“Good lad.”
The boy caught Alex’s eye and winked. “Bye, lady.”
As George, Thomas and the other boys ran off, Alexandra stared after them with a contemplative expression. “They didn’t seem shaken by such a grim sight.”
“It’s a grim sight they see often,” he told her softly. Murder, disease, starvation, accidents—plenty of ways for someone to die in the East End. There was no escaping misfortune.
He longed to read her expression, but Alex turned from him, her face concealed in the dim light of the alley.
Let her feel pity. Or disgust. It’ll make it easier for her to leave when the time comes.
Thorne let out a slow breath before making his way to the corpse. He’d seen his share of brutality and death. Whelan had contributed a fair few bodies to these streets, some chips in the brick caused by a bullet, stains on the sidewalk left by blood. Nick had helped him, during times when protection money was short.
But even this took his breath away. The man was stripped down to the waist. His entire torso was a bloody mass of knife wounds. If Thorne ventured a count, he would have put the number somewhere around seventy. Someone had taken their time, made him suffer, and likely kept plunging the knife after he’d died.
His face, however, remained untouched.
“Joseph Ayles,” O’Sullivan said. “Fuck. We’re going to have to tell his daughter.”
Another family broken apart. Another death to report. O’Sullivan and Thorne had become experts at comforting those who had lost someone to tragedy in their territory.
“She’s got an aunt over in Spitalfields,” Thorne said, reaching out to shut Joseph’s eyes. From neck up, he looked as if he were sleeping. “Lives with her ma. Make sure they have enough for the funeral and whatever else they need to take in the lass.”
“Sure, boss.”
“Someone you know?” Alex’s voice echoed as she approached. He heard her intake of breath as she stared down at the dead man. “Christ god. Ayles.”
Thorne looked at her sharply. “You know him?”
Alex shut her eyes. “Like Mary Watkins, he was another of my contacts for information on Lord Reginald Seymour’s smuggling operation. Joseph was a crew member on one of the ships. A loose end, he’d called himself.” Guilt flashed across her face. “I always took precautions when meeting them, but apparently not well enough. Do you . . . think he’s taken out a contract on my life?”
“And the lives of your informants,” Thorne said, his voice gentle. “Two of them turning up murdered is no coincidence.”
O’Sullivan’s eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. “Seymour, you say? As in son of the Duke of Norfolk and MP of Cambridgeshire?”
Alex nodded. “Yes.”
O’Sullivan let out a gusty laugh. “Damn me. When you go after an aristo, you sure know how to pick them.” O’Sullivan glanced at Thorne. “Thinking we should pay him a visit? Make him pull the contract?”
“No.” Nick hated to say it—Seymour shouldn’t be alive and breathing—but charging in would do Alex no good. “I want to find out who in my territory took the fucking contract first.” His eyes sought his wife’s. “How much do you have on Seymour?”
“Enough,” she said, still staring down at the body. “But I need to be careful with the information. Lord Seymour has powerful allies in Parliament, and public opinion would be in his favor, not mine—Mr. O’Sullivan.” She was leaning toward the corpse, her eyes narrowed now. “You keep a kerchief in your right pocket. Pass it, please.”
What was she doing? “Alex—”
“Quiet, Nick. Mr. O’Sullivan, the kerchief, if you please.”
O’Sullivan fished in his pocket and handed her the scrap of fabric. To Thorne’s surprise, Alex carefully used the kerchief to pry open Joseph’s mouth.
O’Sullivan leaned in closer. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not sure, but I think . . .” she trailed off as she held her breath and plunged her fingers inside the dead man’s mouth.
Good god, this woman was made of steel.
“There.” She pulled out a scrap of paper. It was rolled around something, but she focused on the print. “Oh,” she said softly, lowering her eyes.
“What is it?” When she didn’t answer, he breathed, “Alex?”
She slid her finger across the paper and murmured, “I agonized over these words when I wrote them. Having my work used for this . . . like some taunt . . .” The pain on her face squeezed something in Thorne’s heart, for he knew how important her work was to her. “I have two other informants. I need to warn them.”
