by Zoë Archer
“Jack!” Eva called in warning.
He acted so quickly, so fluidly, she barely discerned the movement. Hardly a moment after Thinning Hair slashed at him, Jack struck the bully’s leading shoulder with the cudgel. In nearly the same motion, he kicked Smashed Face in the chest. The power of Jack’s kick sent the bully careening backward. His head slammed into a heavy wooden side table. Groaning, Smashed Face fell to the ground. His eyes rolled back as he lost consciousness.
Jack didn’t spare the insensate man another thought. He turned back to Thinning Hair, grinning viciously. Seeing his colleague sprawled oblivious on the floor stoked the bully’s fury. He slashed upward with his knife. Jack dodged the strike, then brought his cudgel down on Thinning Hair’s wrist. A sickening crunch filled the parlor, and the bully screamed. The knife dropped from his hand.
Jack smashed his fist into the bully’s jaw. For a moment, Thinning Hair fluttered his eyes like a parody of a coquette. Then he crumpled to the floor, out cold.
Spinning around, Jack readied himself for another assault. But none came.
“That’s the lot of them,” Eva said.
“There’ll be more.” He glanced at the madam, lying across the carpet, then at Eva. His grin returned, a flash of white teeth that, combined with his fighter’s stance, made her pulse kick.
She had to keep her head on straight. She was still angry with him, and they had to find the evidence. “Now where?”
“Rockley’s private room is at the top. Whatever we’re looking for, it’ll be up there.”
She started toward the door to the parlor, but as she passed, he gripped her elbow, stopping her.
Nodding toward the side door, he said, “That leads to the servants’ stairs. Faster.”
She nodded and waved for him to lead the way. Only minutes earlier, the parlor had been filled with feminine chatter and the melodic strains of a Schubert waltz. Now it was silent and empty, save for the three unconscious people splayed upon the floor. Eva smiled to herself. Nemesis had been here.
No—Nemesis couldn’t take credit for the force of nature that was Jack Dalton.
She followed him through a narrow servants’ hallway. A few frightened maids peered out from doorways before slamming them in terror. They’d been too well trained to go to the police for assistance. Then she and Jack arrived at the steep, cramped stairwell reserved for servants. He bounded up them, continuing to hold the cudgel. Her own revolver was still in her handbag, but only as an eleventh-hour resource. Firearms in enclosed spaces were extremely dangerous—they had a habit of hitting the wrong people, or being wrenched out of one’s hand. Her gun would stay in its secure place unless absolutely necessary.
As soon as they reached the second-floor landing, the door there burst open. Another bully charged into the stairwell, armed with a heavy pipe.
At once, Jack and the guard swung at each other. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, and Eva winced as the pipe connected with Jack’s shoulder. He only grunted. He moved to strike at the bully with his cudgel, but the stairwell was too narrow to get a decent swing. He dropped the club and gripped the bully by his lapels, then hit his head against the wall. The guard’s head was thick, however, and the strike didn’t knock him out. He dropped his own weapon and also grabbed Jack by the lapels. Pushing away from the wall, the bully slammed Jack against the stair’s railing, the banister driving right into the small of his back. He pounded Jack against the rail once more, forcing a pained groan from Jack. He struggled to keep from being thrown over the banister onto the steep stairs below.
Eva dropped to the ground, fumbling between the men’s heavy boots as they fought. There! Her fingers closed around the pipe.
She rose up behind the bully, then brought the pipe down onto the base of his skull. The guard made a gurgling sound before sinking to the floor. Jack caught himself before he toppled backward, his hands gripping the railing. Once he’d righted himself, he bent over the slumped bully, his ear to the man’s mouth.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
Jack straightened. “He’ll want to make friends with a bottle or ten of whiskey when he wakes up.” Eyeing the pipe in her hand, he said, “Should consider myself lucky you didn’t do anything like that to me.”
She hefted her acquired weapon. “It’s early yet.”
A corner of his mouth curved up. “Will I get any warning?”
