen snarled. That she believed. Her youngest sibling had a temper to rival a once-beaten dog. “I knew you’d be the one. I knew you’d not let anyone else do it. You’re always protecting everyone else.” With an angry shout, he pulled his dagger from his boot and hurled it at the opposite wall.
Despite herself, she gasped. A knife in the wall had long been Diggory’s unspoken seal. “Stop it,” she said tightly. Stephen was spoiling for a fight, and when he was in one of his tempers, one had a better hope of reasoning with Satan himself than the boy.
Cleopatra strode across the room and, bracing one palm against the plaster, wrestled free the buried tip. “You need to control your temper.” It would see him ruined, and if they hadn’t been provided security at the Devil’s Den through Broderick’s efforts, he’d have been destroyed long ago for it.
“I’m declaring war.”
“On who?” she snapped. “Broderick?”
“On them . . .”
“Do not say it.” Cleopatra glowered him into silence. The last thing their family could afford was a heightened feud with Black’s family, particularly now that their rivals had links to the nobility.
In a bid to defuse his volatile rage, Cleopatra tossed his blade aside and returned to her bed. “It is done, Stephen.” She knelt and withdrew a small valise from under her bed and set it atop her undergarments. Dropping to her knees once more, she peeled back the Aubusson carpet and partially rolled it back. She found the loose floorboard, and lifting it, she reached inside and drew out several daggers. “Put those in my valise.”
Stephen stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I ain’t your lady’s maid.”
Cleopatra grabbed her two pistols and shoved them across the smooth floor so they landed at his feet. “Certainly not. After all, which lady’s maid would be helping a lady pack an arsenal of weapons?” She followed that with a wink.
Despite the earlier fury that had blazed in his eyes, Stephen’s lips twitched. This was how she preferred her youngest brother—with a teasing light in his eyes and a smile dimpling his cheeks. “That’s better,” she said.
He quickly tamped down his grin. Mirth had so long been a sign of weakness for all of them that it was too foreign to trust oneself over to any emotion. That was something Cleopatra well understood.
“You’re mad,” he grumbled, then proceeded to help her pack her weapons.
“It is just marriage.” They’d all sold their souls more times than even the Devil wanted anymore. Broderick had simply found another part to sell. So why, practical and rational as she was, did that knot her insides? She lowered the floorboard back into its proper place and reached for the corner of the carpet.
“You don’t have to go,” Stephen said gruffly, looking up from his task.
She froze midmovement. I don’t want to . . . I have to . . . Not because she gave a rat’s arse about a connection to the nobility but because if she didn’t succeed in the goal Broderick had for them, then he’d turn to another one of their siblings to oversee his goals. “It has to be me.”
“Let Gertie go.”
Cleopatra frowned. “No.” It wouldn’t be Gertrude.
“Because she’s weak,” her brother muttered.
Blinded in one eye because of a fist Diggory had delivered to her head, and silent as the grave, Gertrude had greater strength than most men. Cleopatra would be damned on Sunday if she let her elder sister sacrifice all for their brood. “Marriage to a lord would shatter Gertie,” she said quietly to her brother. Cleopatra, however, could battle any man, woman, or child and emerge triumphant.
“Because she’s no spine,” he spat again.
And even with the deep bond between Cleopatra and Stephen, and for all his grumbling, he loved Gertrude and Ophelia just as much. Cleopatra quit her spot on the floor and joined her brother at the bed. She took his hands in hers and gave them a squeeze.
“Look at me,” she commanded when he directed his focus at the floor.
He slowly lifted his head.
“There are different kinds of strength.”
There was a wavering in his blue eyes, and then the steel was back in place. “You marry one of them, you’re never coming back.”
And despite what she’d resolved to do, and matter-of-factly signed on for, Cleopatra reeled as the weight of her brother’s words slammed into her. If she did this—nay, when she did this—her sisters would be spared from sacrificing themselves, and yet she’d be bound forever in that fancy end of London . . .
“Send Ophelia, then,” Stephen entreated. “Anyone but you.”
“I cannot do that.” Her throat worked, and she damned her weakness. “I won’t do that,” she corrected. She would not sacrifice any of her siblings.
Stephen wrenched away and, turning on his heel, fled her rooms. Cleopatra stared at the door long after he’d gone, the ormolu clock ticking down her remaining moments here.
I’m never coming back . . .
Chapter 4
The following morning, Adair and his brothers gathered in Ryker’s Mayfair office. This meeting was not unlike so many others before it: the Devil’s Den and Killoran’s people remained at the heart of their conversations.
Hands clasped behind him, Adair stood at the floor-length window of Ryker’s office while his brothers discussed the state of the scorched Hell and Sin and the impending arrival of a Killoran into their fold. Adair stared out at the Mayfair streets.
For all the sameness of listening to Ryker, Calum, and Niall discuss Broderick Killoran, a suffocating vise squeezed about Adair’s chest in being in this place. The fancy servants and the lords and ladies passing by the Mayfair townhouse served as a reminder of all he’d spent his life hating, and now because Killoran had burned his home down, he’d be forced to dwell among the elite. Bloody Killoran. Sharp loathing coursed through him, and he fed that fury and abhorrence, for it kept him from giving in to the madness of calling this place home—even if it was a temporary one.
So, this is what Helena felt when we sent her away to live with the Duke of Wilkinson. At the time, it had seemed the right decision to keep her safe from Diggory . . . and it had proven the right one, as she’d ultimately found happiness here. But Helena had been born to this existence. Adair would rather gut himself with Broderick Killoran’s dullest blade than ever remain here.
