I scowled at him. “I’m starting to believe my flower, as you call it, is what keeps me alive.”
“What could you possibly mean by that?”
“The Ripper wrote to me,” I confided. “He praised my innocence.”
Oscar made a comic sound of disgust. “I always maintain the reference to virginity as innocence is imbecilic at best. You are one of the least innocent women of my acquaintance.”
“I confess, I had a similar thought,” I agreed. “Of the many words I’d use to describe myself, innocent would never be among them.”
Oscar was silent for a moment. “If the Ripper knows you’re a virgin, he knows you.”
I nodded, having come to the same conclusion.
“Just never sell your virginity, and you should remain safe.” He shrugged as though figuring out how to safely deflower me was the problem of the day. “Besides, it’s meant to be given away.”
Isn’t it considered a sin to give or sell your virginity unless you’re married in the eyes of society?”
“Oh, please, there is no sin except for stupidity. And it’s idiotic to let anyone in society truly know what sort of sex you’re having.” He tapped some ash to the ground. “Or not having, in your case.” The end of his cigarette mesmerized me as it glowed upon his inhale. “What else did the Ripper say to you? Did he threaten you? I’m worried about you, darling. Perhaps you should come to Paris.”
“He didn’t threaten me.” He’d killed for me. “He told me I was safe. That I need not fear him.”
“Do you believe him?” Oscar murmured down at me.
I shook my head, more out of confusion than denial. “He mentioned my father. Said he’d have the answers I seek were he not already a dead m—”
“Your fahhhther.” An offensively salacious purr escaped with some smoke into the night mist. “Talk about a tragedy. How you remain a virgin when you surround yourself with such beautiful men is beyond the scope of my understanding.”
“I beg your pardon?” I gasped. “You’ve never met my father!”
“I have, too,” he argued. “He calls ‘round all the time. You and Nola had tea in the garden with him not a fortnight ago. Tall, lean, and golden enough to tempt a saint. I’d defrock him faster than—”
I surged to my feet, all weariness emptying from my veins replaced by cold, absolute panic.
Father.
All this time, I’d thought the Ripper had meant the word in the paternal sense. It had never occurred to me he’d been referring to the ecumenical interpretation.
My Father. Despite my endless protestations, everyone seemed to hand ownership of one particular father to me.
Father Aidan Fitzpatrick.
“I have to go.” I dashed up the steps.
“Fiona. It’s the middle of the night.”
I paused in my back doorway, seized with indecision. What if the Ripper was even now visiting his sharp and terrible wrath upon Aidan? I burned to get to him, but I’d be a fool to go alone.
Someone had once said, “we are all fools in love.”
That didn’t mean I couldn’t call for help. But assistance from whom? Croft? Aberline?
What if I ended up confronting the Ripper? What if he spilled my dark secrets to the police should they ever come to my aid? What if Aidan made a confession for me? I’d be in as much mortal danger from Scotland Yard as from any murderer.
Leaping down a few steps, I took Oscar’s face between my freezing hands all but leached of blood. “Oscar. This is very important. I need you to send word to the Hammer at the Velvet Glove to meet me at St. Michael’s in Whitechapel right away. Tell him it’s urgent. Life and death. Do you understand? Tell him to bring his Blade.”
I’d mostly convinced myself that Jorah wasn’t the Ripper because he’d been with me during the hours of Comstock’s death.
“The Hammer?” Oscar’s inebriated eyes sharpened at the name. “The Hammer’s Blade? Fiona, those are unspeakably dangerous men. What do you—what do they—have to do with—?”
“Just do it!” I commanded as I sprinted back up the stairs. “Please. Aidan is in danger!”
I only stopped to snatch a coin purse, another knife, and an extra pair of spectacles from my desk in the study before I burst onto Tite Street. I ran like a daft loon toward the thoroughfare where I was sure to find a cab to hire.
Don’t take him from me, I begged. Tears formed by cold wind, panic, and the threat of grief streamed down my face. With whom did I plead? God? The Ripper?
