The Vixen

by Christi Caldwell

  Needing to reassert her strength before this man, she forced herself to stop.

  “Ya want to know?” She leaned against one of the Corinthian pillars better suited for a museum than a townhouse. “Oi find the most desperate ones. The ones hungry and in need, who’ve given up on loife and ’ope, and I take them under my wing.”

  Had she not been so intently studying him under hooded lids, she’d have missed the way his entire body jerked, like one who’d been run through with a serrated blade. When he spoke, his words came flat and emotionless. “Those are familiar words.”

  “Is that a question? If so, that’d be your second.”

  “It wasn’t.” He dipped his thick gypsy lashes lower. “I better than anyone know that vow.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him why he should believe himself one who’d know that more. Did he think he’d somehow suffered more than Ophelia or any other member of Mac Diggory’s gang?

  Present yar back, girl . . . it’s toime far ya to feel the sting of moi rod.

  Her gaze slid over to the Duchess of Somerset’s portrait, and she lingered on that jagged flesh forever marred by flame.

  “And when you . . . find these desperate children,” he continued, and she stared on with something akin to horror as he pulled out that same damned leather notepad and devoted his attentions to that book, “what do you do with them?”

  That second query hit her like a fist to the belly, and as she dragged her attention from the duchess and put it squarely on the person who’d always excelled in insulting her and her kin, she sneered, “What do ya think Oi do with them? Send ’em out as pickpockets? Have Cook turn them into mince pies? Make the girls whores?” Her gorge rose. She gave thanks for the dimly lit space that bathed them both in shadows, for shadows in all places offered a person protection.

  At last he lifted his head. “That will hardly suffice the terms of the agreement we struck.”

  She’d wager her very life he didn’t question the motives of his angelic duchess. Damn him to hell.

  “I give them work,” she snapped. “A place to sleep and eat and wages, and in return they work the kitchens or serve as runners for our family.” She omitted Gertrude’s role in schooling those children, leaving him to his infernally low opinion, because to hell with him.

  “You indicated overseeing the hiring of children has only recently fallen to you.”

  She watched him guardedly as he flipped through his journal. “Yes.”

  “Yet I trust these are boys and girls not unfamiliar to you. Rather, they were former gang members of Mac Diggory who’ve either been kept on in your employ in a new capacity or absorbed into the hold of another kingpin.”

  It was a detail only one of the streets could glean. A respectable runner or gent with a fancy background wouldn’t know the inner workings of East London the way Connor O’Roarke did, and that surely marked just one reason he’d become so successful in what he did.

  “I want the history of the children in your employ.”

  It was an expansive third question and yet a question all the same. Ophelia balled her hands. She’d be damned if she turned those boys and girls over to his questioning. “And have them lay bare their crimes before you?” she scoffed. “So you might threaten them and receive the information you seek?” She’d been jaded enough in life to know the only thing one could trust was the unreliability of others.

  Ophelia turned to go.

  “That is what you believe, then? That I’m some ruthless investigator who lives with the sole purpose of exacting misery on the masses?” Wasn’t his opinion of her as low?

  “Aren’t you? Doing the bidding of a nob at the expense of anyone and everyone?” she spat. This was safe ground with Connor O’Roarke. A familiar one that steadied her. Reminded her of the great divide that had always existed, one that would always be there. “Look at you,” she said, scraping a gaze over him. He stiffened under her scrutiny. “You claiming to care about others when you only ever thought of yourself.”

  A muscle jumped in his cheek. “You don’t know anything of it.”

  “Don’t I? You were too good to join the boys and girls in the streets.” It had always stabbed at her.

  A sound of disgust burst from him. “It was never about that.”

  “Wasn’t it? Living in the shadows like a ghost, you’d take favors where you could get them.”

  “As we all did,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, you saved my life”—she jabbed a finger at him—“but I never pretended Oi was too good for others, either.”

  They locked in a battle, and Ophelia stood facing him, energy humming in her veins, as she at last laid bare every resentment she’d carried over Connor.