“. . . Adair?”
Calum’s visage reflected back in the crystal panes.
Adair’s mind raced as he sought to put order to what had just been discussed. “I wanted you all to look at this,” his brother elucidated.
Neck heating at having been caught off guard, he turned. Ryker sat behind his desk like the king of this new empire, with Adair, Niall, and Calum awaiting guidance, as always. His brothers studied the sheets of vellum in their hands. Ryker stared expectantly, with one of those sheets extended toward him. Abandoning his place at the window, he strode over and collected that sheet. “What is . . . ?” His words trailed off as he scanned the perfunctory list.
HELL AND SIN
HOTELS
STEAM-POWERED BOATS, SHIPS, AND RAILS
PHILANTHROPY
“What in blazes is this?” Adair breathed, looking up from the page marked sloppily in his brother’s hand.
Ryker folded his hands before him and rested them on the desk. “The future.”
The future?
“Given the fire and our plans of rebuilding, Penelope and I discussed at length the future.” The future. Not the future of the club. “Mayhap some good can come from the blaze,” Ryker continued. “We’ve never thought of a life beyond or outside the Hell and Sin.”
Adair recoiled as his brother’s meaning hit him. “You want us to forget the club.” Was his brother addled? “After everything we’ve dedicated and invested in it, you’d throw it away for”—he looked down at the page—“hotels?” He cringed. And furthermore, what did a single one of them know of anything other than gaming? Those skills they’d learned on the streets. They were the only ones they had.
“It wouldn’t be throwing it away,” Calum said somberly, bringing Adair’s head up again. “Mayhap from the ash of the Hell and Sin, something new can be born.”
Adair studied his sheet as his brother’s words rooted around his mind, and then a dawning understanding slipped in. Ships and rails. Philanthropy. Hotels. Staggered, he glanced around at his siblings of the streets. “You’ve already spoken.” Of course. Niall had taken to traveling with his wife, Diana; Calum and Eve had taken up work on behalf of the Salvation Foundling Hospital. A discourse that had occurred between husband and wife, not the men who’d built one of the greatest clubs in the whole of England. Adair slammed the damning scrap of their betrayal down on Ryker’s desk.
They didn’t even have the good grace to deny it or look away.
“We cannot raise our families in the streets of St. Giles,” Ryker said in his gravelly tones. No. Calum’s wife, now expecting their first child, had moved them out of the club . . . just as Ryker had months earlier. It was a practical move that Adair, even though he had no wife or child of his own, understood and respected. “We spent our lives seeking to escape, and we did.”
Adair flexed his jaw. “You’re a bloody fool if ya think we’re ever truly free of those streets.” He gave his head a disgusted shake. “You’re no different from Broderick Killoran and his lust for a connection to the nobility.”
Niall took a step closer, and Adair braced for the fight the hot-tempered sibling had always been eager to give. He stiffened as the other man laid a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t believe that.” Niall’s mastery of his Cockney, when Adair was wholly unable to control a single bloody thing in this instance, grated on his last nerve. “This is for the good of all of us.”
A battle waged inside, born of panic and uncertainty. “And so, we each take on different endeavors and begin from the ground up?” His mouth went dry at the horrifying prospect: the blood, sweat, fears, and silent tears he’d cried through the hell his existence had once been.
Calum rolled his shoulders. “We’ve done it before, Adair. We did it before when we had nothing but stolen coin to our name.” He caught his stare and gave a little nod. “We can certainly do it now with the fortune and connections we’ve built.”
To hide the tremble in his hands, Adair again picked up that hated page. He briefly closed his eyes as he was transported back long ago to the boy he’d been, returning from delivering goods for his father to find his family’s business destroyed and his parents and sister lost to the flames. Just like that, the past came flooding in. The acrid sting of smoke burned his nostrils. Nooooo . . . Papa . . . Mama . . . His own desperate cries churned around his mind. He fought the need to clamp his hands over his ears in a bid to dull the distant sounds of his own misery.
“I will see to the Hell and Sin Club, then,” he said at last, when he trusted himself to speak through the damned, unwanted emotion there.
“Is that what you want?” Ryker asked cautiously.
Adair chuckled. “Does it truly matter what I want?”
“It is a new beginning.” Calum motioned between them. “For all of us. If we wish the club to remain as it is or build it again, the options are both there.”
“Leave it as it is?” Adair was unable to keep the incredulity from his question. The clink of coins being thrown on the table and the laughter of their patrons on crowded nights pealed around his mind, familiar and fresh as the first night they’d opened their doors to the lords of London. “You would do that?” he challenged.
“Calum is only laying forth all the options,” Niall supplied for the silent trio before Adair.
“This,” Adair hissed, “is not an option. That club is everything of who we are.” Without it . . . who were they? Nay . . . who was Adair? He was the scared, cowering orphan in the streets wading through the uncertainty of an even more uncertain existence. “What of all the men and women dependent upon us?” Children, too. “All people like us, born to St. Giles and the Dials who’d finally found security. We’d just yank that away?”
“There’s more good we can do, the more ventures we have,” Calum said quietly. “Expanding our business—and taking on philanthropic pursuits, as we should have done long ago—only allows us the power to help others.”
Damn Calum for always being the calm, logical one of their group. And damn him for being correct.
Adair dusted a hand over his face, searching his mind for reasons to counter a plan he’d not truly had a say in.
“It is settled, then?” There was a question there as Ryker settled back in his chair. “The restoration of the hell falls to you.”
The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers Book 1) Page 4