“I have to use the necessary.” The boy standing next to Argent bent his knees and blinked up at him with a grimace.
Argent frowned as he glanced from a luminous Millie on stage, to her light-haired boy, and back. “Can’t it wait until she’s finished?” he asked.
“I’ve already been trying, but Mama said not to leave your side. It’s critical. I’m afraid I won’t make it until she’s done with the scene.”
It was the scene, as well. The one where she died and had to remain on stage for a long while.
Swearing under his breath, Argent glanced around the backstage area. People bustled about in Elizabethan costumes, ducking around ropes, pulleys, curtains, props, and each other. It was difficult to be vigilant with this much chaos. Argent knew he couldn’t relax until he’d taken her somewhere safe.
And alone.
He didn’t want to take his eyes off Millie. He’d known her to be exquisitely beautiful, but before tonight, she’d been just that. A rare and dark gem, sparkling despite the danger and blood surrounding her. Something to be possessed. To bring him pleasure.
Something he coveted.
But now, after he’d seen the passion in her eyes, watched her gesture with fervency and emotion and animated affectation …
“Mr. Argent.” Jakub tugged on his arm with urgency.
He knew she’d be relatively safe on stage in front of a thousand people. Millie had told him that her son was to be his first priority. If there was a good time to take the boy, this would be it. “Where is the closest one?”
“In the dressing room.”
“Why didn’t you go before we left the dressing room?”
“I didn’t have to go then.”
He glanced sharply down at the boy once more, wondering if all children lacked any kind of foresight. “You must hurry, understand?”
“I promise.”
Millie’s dressing room was visible from backstage, and Argent followed the boy to it, amused at how the child walked with his knees together.
The dressing room seemed less brilliant and filled with more useless clutter without Millie there. Argent swept through the room and checked every corner and hiding place before he returned to the door to allow Jakub some privacy.
The boy hurried, as he’d promised, but dawdled at his painting corner.
“Come on then.” Argent gestured to the door.
“I just have to take something with me.” Jakub bent to retrieve two boxes and a long brush. “These are too valuable to be left—” A sound of terror escaped the child, just as a slow creak of the door closing behind Argent ripped a chill through his already taut muscles. He whirled to see the gleam of muddy eyes he’d thought never to encounter again.
“It’s the fifth act, Argent,” said Charles Dorshaw as he oozed from the shadows of the doorway. “Desdemona is in the middle of being murdered.”
“I should have known you were back,” Argent muttered as he sized up the pale assassin with the mischievous eyes and the sharp throwing knife brandished at the ready. “The blood in the streets, the tortured, degraded women.”
The man across from him maintained an expert grip on his knife as he gave a relaxed chuckle. “Some of us enjoy our work. We can’t all be cold fish like you.” He licked thin, refined lips. “Though we can savor the bodies … when they’ve gone cold.”
Ladies fanned themselves over Charles Dorshaw’s lean, handsome elegance. They posed seductively and dropped their handkerchiefs for him. They angled for introductions and indelicacies. What they didn’t know was that catching his attentions was worse than drawing the notice of hell.
Demons had a shorter attention span and weaker stomachs, and there was a chance even the denizens of hell liked their women to be warm and alive when they bedded them.
Dorshaw didn’t.
“America and I failed to suit, I’m afraid. It posed no challenge for me.” Much like a cobra, he used his hypnotic eyes, melodic voice, and impeccable manners to disarm his prey. “So much of it is still as good as lawless, and the women are all loud, opinionated, uncultured swine, or worse, religious fanatics. The men all wear pistols on their hips, and business is slow as those industrious upstarts all seem to do their own killing.” Dark hair and soft, thin eyebrows lent an almost androgynous symmetry to Dorshaw’s wicked good looks as he made a dismissive gesture in his starched evening attire. “Indeed, London is my home, Argent, and her streets have always been big enough for the both of us, wouldn’t you agree?”
“As you say.” Argent nodded once. “But this room isn’t, so get the fuck out.”
Dorshaw tsked and motioned with his chin to the child blocked by Argent’s body. “Can’t do that, old boy. The contract on these two has been … renegotiated. You failed to deliver, and it’s back on the open market.”
“Not as of this evening,” Argent informed him. “Blackwell’s pulled it. The LeCours belong to me.”