  “My father was an Irishman, skilled with horses.”

  She cocked her head. What was he . . . ?

  “My mother . . . she was a squire’s daughter and fell hopelessly in love with a man her father could have never approved of.”

  Her jaw went slack. “You were born to the peerage.” It was why he spoke like a gentleman . . . because he’d been born one. As such, it hadn’t been outside the realm of reality that he might marry his Lady Bethany. Ophelia curled her toes hard in her slippers.

  He shifted. “A squire isn’t of the nobility. They have a coat of arms and are usually related to someone in the peerage, but . . .” Connor silenced his ramblings. “My parents set off to London to make a life for themselves. They struggled . . . we struggled . . . but we were always happy.” His gaze grew distant, and a wistful smile pulled at his lips and filled his eyes, and she ached to see a glimpse of that happiness he spoke of. Because it was his. Because it was unfamiliar. Because she wanted to know that some children didn’t always know strife. That Connor’s life had once been filled with even a fleeting happiness.

  He fished around the inside of his jacket and handed something over.

  Head bent, she stared down at the rusty piece. A crimson jacket still marked the child’s toy, a soldier. She accepted it, turning it over in her hands. It was an aged version of a similar gift presented to Stephen when Broderick had taken over the Devil’s Den. Those toys had gone unplayed with and been packed away. Handling this token, so precious Connor kept it close to his own heart, opened further that window into his world.

  “It did not matter how dire our circumstances were, they sacrificed for my happiness. There were child’s games and books and lessons and food for me . . . even while my parents went without.” The column of his throat moved. “Even as they insisted they weren’t hungry and watched me eat my meals.”

  She braced for the familiar envy that came for children who’d known those precious gifts she herself had never had.

  Only this time . . . it didn’t come.

  Ophelia looked up as Connor continued his telling. “My da and ma would make every and any sacrifice for me, and one day they did.”

  A chill shuddered along her spine, ushering in a cold. Because even though she didn’t know the telling, she knew where life had ultimately found him—in the streets, on the run. Knew that the happiness had been snuffed out and, coward that she was, wanted him to freeze his story with the most joyous moments he’d known. Despite that, a question came tripping off her tongue anyway. “What did they do?”

  “My da borrowed funds to feed our family through the winter.”

  She slid her eyes closed. Reflexively, her palm wrapped around his metal soldier, the metal cool against her hand, his tiny bayonet digging sharp into her skin. The moment one opened the door to the gangs in St. Giles, there was no forcing them out. They were in, and in they remained until one was gone from the earth. Only the most evil survived. “What happened?” she asked with a knot forming low in her belly.

  “My da had been charged an exorbitant amount. An amount he could have never fully paid back in the time frame he’d been given. Then the day the debt was to be collected . . . the leader of the gang . . .” Oh, God. No. Her mind screeched to a stop
as a dawning horror rooted around her mind. She knew before he finished. Knew what he’d say. “Diggory came calling.”

  No. Her mind screamed. Her heart stopped. And then resumed to beat an erratic, frenzied pattern.

  “He had a . . . sick fascination with my mother. The moment he discovered she was a squire’s daughter, he wished to make her his wife.”

  Ophelia hugged her arms close to her chest in a futile bid to keep warm. “He had an obsession with respectability,” she whispered. Helena and Ryker Black’s mother. Connor’s.

  “My father . . .” Connor stared vacantly through her, and she knew it was the precise moment he’d forgotten her presence. “He loved her enough to battle the Devil for her.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “And he did.”

  “He lost,” Ophelia whispered. For in the end, everyone had always lost to Diggory. Even after he’d gone, his vile hold remained, haunting one’s days and sleepless nights.

  “We all did that day. He slit my father’s throat.” She squeezed her eyes shut, willing him to silence, but the methodical, deadened words continued coming. “He raped my mother and then broke her neck.” Did that tortured keening come from Ophelia? She bit her lower lip and tasted the metallic tinge of blood flooding her mouth. “I saw it all.”