Did anyone hear me?
One phrase from the letters ripped through my bones again and again, fraying at the edges of my sanity as I fought time and darkness and distance with desperation and despair burning in my chest.
Already a dead man.
Oh, God. While we were distracted by Comstock’s murder scene, had the Ripper been with Aidan?
Suddenly, I understood. I understood the Hammer’s wrath. Night Horse’s lust for blood. All decency and humanity leached away from me with an unholy knowledge that if anyone harmed a single beautiful, golden hair on Aidan’s beloved head…
I’d cut them to bloody pieces.
21
The screams echoing against the painted ceiling of St. Michael’s mirrored the tortured sounds I’d imagined Thaddeus Comstock had made toward the end. It was the sound of a man losing a part of himself.
Parts of himself.
They stirred something inside me. Fractured my soul into many sharp and crystalline pieces, like a mirror I could no longer stand the sight of.
I couldn’t say why I took the time to brush the cobwebs I’d snagged in the crypt from my shoulders and skirts as I raced down the hall toward the chapel.
Perhaps because I was as afraid of spiders as I was of death.
Or maybe because I was about to meet destiny, and a strange part of me wanted to look my best.
Either way, it was absurd. As irrational as avoiding the front door of the abbey had been.
I didn’t know what I was thinking. At the time, it seemed more reasonable to gain access to St. Michael’s by way of stealth, and I knew where Aidan kept the spare key to the crypt in the groundskeeper’s shed. I must have figured if I were to gain any sort of upper hand with the Ripper, I’d need the element of surprise.
The agony contained within the sounds emitted from the chapel sent every plan or rational thought scattering to the night like a murder of crows picking at a corpse as wolves descended.
I picked up my skirts and sprinted forward when every instinct I had yearned to flee. I could not let Aidan suffer. I couldn’t let him die. Not if there was a chance the Ripper would listen to me.
I skidded through the oratory, ignoring the candles warning me away with frantic golden flickers. The arched door dumped me at the front of the nave, where the shadows of empty pews were arranged neatly in the pious expectancy of a devout congregation.
I was still partially concealed by what was left of a rood screen. The ruins of an earlier time, of a more brutal, secretive church.
What I saw between the slats, crumbled the very foundations of my being.
I surged from behind the screen and tripped up the three steps to the sanctuary altar, holding my hand out in supplication. “Aidan!”
I didn’t stop to think how foolish I was. I didn’t process what my mind readily yearned to reject. I only knew that stealth no longer mattered. Only Aidan mattered.
Saving him.
Because he was not the half-naked man tied on his back to the cross, prostrate on the altar, the flesh of his shoulder and chest flayed away to reveal the fiber beneath.
Aidan—my Aidan—was the one wielding the knife.
I wished in that moment that I could rip everything I ever felt for him out of my heart and stomp it into the sparse rivulets of blood pooling beneath the altar.
But, alas, that wasn’t how love worked.
Altars, it occurred to me, had been invented for this very purpose. The spilling of
blood.
It shamed me to my soul that relief combined with the revulsion, the terror, and the shock of seeing him thus. A tiny, glowing bead in the Pandora’s Box I’d just opened.
Aidan was alive. Thank God.
Aidan was a killer. Possibly the killer.
Oh, God.
I couldn’t rely upon the Hammer to rescue me this time.
“Fiona.” Jorah David Roth rasped my name from a throat made hoarse by screaming. His lovely, elegant fingers reached toward me from their bindings, even as he wheezed, “Run.”
If I were capable, I might have obeyed him.
But what I saw burning in Aidan’s dark eyes—brighter than the heated blade in his hand—planted my feet to the ground across the sanctuary from him.
Devotion. Pure, true, brilliant faith. No anger, wrath, or hatred as one would expect from the perpetrator of such a vicious act.
“Aidan?” My first instinct was to reach for the knife, but logic reminded me of folly. “Aidan, what in God’s name are you doing? You’ll kill him.”
“Yes,” he confirmed clinically. Not with relish or with regret. “Yes, eventually, I will.”
