It never did. Touch came without words, care without voice. And the silence stung worse than the wound.
Until that night, when the angel spoke, and her voice came like a wicked weapon—a long sigh, and then, soft and rich, like warm whisky, “Ewan.”
Like home.
He was awake.
He opened his eyes. It was night still—night again? Night forever?—in a dark room, and his first thought was the same he’d had upon waking for twenty years. Grace.
The girl he’d loved.
The one he’d lost.
The one for whom he’d spent half a lifetime searching.
A litany that would never heal. A benediction that would never save, because he would never find her.
But here, in the darkness, the thought came harsher than usual. More urgent. It came like memory—with the ghost of a touch on his arm. At his brow. In his hair. It came with the sound of her voice at his ear—Ewan.
Grace.
Sound, barely there. Fabric?
Hope flared, harsh and unpleasant. He squinted into the shadows. Black on black. Silent now. Empty.
Fantasy.
It wasn’t she. It couldn’t be.
He ran a hand over his face. The movement produced a dull ache in his shoulder—an ache he remembered from years earlier. His shoulder had been dislocated and reset. He made to sit up, his thigh twinging—bandaged tight, already healing. He gritted his teeth against the lingering twinge of pain even as he welcomed it, and the way it distracted him from the other, far more familiar pain. The one that came from loss.
His head was clearing quickly, and he recognized the dissipating haze as an effect of laudanum. How long had he been drugged?
Where was he?
Where was she?
Dead. They’d told him she was dead.
He ignored the anguish that always came with the thought, reached for the low table near the bed, feeling for a candle or a flint, and knocked over a glass. The sound of liquid cascading to the floor reminding him to listen.
And then he realized he could hear what he could not see.
A cacophony of muffled sound, shouting and laughing nearby—just beyond the room?—and a roaring din from farther away—outside the building? Inside, but at a distance? The low rumble of a crowd—something he never heard in the places he usually woke. Something he barely remembered. But memory came with the sound, from a similar distance—from farther away, from a lifetime ago.
And for the first time in twenty years, the man known to all the world as Robert Matthew Carrick, twelfth Duke of Marwick, was afraid. Because what he heard was not the world in which he’d grown.
It was the one into which he’d been born.
Ewan, son of a high-priced courtesan come down a notch—or a thousand—with a babe in her belly, made one of Covent Garden’s finest molls.
He stood, crossing the darkness, feeling along the wall until he found a door. A handle.
Locked.
The angels had rescued him and brought him to a locked room in Covent Garden.
He did not have to cross the room to know what he would find outside, the rooftops filled with angled slate and crooked chimneys. A boy born in the Garden did not forget the sounds of it, no matter how hard he’d tried. He stumbled to the window nonetheless, pushing back the curtain. It rained, the clouds blocking the light of the moon, refusing to let him see the world outside. Denying him sight, so he might hear sound.
A key in the lock.
He turned, muscles taut, prepared for an enemy. For two of them. For battle. He’d been locked in war for months, years, a lifetime with the men who ruled Covent Garden, where dukes were not welcome. At least not dukes who’d threatened their lives.
It did not matter that he was their brother.
Not to him, either, as they had broken his trust—unable to keep the only woman he’d ever loved safe.
And for that, he would do battle until the end of time.
The door opened, and his fists balled, his thigh stinging as he came to the balls of his feet, prepared for the blow that would come. Prepared to deliver a matching one in kind. Strong enough for it.
He froze. The hallway beyond was barely brighter than the room where he stood—just bright enough to reveal a figure. Not outside. But inside. Not coming. Leaving.
There had been someone in the room when he’d awoken. In the shadows. He’d been right, but it was not his brothers.
His heart began to pound, wild and violent in his chest. He shook his head, willing it clear.
A woman in shadow. Tall. Lean and strong, wearing trousers that clung tight to impossibly long legs. Leather boots that ended above the knee. And a topcoat that could easily have been a man’s, if not for the gold lining, somehow gleaming in the darkness.
Gold thread.
The touch hadn’t been a ghost. The voice hadn’t been imagined.
He took a step toward her, already reaching for her, aching for her. Her name wrenched from him, coming like wheels on broken cobblestones. “Grace.”
A tiny inhale. Barely sound. Barely there.
But enough.
Like that, he knew.
She was alive.
The door slammed shut, and she was gone.
His roar shook the rafters.
Chapter Four
Grace turned the key in the lock with lightning speed, barely able to pull it from its seat when the handle vibrated—an attempt of escape from within. No. Not escape. Pursuit.
A shout came, angry and wounded. And something more.
The sound was punctuated by a wicked thud, instantly recognizable. A fist against wood, hard enough to terrify.
She wasn’t scared. Instead, she pressed a hand to the door, her palm flat against it, holding her breath, waiting.
Nothing.
And if he had struck it again, what then?
She pulled her hand back as the thought seared through her.