Thorne reached out and gently took her arm. “Not tonight.” She was trembling, and it reminded him of when she’d come to his office days ago. Some sights brought back terrible memories. “It’s safer during daytime. Here, let me take these.” He gestured for the items she found in Joseph’s mouth.
Alex passed him the scrap of paper, and the other thing that had come from Benjamin’s mouth—a cheroot, he realized. Why would the killer leave this? He lifted it to his nose.
The stench of specialty tobacco made his stomach heave. “God. Christ fucking god.”
O’Sullivan snatched the cheroot out of his hand, sniffed it—and gagged. “Fuck.” He dropped the cheroot and ran his hands through his hair. “Fuck fuck fuck.” His words were hoarse, gasping.
It wasn’t the scent; it was the memories. Memories of being ten years old in the dark with that stench lingering in the cellar as they treated each other’s wounds. As O’Sullivan and Thorne and the other lads huddled together for warmth—thirty-one at first, then twenty-eight, twenty-three, twenty, fifteen, ten. So many of them dead. From cold, from fights in the Nichol, or murdered. Aye, so many murdered, too.
By the man Thorne had replaced as King of the East End.
The man he had betrayed Alex to defeat—her money gave him the power he needed to save those who had lived in the darkness with him. Boys who had, against all odds, survived to grow into men.
And the piece of shit who had starved them, beat them, and forced them to kill and steal for him was still breathing.
He was still fucking breathing.
And he was after Thorne’s wife.
“When we get back to the Brimstone, I want everyone notified.” Thorne’s order to O’Sullivan was clipped as he took Alex’s arm and all but dragged her in the direction of the Brimstone. “Two of my men guard her door at all times, and someone at every entrance. If he took the contract from Seymour, he won’t do his dirty work alone. You know that.”
“Who?” Alex was alarmed, but she let him lead her. “What did the cheroot mean?”
O’Sullivan shook his head wildly as he kept up with Thorne. “It’s not possible.”
“They never found his body,” Thorne reminded him.
“You slid a knife in the bastard’s belly and he fell over the bridge. If he didn’t drown in the Thames, the sepsis would have killed him off. We made damn sure there was no one to fish him out. Whelan is dead.”
It made Thorne’s skin crawl to think that bastard had pulled himself out of the Thames four years ago and survived. That he had recovered and planned for the day that he could return and get his revenge on Thorne. On everyone who betrayed him. O’Sullivan, too.
Alex tensed in his grip as Thorne led her down another alleyway. “Who is Whelan?”
“Patrick Whelan used to control the East End,” he told Alex as he placed a hand on her back to urge her forward. O’Sullivan’s pace was brisk beside them. “He took kids off the street to steal for him, or kill if necessary. Liked to remind you of how much blunt you owed him for food and shelter, so debt and fear kept you loyal. No one ever tried to leave him without getting a knife in their back for the effort.”
“You think Seymour hired this Whelan?”
“Aye. I’ve a lot of enemies who would ally themselves with Whelan.” He kept his voice low. Now that he knew Whelan lived, these streets suddenly seemed filled with
eyes watching from the darkness. “The man you killed was just one of many.”
“Would make sense,” O’Sullivan said. He sounded breathless. “Whelan did business with toffs. If Seymour suspected your wife was gathering information on him, hiring someone who fucking hated you both would be ideal motivation to get the job done.”
“Me?” Alex looked surprised as she came to an abrupt stop. “Why should he hate me?”
O’Sullivan raised an eyebrow at Thorne. “You gonna tell her?”
Thorne made an impatient noise. He knew his old enemy wouldn’t attack now, but he wanted his wife safely inside the Brimstone and guarded by men he trusted. “I took the East End from him,” Thorne told her, nudging her forward once more. “And he hates you because you gave me the means to steal it.”
Chapter 14
Stratfield Saye, Hampshire. Four years ago.