In response, she waved toward the stairs. “Keep climbing, and find out.”
He nodded and started up the next flight, with her following. Either he was foolish, or he truly did trust her. And Jack was no fool.
But they still had farther to go, with a fight every step of the way.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The commotion roused the rest of the house. As Eva and Jack continued to ascend the servants’ stairs, she could hear women’s panicked voices and irritated and alarmed men hurrying out. No one wanted to stay in a brothel under siege.
At the very top of the stairs stood a baize-lined door. Cautiously, Jack eased it open, holding his body in readiness if another bully tried to attack. All they found was an empty carpeted hallway. As they stepped into the corridor, it was eerily silent. Two doors faced each other across the passage. Presumably, one of the doors led to Rockley’s private chamber, and in that chamber was the evidence.
But where was the guard? Surely there had to be one. Even with Jack supposedly dead, a man as paranoid as Rockley wouldn’t leave dangerous documents unprotected.
Jack nodded toward one of the doors. He placed his finger against his lips. She nodded in understanding.
They edged beside the doorway, backs to the wall. Jack stuck his foot out and pressed down on the floorboards directly in front of the door. The floorboards obligingly creaked beneath his weight.
From within Rockley’s private room, four gunshots rang out, bullets flying through the door. Splinters flew. Eva flattened herself tight to the wall to keep from being hit by both the shattered wood and the bullets.
Then more silence. The guard inside waited.
Jack tensed, readying himself to storm into the chamber. She stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed. “You killed ’im! You killed the madman!”
The door slowly creaked open. Leading with the gun in his hand, the guard poked his head out. Jack struck instantly, grabbing the bully’s hand and slamming it into the door frame. The guard’s hand opened with a pained spasm, and the gun dropped from his grip. Eva lunged for the gun just as Jack shoved the guard back into the chamber.
She caught the pistol before it hit the ground.
A tremendous crash sounded from inside Rockley’s chamber. Inside, she found Jack and the guard furiously trading punches. This guard was just as big as Jack, just as brutal a fighter. The two men threw vicious blows, pummeling each other as if they were in a Bethnal Green brawl rather than an elegantly furnished bedroom in St. John’s Wood. She immediately discarded the idea of taking a shot—with the two men locked in combat, she ran the risk of hitting Jack rather than the bully. But she kept the gun, just in case Jack got himself into a tight situation.
She had to make use of the time he was buying her. Dodging the men as they threw each other into walls and furniture, she checked under the four-poster bed and behind the framed paintings. No sign of a strongbox or vault.
She tugged open a dresser’s drawers and dumped their contents on the ground. Bile rose in her throat as floggers and restraints tumbled over the carpet. She had a feeling that Rockley wielded rather than received the flogger. And he’d never consent to be restrained.
Eva jumped aside as Jack and the guard crashed into the dresser. The sound of breaking wood filled the room as the dresser broke apart beneath their weight. Neither of the men seemed to notice. They hauled themselves to their feet and resumed fighting. Blood dripped from the corner of Jack’s mouth, and the guard’s eye had already begun to swell shut. Yet they didn’t slow or stagger as they brawle
d.
At this rate, they’d tear the house down around them before she could find the evidence.
“Damn,” she muttered to herself, glancing around the chamber. “Where the hell is it?”
Her gaze caught on a small door that presumably led to a closet. Flinging it open, she found several men’s jackets hanging there. Useless. But on the floor of the closet …
There sat an iron strongbox, roughly the size of a traveling valise. Two locks secured its lid, and handles were on either end of the strongbox, making it relatively easy to transport. But the strongbox wouldn’t be traveling anywhere in a hurry—a locked chain secured it to a metal ring mounted to the wall.
She crouched down and removed her lock picks from her handbag.
Fire suddenly spread across her scalp as someone gripped her roughly by the hair and jerked her back. “You ain’t getting in there,” snarled the guard.