  No. No. No.

  It was a litany. A mantra that could never, would never, take away the evil Connor spoke of. He hadn’t been an orphaned bastard or an unwanted child sold off by a whore mother and nameless father. This had been a child who’d laughed and loved and known the gifts of true parents.

  He lost it all . . . because of my father. Here she’d believed herself incapable of loathing him more, only to be proven so very wrong.

  “Oh, Connor.” She stretched her spare palm out for him. Except . . . what did one say? There were no words to drive back his suffering. And certainly no words from the child of his parents’ murderer. Ophelia let her quavering arm fall to her side.

  He palmed her cheek, and she leaned into it, selfishly taking comfort from the last man who should be offering that gift. “You always presumed to know who I was and what drove me.” A sad smile formed on his lips. “But just as I don’t truly know anything about you, Ophelia, you don’t know anything about me.” No, they’d not truly known anything of each other. “On that day, Ophelia, I vowed to rid the streets of men like Diggory. Instead, I was forced to join him . . . and when I broke free, I could not understand how other boys and girls made orphans by that Devil, children like . . .”

  “Me,” she finished for him on a whisper.

  He gave a small nod. “Why should he have any person’s loyalty? When for me the thought of bringing the Diggorys of the world to justice sustained me. It is why, despite the wealth given and promised me by my adoptive father, I still do the work that I do.”

  The moment she’d found him in Broderick’s offices, she’d mocked him and taunted him for the role he’d taken on. Shame gnawed at her. Palm shaking, she handed over the last link he had to his family. “No wonder you hate me.”

  Connor curled her fingers around that piece. “I could never hate you.”

  Tears flooded her eyes, blurring his visage before her. “How can you not?”

  “Oh, Ophelia,” he said with a tenderness that threatened to shatter her. “You are not like him.”

  “But I am,” she cried, spinning out of his reach. She didn’t want his undeserved defense. “I’ve killed and robbed and—”

  “And you freed me.”

  “That debt was paid.”

  “You never sought to collect,” he insisted. She hadn’t. It had been a fundamental rule of Diggory’s she had always broken for Connor O’Roarke. “You followed Ned and me in the streets. Why did you do that?”

  Ophelia looked away.

  Large, comforting hands settled on her shoulders, forcing her gaze back. “Why did you do that?” he repeated with a quiet insistence.

  “You’re making more of it than it was, Connor,” she whispered, overcome by the depth of his magnanimity.

  When he spoke, he did so in hushed tones, gentle ones far more difficult to take than had they been filled with a rightful contempt. “You’re still so stuck in the acts you were forced to carry out, you still blame yourself for the work you did for”—she wrenched away—“Diggory.”

  Ophelia clamped her hands over her ears, wanting to blot out that hated name. It was futile. Not a single one of them could fully purge his memory from their thoughts. Tears slid down her cheeks, and he caught them with his callused thumb. “But you do. You question my motives, believing I’ve some sinister man bent to hurt a child and help a nobleman because that is all you’ve ever known. Because of it, you cannot even acknowledge that in trying to reunite a father and son, there is good in what I do. Just as there is good in many peers.”

  Her throat tightened.

  He couldn’t be right.

  Because if he was . . . what did that mean about everything else she’d taken as fact over the course of her life?

  Chapter 12

  The following afternoon, Ophelia sat in the Eve Dabney Foundling House as the founder, Mrs. Eve Dabney, spoke to the assembled gathering. This event was proving far preferable to other ton events she’d been forced to suffer through. Despite the lords and ladies also present, Ophelia found herself in contact with men, women, and children to whom she could relate and understand.

  As Eve Dabney spoke in her flawless, cultured tones, her words shifted in and out of focus, blending with Connor’s revelations.

  “No child should know hunger.” My da made him an orphan. “No child should be alone.” My da hurt his mother in ways no woman should ever know pain, and Connor witnessed it. “No one should know strife . . . and yet so many do. Too many.”