He wasn’t intended to be awake. He was intended to have been dosed with enough laudanum to down a bear. Enough to keep him abed until his shoulder and leg were ready for strain. Until he was ready for the fight she planned to give him.
But she’d seen him stand without hesitation, an indication that his wounds were healing quickly. That his muscles were as strong as ever.
She knew those muscles well. Even as she shouldn’t.
She’d meant to be as clinical as possible. To tend to his wounds and mend him enough to send him packing—to give him the punishing he’d deserved since that day, two decades earlier, when he’d destroyed all of their lives, and hers the most of all.
She’d planned this revenge with years of skill and rage, and she was ready to mete it out.
Except she’d made a mistake. She’d touched him.
He’d been so still, and so strong, and so different from the boy she’d left, and yet—in the angles of his face, in the way his too-long hair lay on his forehead, in the curve of his lips and the slash of his brows—so much the same. And she hadn’t had a choice.
On the first night, she’d told herself she was looking for injuries, counting the ribs beneath the flat planes of his torso, the ridges and valleys of muscle there. Too lean for his frame, as though he barely ate, barely slept.
As though he had been too busy looking for her.
She didn’t have an excuse for the way she’d explored his face, stroking over his brows, marveling at the smooth skin of his cheek, testing the roughness of the new growth of beard on his jaw.
She couldn’t say why she’d catalogued the changes in him, the way the boy she’d loved had become a man, strong and angled and dangerous.
And fascinating.
He shouldn’t be fascinating. She shouldn’t be curious.
She hated him.
For two decades he’d loomed, hunting her. Threatening her brothers. Ultimately hurting them and the men and women of Covent Garden, whom the Bareknuckle Bastards had sworn to protect.
And tha
t had made him her enemy.
So he shouldn’t be fascinating.
And she shouldn’t have wished to touch him.
Shouldn’t have touched him, either, shouldn’t have been riveted to the planes of him, the even rise and fall of his breath, the roughness of the stubble at his jaw, the curve of his lips—the softness of them—
The floorboards of the locked room creaked as he crouched.
She backed away, pressing herself to the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, far enough out of view to ensure that the man within could not see her when he looked through the keyhole. He was the one who had taught her about keyholes, when she was young enough to believe that a closed door was the end of the story.
She stared at the tiny black void beneath the door handle, consumed with the wild memory of another door. Of the bite of another handle in her palm, of cool mahogany against her forehead as she leaned close to it, a lifetime earlier, peering within.
The inky blackness inside.
The feel of the metal casing of the lock against her lips as she whispered into the room beyond. Are you there?
Two decades later, she could still feel her heart pounding as she pressed her ear to the mysterious opening, searching for sound where she could not use sight. She could still feel the fear. The panic. The desperation.
And then, from the void . . .
I’m here.
The hope. The relief. The joy as she’d repeated his words.
I’m here, as well.
Silence. And then . . .
You shouldn’t be.
What nonsense.
Where else would she go?
If you’re discovered . . .
I won’t be.
No one ever saw her.
You shouldn’t risk it.
Risk. The word that would come to be everything between them. Of course, she hadn’t known that then. Then, she’d only known that there’d been a time when she would never have risked on that massive, cold estate, miles from anywhere. The barely-there home given to her by a duke to whom she was told she should be grateful. After all, she’d been another man’s bastard, born to his duchess.
She was lucky, she was told, that he hadn’t sent her away at birth, to a family in the village. Or worse.
As though a life hidden away without friends or family or future wasn’t worse.
As though she wasn’t consumed with the ever-present knowledge that she would someday run out her time. Outlive her purpose.
As though she didn’t know that the day would come when the duke would remember she existed. And be rid of her.
And then what?
She’d learned early and well the truth that girls were expendable. And so it was best to stay out of sight, out of hearing. Survival was her purpose. And there was no room for risk.
Until he’d arrived, along with two other boys—his half brothers—all of them bastards, just as she was. No. Not just as she was.
Boys.
And because they were boys, infinitely more valuable than she.
She’d been forgotten the moment she’d been born—a girl, the bastard daughter of another man, unworthy of attention, or even a name of her own, valuable only in that she’d been born at all, a placeholder for a son.
A placeholder for him.
And still, she’d risked for him. To be near him. To be near all of them—three boys she’d come to love, each in his own way—two of them, brothers of her heart if not her blood, without whom she might never have survived. And the third . . . him. The boy without whom she might never have lived.
Don’t—
What?
Don’t leave. Stay.
She’d wanted to. She’d wanted to stay forever.
Never. I’ll never leave. Not until you can leave with me.
And she hadn’t left . . . until he’d given her no choice.
Grace shook her head at the memory.
In twenty years, she’d learned to live without him. But tonight, she had a problem, because he was here, in her club, and every moment he was conscious was a moment that threatened everything Grace Condry—consummate businesswoman, power broker, and the leader of one of the most coveted intelligence networks in London—had built.
He wasn’t just the boy she’d once whispered through keyholes with.