Her eyes burned, and her hand came up automatically, grasping her own hair to lessen the force of his tugging. Twisting around, she jabbed the fingers of her free hand into his unprotected windpipe as he bent over her. He gagged and his grip on her hair lessened. She kicked at his knees at the same moment she brought the side of her hand down onto his forearm.
Howling in pain, he released her. And then he wasn’t there anymore. Jack slammed into the guard, tackling him to the ground. Jack pinned the bully’s arms with his knees as he knelt over him. If Jack had been fighting viciously before, he was rage personified now, his face dark with fury as he landed blow after blow to the guard’s face.
Though the sight was brutally fascinating, she had her own task to accomplish. She turned back to the lock fastening the chain to the strongbox. Forcing herself to ignore the wet, crunching sounds of Jack’s fists pounding into the bully, she worked her picks on the lock. She’d never before had to pick a lock when someone in the same room was administering a relentless beating, and she strained to sense the tiny clicks and barely perceptible movements of the lock’s mechanism as Jack unleashed the full extent of his fury on the guard.
The man’s groans stopped, but Jack’s assault didn’t. She glanced over her shoulder. The bully was unconscious, blood flowing from his nose and mouth. But Jack kept going.
“Jack,” she said sharply. “He stopped fighting back.”
Snarling, Jack whipped up his head. The moment his gaze fell on her, the mask of rage fell away.
“Don’t add murder to your list of crimes,” she said.
“He … hurt you.” His words were a low rasp.
“I hurt him back.”
His scowl slowly faded. “So you did.”
“Now stop distracting me.” She turned back to her work, fighting for calm when she felt anything but. He’d been on the verge of killing the bully, and all because the guard had tried to harm her. He’d been callously efficient when fighting with the other guards, but this had been personal.
The lock’s tumblers clicked into place. She unfastened it, separating the strongbox from the chain that bound it to the wall. Her arms strained with effort as she struggled to pull the heavy container out of the closet. It might be the size of a valise, but it was far heavier, as though someone had packed the case with bricks instead of clothing.
“I’ll see to that.” Jack grabbed the strongbox’s handles and hefted it easily.
Getting to her feet, she said, “Now you’re just showing off.”
He started to grin, but winced from the cut at the corner of his mouth. “I want a look at what we’ve got on Rockley, but we ain’t opening this here.”
“A neighbor may have notified the constabulary,” she said in agreement. “Between the gunfire and this”—she gestured at the ruined bedchamber, where every single piece of furniture had been destroyed by Jack and the bully—“we’ve made enough noise to summon the entire Metropolitan Police. The army, too.”
She stepped around the prostrate form of the guard, and together she and Jack left the bedroom. They hurried down the main stairs, Jack in the lead as he carried the strongbox. The house stood silent. Either everyone had fled, or the women cowered in their rooms.
Eva and Jack reached the ground floor. The front door was only steps away. But as they crossed the foyer, Smashed Face charged. Jack didn’t slow his steps. He swung the strongbox at the attacking guard. The metal container caught the bully right in his gut. He grunted and careened backward, gagging. As she and Jack sped through the front door, the bully didn’t try to stop them.
They hastened out into the street. Whistles and the clanging bell of the Black Maria police wagon broke through the night’s silence. She and Jack ran in the opposite direction, toward the hansom they’d hired for the night. The cab waited for them in an alley, and moments after they’d clambered into the vehicle, the strongbox settled across Jack’s knees, the driver snapped the reins and they were off. If anyone looked askance at a woman riding in a hansom, Eva didn’t give a damn.
She’d just stormed into a brothel to steal incriminating evidence from an embezzling nobleman. Reputations were just bits of tissue paper in comparison.
She didn’t relax against the seat until they were well out of St. John’s Wood, with no sounds of pursuit. Only then did she give a long, slow exhale.
Jack’s smile flashed in the darkness. “Haven’t had that much fun since all three O’Leary brothers challenged me in the ring.“
Given what she’d just witnessed at the brothel, she had no doubt how that fight had concluded.