I gaped at him in dumb astonishment before I finally struggled through my outrage. “It’s murder! You can’t atone for murder.” I tried to speak to him in a language he might understand. To bring some semblance of reason back to what my mind didn’t want to process as reality.
Patiently, Aidan returned the knife to a brazier of red and white coals as he addressed me. “This is my atonement. My sacrifice to the Almighty. It’s what He demands of me. I’m not murdering them, Fiona. I’m martyring them.”
“Go,” Jorah moaned. “Get help. Get the Blade.” He gave a few weak struggles against leather bonds already slick with blood from his wrists and ankles.
The Hammer was not one to give in to such a fate without a fight. That he was so exhausted, revealed just how long he’d been in Aidan’s custody.
Hours. Maybe since he’d left me at Scotland Yard.
“It’s okay, Fi,” Aidan soothed. “You can go. You are safe. I will come to your house and explain everything later.”
I could admit the promise of safety tempted me more than it should. This is Aidan, my heart told me. Steady, brilliant, gentle Aidan. If he planned to kill the Hammer, he must have a good reason.
If he kills the Hammer, a dark voice whispered to me, you’ll be free of the gangster’s illegal demands…
No. I violently rejected the awful temptation. I didn’t listen to that voice. We were all of us alive, and I’d do what I could to keep it that way.
Had tears not already been streaming down my cheeks, the sight of poor Jorah would most certainly have produced a flood of them. His well-hewn body trembled. The multitude of sacred candles half-mooned around the altar glimmered across the sweat slicking his pale skin.
Except for the places he’d been relieved of that flesh. Aidan had stripped the epidermis from part of Jorah’s shoulder to the clavicle and had begun working down toward his chest when I’d interrupted.
Every nerve of mine seized with a strange sympathetic pain. It would not have surprised me to look down to find my flesh burning away, leaving a red, sinewy chasm beneath.
I could not fathom the agony Jorah suffered.
“You cannot believe that this is the will of God. Aidan, what could he possibly have done to deserve this?”
A transformation overtook him, then. Something wicked. Demonic, even. “You know his sins are legion,” he declared in a dark voice I’d never heard from him before. “Not the least of which is daring to touch you with his heathen hands.”
What was he talking about? “He never touched me, Aidan, not in the way you think.”
“You always were a terrible liar, Fiona.” He shook his head like a disappointed parent.
“I’m telling the truth!”
“You’re saying he didn’t relieve you of your clothing? Your blouse?
“Only to doctor a wound!” I touched the still-healing cut near my clavicle. “I told you that.”
“He didn’t half-carry you to the café today?” he challenged. “He didn’t stroke your cheek and kiss your bare knuckles when he dropped you at Scotland Yard?”
Well…he’d done that. “Have you been watching me, Aidan? Spying on me, your oldest friend?”
“I’ve been watching him.” Aidan stabbed a condemning finger at the Hammer. “That I often see you nearby is disturbing happenstance.”
I heard none of this. Or maybe I did, and it refused to register because all I could focus on were the wet, awful sounds of several East End prostitutes as he cut their throats.
“It’s you,” I breathed. It all made sense now. Aidan knew my past. My secrets. He knew me better than anyone. Anyone left alive anyway. He’d been trained as a soldier and then as a surgeon. He’d been in Whitechapel long enough to carefully select his victims and reap this sort of bloody judgment upon them. He’d written me letters before, and his script was as dear as it was familiar.
But he could have changed all that.
“You’re the Ripper?” To scream both a question and an accusation made the most ludicrous sound, but I did it. My chest expelled the words with all the fervency of a poisoned purge. Heaving the tortured conclusion into the air.