Now, he was the duke. The Duke of Marwick, and her prisoner. Rich, powerful, and just mad enough to bring the walls—and her world—crumbling down.
“Dahlia . . .” Zeva again, at a distance, warning in her lightly accented speech.
Grace shook her head. Hadn’t she made it clear that Zeva was not to follow?
What the fuck had she done?
“What the fuck ’ave you done?” Ah. The reason for Zeva’s warning.
Grace closed her eyes at the sound of her brother’s voice in the darkness, opening them a heartbeat later, even as she turned away from the locked door and her prisoner’s eerie quiet, and strode down the narrow hallway, raising a finger for silence. “Not here.”
She met Zeva’s gaze, dark and altogether too knowing. Ignoring that knowledge, she said, “The room needs a guard. No one goes in.”
A nod. “And if he comes out?”
“He doesn’t.”
A nod of understanding, and Grace was pushing past to meet her brother at the dark entrance to the back stairwell. “Not here,” she repeated, seeing that he was about to talk again. Devil always had something to say. “My offices.”
One of his black brows rose in irritation, punctuated by a quick tap of the walking stick he was never without. She held her breath, waiting for him to agree . . . knowing that he had no reason to. Knowing that he had every reason to push past her and face the duke himself. But he did not. Instead, he waved a hand in the direction of the stairwell, and Grace released her breath silently, leading the way to the top floor of the building, where her private rooms adjoined the office from which she managed a kingdom.
“You shouldn’t even be here,” she said softly as they made their way through the dark space. “You know I don’t like you near the customers.”
“And you know as well as I do that your fine ladies want nothing more than a look at a Covent Garden king. They just don’t like that I’ve a queen now.”
She scoffed at the words. “That part, at least, is true,” she said, ignoring the way her heart pounded, knowing as well as Devil that the conversation was to be forgotten the moment they were inside her quarters. “Where is my sister-in-law?” She’d do anything to have Felicity there now, with her good sense, distracting from Devil’s purpose.
“At Whit’s, watching over his lady,” he said, as they reached the door to her quarters.
She looked over her shoulder at him, her hand stilling on the door handle. “And Whit is not watching over the lady himself because he is . . .”
He lifted his chin, indicating the room beyond.
“Dammit, Dev.”
He shrugged. “What was I supposed to do? Tell him he couldn’t come? You’re lucky I convinced him to wait here while I found you. He wanted to ransack the whole place.”
Grace pressed her lips into a thin line and opened the door to reveal the man inside, already crossing the room toward her, enormous and barely hinged.
Once they were inside, Grace closed the door and pressed her back to it, pretending not to be unsettled by her brother’s obvious fury. In the twenty years she’d known him, since they’d escaped their shared past and rebuilt themselves as the Bareknuckle Bastards, she’d never known Whit to rage. She’d only known him to punish, cold and deadly, and only after reaching the end of a fuse as long as the Thames.
But that was before he’d fallen in love.
“Where the fuck is he?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Downstairs.”
Whit growled, low in his throat—acknowledgment barely audible inside the threatening sound—like a wild animal ready to spring. Known to all of Covent Garden as Beast, he was strun
g tight that night—had been for the week since the explosion on the docks—Ewan’s handiwork—had nearly killed Hattie. “Where?”
“Locked away.”
He looked to Devil. “Is that true?”
Devil shrugged. “Dunno.”
Lord deliver her from obnoxious brothers.
Whit looked to her. “Is it true?”
“No,” she drawled. “He’s downstairs, turning a jig.”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “You should have told us he was here.”
“Why, so you could kill him?”
“Exactly.”
She met his anger head-on, refusing to cower. “You can’t kill him.”
“I don’t care that he’s a duke,” he said, every inch the Beast the rest of London called him. “I’ll tear him apart for what he did to Hattie.”
“And hang for it,” she said. “What good will that do your lady, who loves you?”
He roared his frustration, turning for the massive desk that stood in the corner, piled high with the club’s business—current member dossiers, gossip rags, invoices, and correspondence. She advanced as he swiped a hand through a tower of new member requests, sending paper flying through the room. “Oy! That’s my work, you lout.”
Beast thrust his hands into his hair and turned on her, ignoring her protest. “What do you plan for ’im, then? ’E nearly killed her. She could have . . .” He trailed off, not wanting to speak the words. “And that was after leavin’ Devil to freeze to death. After nearly killing you, all those years ago. Christ, you all could have . . .”
Grace’s chest grew tight. Whit had always been their protector. Desperate to keep them safe even when he was too small and too battered to do the job. She nodded. “I know. But we are all here. And your lady mends.”
He let out a harsh, relieved breath. “That’s the only reason why my blade isn’t in his gut.”
She nodded. He deserved vengeance. They all did. And she intended for them to get it. But not like this.
Devil spoke then, from his place by the door, where he leaned against the wall, deceptively loose, one long leg crossed over the other, “And you somehow remain calm, Grace. Somehow, willing to let him live.”
Daring and the Duke EPB Page 3