“It’s serious business, what we do for Nemesis,” she answered. Then grinned. “But that was fun.” She couldn’t admit that to anyone—except Jack. Yet the excitement of what they’d just done continued to course through her.
“Could use a pint after a dustup like that,” he said with a grin.
“Me, too,” she said, wistful. But there’d be no drinks until after they reached headquarters.
“We could share a pint or two at the pub.” His expression sobered. “What I said before, about you trying to gull me—”
Her mood plummeted. She glanced away. “Don’t.”
He put his fingers on her chin and turned her to face him. Rough, the pads of his fingertips against her skin, and his eyes were dark as mystery, filled with fire. Heat settled low in her belly.
“Goddamn it,” he rumbled. “Listen. I’m … sorry about what I said.” He shook his head. “Where I’m from, ain’t no one as ruthless and manipulative than women. Men got nothing on them. But the women, they have to survive, any way they can. That’s what I know.”
“I’m not like them,” she said tightly.
“You ain’t like any woman I’ve met,” he answered, heated.
His gaze searched her face, and she marveled at the contrast between the man who’d relentlessly cut through the guards at the brothel and this man, who looked at her with desire and admiration. Yet they were the same man. Brutal but honorable in his way. Capable of base violence and fierce emotion. Including the emotion he felt for her.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I oughtn’t have said that to you, and I hate that I did.”
She clasped his wrist and leaned closer. Then kissed him. Because she had to. Because every part of her wanted it, wanted him. She tasted his blood in the kiss, metallic and earthy.
His grip on her chin tightened, and his growl traveled from deep in his throat into her with low, dark reverberations.
“You’re like no one I’ve ever known, either,” she whispered against his mouth.
“A pair of rare birds we are,” he agreed. “Not birds—wolves. Rare wolves.”
She glanced down at the strongbox. “Wolves who are in possession of dangerous, perhaps even ruinous, information.”
Both his eyes and teeth gleamed in the shadows. “A wolf’s got to have fangs.”
* * *
At Nemesis headquarters, no one wanted to wait until morning to open the strongbox. Everyone gathered around Eva as she sat at the parlor table, using her picks to open th
e two hefty locks securing the strongbox’s lid.
Jack leaned against the wall, holding a damp cloth to his busted lip, watching. Impatience burned at him to see what, if anything, the coffer held—but he didn’t want to be one more body breathing down Eva’s neck as she worked.
It was a damned pretty neck, though. What he wouldn’t give for a proper time and place to run his mouth over it, breathe in its scent. But proper times and places were in bloody short supply.
All he could do was wait and seethe, slowly torn apart by his hunger for Eva and his need to learn what was in the coffer.
Could be that the strongbox contained nothing more than a few dirty French photographs or letters from mistresses. If that was true, then everything he and Eva had done was for nothing, and they’d be no closer to destroying Rockley than they’d been at the beginning. No—they’d be worse off, because they had nothing to hold over the bastard, their hand played.
He wasn’t the only impatient one.
“Give us a go at that,” Marco urged. “I cracked the Turkish embassy’s safe in Paris in less than three minutes.”
“If you’d stop chattering at me,” she said without looking up, “I’d get this done much faster.”
“Shut it and let the lady work,” Jack snapped.
Marco scowled at him, but at least he stopped talking.
Finally, the telltale snick of the locks opening sounded in the quiet room. Everyone crowded closer to the table, Jack included, as Eva opened the lid. Tension was sharp and tight when she held up what was inside.
Stacks of paper.
“What are they?” Harriet demanded.
Eva sorted through them. “A list of London’s most elite courtesans, and their even more elite clients.”
Simon plucked that sheet of paper from her fingers. “Top-ranking ministers, heads of major corporations, bishops.” He whistled. “This could wreak considerable damage if it fell into the wrong hands.”
“’Course that’s why Rockley has it,” Jack muttered. “Anyone tries to make a move against him, and he’s got ’em by the stones.”