Alexandra smoothed her hands down the front of her dress and eyed herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed. She was always nervous before seeing Nick, despite meeting him daily for weeks now. It was a strange feeling, this fluttering in her belly that she experienced before their swimming lessons.
There were so many words in her vast vocabulary that she had never felt before him: want; longing; yearning.
Desire.
No, more than that. She could be honest now; there was no one about to witness her folly. Alexandra was falling in love with Lord Locke.
Stupidity was another word, one reserved for a woman who fell in love with someone who did little more than engage in harmless flirtation. His smile was devilish; it made her blush. But he had made no move to kiss her. His touch, if it lingered, could have been entirely in her imagination.
Foolish. Yes, that word, as well. In the privacy of her bedchamber, she spent too many hours recalling the way Nick’s swimming costume clung to his body. The lines of his muscles were visible through the fabric, lean and sleek like a large cat’s. She often imagined herself removing his clothes to lick the water off his skin. She loved to wonder at the sounds he’d make. How he’d touched her all over, his hand trailing down her hips to find the mound betwixt her thighs.
Quim, she had heard the maids call it once, when they didn’t notice her listening. Another word stored away in her mind, so little used.
Alexandra’s own hand would stray to the waistband of his swimming costume to seek the skin beneath. Cock. Here was another term she dusted off for the first time. It was illicit, forbidden in the language of gentlewomen, but the honesty of it appealed. It was for bedrooms. Cock. What would Nick’s look like? How would he respond if—
A soft scratch at her bedchamber door startled her. Alexandra pressed a cool hand to her cheek. “Yes?”
One of the maids entered with a swift curtsy. If she noticed Alexandra’s flush, she didn’t breathe a word of it. “Apologies for the intrusion, milady, but Lord Kent is askin’ for ye in ‘is study.”
Alexandra frowned. George Grey might have been her father, but he was no more familiar with her than a stranger—a stranger who found her very presence distasteful. He made no effort to conceal the fact that he found Alexandra’s commentary on political matters vulgar, her manner unladylike, and her behavior in polite society to be coarse.
Yes, Alexandra was hardly known for being demure, a fact her brothers teased her over often enough. But George Grey loathed his daughter over one very simple, undeniable fact: Alexandra resembled her mother.
It was strange, to be a wholly superfluous and unwanted offspring in a union of such animus. Kent’s heir and spare were achieved in quick succession—marital obligation achieved—and yet earl and countess had conceived one more child to torment each other with. Her. Alexandra did not pretend to understand that disastrous union. After all, she had not known her mother beyond the five minutes after her birth.
Now Alexandra existed only as a reminder of the woman her father abhorred. Death had done little to ease that.
Alexandra dismissed the maid and traversed the halls to her father’s study. She found him bent over his desk, scratching neat numbers into columns, and felt a stirring of irritation. The Earl of Kent was a master at budgets and making money. He took better care of his various properties than he did his own children, and estate matters accounted for much of his absence. Alexandra couldn’t have seen him more than three or four times in the last eight months.
“Good morning,” she said, trying to hide her impatience. “Was there something you needed?”
Alexandra’s attention slid to the longcase clock. Nick would be at the lake now. She was going to be late.
George set down his pen. “Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
“No.” Her answer came in a quick rush. “Only my afternoon walk. My maid said you asked to see me,” she reminded him. A wordless way of saying, hurry the bloody hell up.
His eyes snapped to hers. Cold eyes, she thought. The color of a sea in winter. Her brothers had inherited them, but James and Richard’s were warm and full of laughter.
“It’s been brought to my attention that you’ve been seen in the company of our new neighbor, Lord Locke.” George leaned back in his chair. “More than once.”
Had he been spying on her? Alexandra tried to keep her expression even. Who could have seen her? A servant? The gamekeeper? If they had—oh god, someone would have seen them swimming together.
Without an escort. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t done. A woman’s reputation was gossamer thin, as fragile as burned paper. One hint of impropriety—the slightest bit of force—and it collapsed to ash. Ruination.