I kicked a few candles aside in my enraged advance around the altar. I was lucky my skirt didn’t catch on fire. I was so hot, so inflamed with fury, I might not have noticed imminent immolation until my flesh began melting away. “Did you murder those prostitutes? Did you butcher them? Did you kill Comstock? For me? Because so help me, Aidan, I’ll—”
“No!” He actually backed away from my wrath. Something in my frenzy reached him, and he was again the hapless youth who’d been caught keeping watch as my brothers slipped worms into my stockings. He shielded himself with spread palms as though they would protect him from my onslaught. “God, Fiona. How could you think that of me? Those women, the victims of the Ripper, are like the Magdalene. They needed mercy. Not brutality.”
I thumped his chest as I’d done all my life when displeased with him. “Don’t lie to me, Aidan!”
He grasped my shoulders, then. His fingers bruising with a strength I’d forgotten he hid behind the long, black cassock. How could it have taken me so long to be afraid of him? All my life, I’d taken Aidan’s goodness for granted. Until the moment I realized he could—he might—kill me if he wanted to.
But he didn’t. He merely brought his forehead close to mine until his doe-brown eyes became my entire world. “Fiona.” He shook me softly. “Do you really think I’d hurt Mary?”
My every breath was a shaking mess. “Up until today, I never thought you’d hurt anyone.”
To my utter shock, he pressed a fond kiss to my forehead. “Bless you, Fi, but you’ve never been so wrong in both your estimations of me. I am a warrior of God. And, therefore, I am unquestionably not Jack the Ripper. He is a servant of the devil.” His hands on my shoulders turned me to face Jorah.
“Who else could it be but the Hammer?” Aidan whispered in my ear.
“The Hammer…” Jorah David Roth. “Jack the Ripper?” I blinked down at the man beneath me. Like a bear in a trap. I felt pity and a strange sense of disappointment. How did someone so canny, so clever to the point of devious, fall prey to a priest? It was difficult to see someone so powerful bound and helpless.
More difficult for him than I, I was sure.
An animalistic fierceness blazed from the gangster. His lips curled back from his sharp eyeteeth in a wolfish growl. His hazel eyes raged at me with silent demand. With threats and promises of retribution.
If he survived this, I’d have yet one more reason to be afraid.
“Everyone knew the Ripper was a Jew, and the Hammer is the perfect suspect,” Aidan continued from behind me. “What’s another dead whore to him? Less competition. He’s a snake, Fiona. A serpent. And the devil makes him do unspeakably evil things. He’s coerced you
to commit egregious sins. Sins for which you’d hang. You said so, yourself.”
For a moment, the Ripper had a face. A beautiful, exotic visage. He cut women open for sport with those deft fingers I so admired. He dominated them. Penetrated them. Took disgusting little trophies he might keep in a hidden golden Shiloh room, gleefully gloating how he’d outsmarted us all. That he ruled us all.
People not only feared his name. They feared his shadow, too.
He’d shrugged his shoulders when we blithely discussed our dealings. The bodies he gave me were only men.
Did he leave his women in the streets with their throats slit and their legs open? Did he hate women that much?
“You know that it is not me.” Jorah’s ferocity drained away from him, replaced by a foreign sort of uncertainty. “Don’t you?”
Did I?
I knew it was a bizarrely heady thing, to have the Hammer fear me for once. To have power over his life where before I’d had none.
I’d suspected him every now and again. Even this evening, when we’d dined together, the worry had whispered to me. Would the “Juwes” be blamed?
Weren’t they always?
It wasn’t fair, I realized. To condemn a man for suspicion. For public outrage. For the general opinions of the populace against his people.
I’d felt his pain as we’d spoken together. I’d commiserated with him about the prejudice of the majority against both of us. The blood that ultimately spilled because of that hatred.
The family we’d each lost.
“He’s…he’s not the Ripper.” I spoke my conclusion with dubious conviction, but the Hammer’s eyes still fluttered with relief. “Jack killed a man today, and Jorah was saving my life when Thaddeus Comstock died.”
“He could have had an accomplice. That heathen with the blade,” Aidan insisted. “I watched this man lust after you, plying you with drink, with charm, like a godless swine. He’s always surrounded by an army of brutes, by his pagan protector, or walled away in his fortress of sin. But not today. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ sayeth the Lord. He presented a path, and I took it.”
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