  While Mrs. Dabney went on, Ophelia struggled to swallow around the emotion stuck in her throat.

  They were cut down before my eyes by a ruthless, heartless scum of the streets, a man named Mac Diggory.

  Diggory had killed his parents.

  She briefly closed her eyes. Was it a wonder Connor should hate everyone and everything connected with that miserable blighter?

  Since they’d been reunited, he’d been anything but hateful. He’d spoken candidly, letting her into his past. He’d defended her before a room full of highborn guests. He treated street urchins with concern when any other constable or investigator would have cared about nothing other than the information to be obtained, and to hell with how they got those details from a guttersnipe.

  He doesn’t realize you’re not just any child bought or sold into the Diggory gang. She was one of Diggory’s bastards. Sprung from his blood and loins, as a living testament to evil.

  Would he have stepped in to save you all those years ago if he’d known who you really were?

  Bitterness stuck in her throat.

  She’d spent her entire life hating the nobility. Hating the law. Both of which represented her enemies—those who gave no thought to the oppressed and lived for only their own pleasures and pursuits. Yet she’d not truly taken ownership of the crimes carried out by her and her family. Instead, she’d separated herself from the truth.

  Until Connor.

  “The children of the streets,” the young lady was saying, “are far more than the circumstances they were born to.” The woman’s voice rose in an impassioned plea. “We have an obligation to provide when the world has failed them.”

  A murmuring of assent went up about the crowded room; Mrs. Dabney’s reminder was a near echo of Connor’s from the evening prior.

  “We are more than our stations and experiences,” Ophelia mouthed. Mayhap the other woman was . . . correct. Mayhap the world—Connor—could see more in Ophelia than Mac Diggory.

  “Wot did ya say?”

  She started.

  Her brother Stephen scrunched his nose. “Ya’re talking to yarself now?” he demanded on an outraged whisper.

  Stealing a glance about, she leaned close. “I am not talk
ing to myself.” She’d merely been repeating silently what Connor had reminded her of in the Duchess of Somerset’s portrait room.

  “Ya were.” She set her teeth. God, he’d a stubborn streak to test a bloody saint. Stephen yanked at the side of her skirts. “And ya’re dressed all funny,” he said more loudly.

  “Shh.”

  Several pairs of eyes swiveled to where Ophelia sat alongside Stephen.

  At the front of the room, Mrs. Dabney paused. In contrast to the stern looks shot their way, Calum Dabney’s wife caught Stephen’s eyes and smiled before resuming her talk for the impressive crowd.

  Settling in her high-backed Empire chair, Ophelia trained her focus again on the young woman speaking. She was known throughout London as amongst the greatest philanthropists, and the unveiling of their latest foundling hospital under any other circumstances would be a welcome shift from the tedium of ton functions.

  If she hadn’t been needled for the past thirty minutes or so by her youngest sibling.

  “Ya smell funny, too,” Stephen accused in blatant disregard of the guests assembled and the woman speaking.

  “I do not smell,” Ophelia said from the side of her mouth, keeping her gaze trained on Mrs. Dabney.

  “Ya do stink. Loike the whores at the—”

  This time Gertrude leaned over to glare. “Hush,” she whispered, delivering a well-placed pinch.

  “Ouch,” their youngest sibling groused, shifting back and forth in his chair. “But she does.”

  “I most certainly do not smell any different than I usually do,” Ophelia shot back, earning a sharp pinch of her own. “Bloody ’ell,” she mumbled, rubbing her wounded side.

  “Will you two be silent?” Gertrude hissed.

  An older gentleman with greying hair at his temples turned to glower once more.

  “Mind your affairs,” Gertrude warned, favoring him with a fierce look that sent his head whipping forward. “And you two . . . enough. It is bad enough that the Blacks believe us uncouth scum who have no place here.” As one, their stares traveled to the front of the room where Ryker Black, his wife, and the remainder of their brood frowned.