No, Alexandra thought. Nothing had happened. She would reveal nothing. “What of it?” her voice didn’t tremble, of that she was glad.
The earl’s expression hardened. “You’re not to see him again, Alexandra.”
Her mouth hung open. She had expected strong words, something about having a care for her reputation. If he had a mind to do so, he could visit Nick and issue some idiotic demand that they marry to keep the village tongues from wagging.
But this? He was forbidding her? “I beg your pardon?”
“Did you lose the ability to understand English? Shall I say it in another language you know?” At the absurd suggestion, he continued his cruel words in the French tongue. “You are to end your acquaintance with Lord Locke. No daughter of mine is going to be compromised by a penniless Baron, let alone one previously employed as a common schoolmaster.”
Alexandra’s lips flattened. She would not play his game. “You’ve barely acknowledged me as a daughter,” she said in English. “Why do you care to whom I show affection?”
“If it reflects on my name—”
“You were the one who insisted I rusticate here after deciding I was a danger to my own marriage prospects in London. Now I finally meet a man whose presence I can tolerate and you’re telling me to reject him because he was a schoolmaster?” She gave a dry laugh. “I don’t even have words for how patently idiotic that sounds.”
Kent rose and planted his hands on the desk. “Listen to me,” he hissed. “If you want to spread your legs and fuck a glorified commoner after you’ve wedded a suitable gentleman, that’s your business. God knows you take after your whore of a mother as it is.”
Alexandra slapped him. The sound seemed to echo in the small room, and the red mark of her palm was stark against his shaved cheek.
George seized her wrist and yanked her forward. Alexandra’s face was so close to his that she could smell the brandy on his breath. “I’ve never struck a woman, but you try my patience. If I hear about you seeing Lord Locke again, I’ll marry you off to someone without the same restraint. Do you comprehend me or shall I repeat it in French?” When she didn’t answer, he squeezed her wrist so hard that she almost cried out. “Do you?”
Alexandra glared at him. “Yes.”
His eyes narrowed, but he released her. “Good. Stevens!” The butler appeared at the door and bowed. “Escort Lady Alexandra to her bedchambe
r. Make sure she stays there.”
Stevens seemed apologetic as he escorted her. Alexandra was aware that her father’s voice carried; the butler had likely heard their entire conversation. But Alexandra was in no mood for pity. She did not want condolences. Such emotions would not save her if her father wished to marry her off to a cruel husband who abused her.
Alexandra paced her bedchamber. Nick would be at the lake now. He’d be wondering where she was.
Would he be disappointed if she didn’t show up today? If she never showed up again? Compromised or not, Alexandra would force nothing on Nick; her tattered reputation was not his concern. He’d made no promises to her. Their lessons were not vows.
But he deserved some goodbye. An explanation for her future absence.
“Damn this,” she muttered. No, she couldn’t let him wonder.
She’d end it today.
Alexandra pulled open her bedchamber window. She had climbed this tree so many times in her youth, the scrapes and bruises angering her brother James. He’d called her reckless. She wished he were here so she could tell him climbing up and down trees was the easy part.
What came next would be hardest.
Thorne paced along the banks of the lake, where he had been waiting for over an hour.
He was impatient to see Alex. Meeting with her had become the best part of his day—hell, the best part of his life. Happiness had been so fleeting before. It existed in mere moments: a warm meal; a soft bed; a bit of extra coin for a pie. Joy was a luxury, after all. It required some sense of safety, however brief.
Bliss was an intoxicant. Difficult to gain, easy to lose.
Thorne was a fool prolonging the inevitable. Every second with her was stolen time he didn’t deserve, laughs he hadn’t earned, yearning looks that he’d lied to receive. He had to hand it to Lord Kent for conceiving of the most inventive form of hell: a confidence artist falling for his mark. Happiness, then, was another form of torture. The devil whispering in your ear that it came with an expiration date.
And so did her affections.
Tempting the Scoundrel (Private Arrangements Book 2) Page 12