Dorshaw shook his head. “There must be some dreadful misunderstanding. I didn’t get this contract from Blackwell. In fact, he and I have never particularly got on. You see, this client has employed me before, and I should be very loath to disappoint.” He thumbed the razor edge of the dagger for which Dorshaw had become infamous. “I’ll leave the child alive, if that’s any comfort to you. I merely have to deliver him.”
A gasp and a whimper sounded from behind them and Argent did his best to shut it out. If he could reach for his garrote, or his own knife, he could bloody Dorshaw’s throat before he took his next breath. But something about the tiny rattle of whimpers behind him stayed his hand.
“Listen carefully, Dorshaw,” Argent said, nonplussed by the difficulty he had in maintaining his monotone. “I have claimed the woman and the boy. They are under my indefinite protection. You leave now, and you leave them alone … and I’ll let you escape with your life.”
Dorshaw threw him a look of regret that had little to no sincerity in it. “I could have done, Argent. The money is good, but not the best. I could have let you have her; I could have let her go, if I hadn’t seen her first.” His face turned rapturous, and Argent knew in that moment Dorshaw was going to die.
By his hand.
But that throwing knife in Dorshaw’s hand was poised to fly, and Argent had to take care of it before he made his move. He inched to his right slightly, to be sure his body blocked that of the child.
“It isn’t often men like us get a mark filled with such an overabundance of life as Millie LeCour…” Dorshaw showed even, white teeth in a wolfish grin. “It will take extra time for me to drain her of it.”
“Don’t you fucking say her name.” The red returned, and Dorshaw must have recognized it in his eyes, because his smile died, and with a masterful flick of his wrist, his knife flew right at Argent’s throat and was followed by a deft lunge, charging to take him down if the knife failed to do so.
With reflexes honed to that of a viper’s, Argent reached his right arm across his body and slapped the knife out of the air with his open palm, changing its trajectory to embed into the wall to his left. That put his elbow in the perfect place to solve the problem of Dorshaw’s advancement.
A sharp lunge forward connected his elbow with the man’s eye socket. But his colleague was no stranger to a strike in the face.
Dorshaw absorbed much of the force of the strike by spinning away from it, and coming full circle to face Argent with a larger, sharper knife in the same hand. The flash gave little warning before a burning pain ripped through the meat beneath Argent’s forearm.
Gritting his teeth, Argent cut Dorshaw’s victorious smile short by stomping out at his chest, the force of the blow lifting the smaller man off his feet and throwing him against the door. It was a testament to Edward Middleton Barry’s architectural brilliance that the door remained intact.
In the time it took for Argent to retrieve the knife from the wall, Dorshaw had nearly recovered, and they brandished their blades at each other with absolute absorption.
“We should have done this in the ring, Argent.” Dorshaw sneered. “Imagine the money we would have made, the best slashers in the empire, hand to hand, as it were.”
Argent’s only response was an attack.
With his free hand, Dorshaw seized Argent’s knife arm, his fingers digging into the smarting wound while simultaneously stabbing at Argent’s torso.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Argent plucked the man’s wrist mid-slice, keeping his skin unmarred and his organs right where they preferred to be. Inside his body.
Trembling muscles on both sides locked each man in a momentary impasse, but Argent had a few advantages the other assassin did not. The first being an almost inhuman tolerance to pain. Second, superior size and strength. And tertiary, a knowledge of the body’s reflexive tendencies and how to manipulate them.
A slight press on the right point of his wrist, and Dorshaw yelped as his fingers sprang open and the knife clattered to the floor. A shift in weight alerted Argent to the incoming kick aimed between his legs.
None of that; he was planning on using that particular part of his anatomy in a short while.
His foot shot out to block it successfully before kicking at the man’s other knee, buckling it from under him.
Argent followed him to the floor and impeded Dorshaw’s attempt at gaining the upper hand by rolling them both once before pinning the man beneath him, the knife levered toward his adversary’s wide eyes.
“The world is well rid of you,” he murmured as he pressed down with his weight, some of the blood from the wound on his arm dripping onto Dorshaw’s already wounded cheek. The man used both arms in a fruitless struggle to push Argent’s knife arm away.
A muffled sob startled him, and Argent looked into the magnified, tear-reddened rims of wide, blueberry eyes.
“Look away, boy,” he snarled, cringing at a softening—no—a pause in his cold, lethal ferocity.
“No, do watch.” Dorshaw laughed maniacally. “You and me, Argent, we’ll create the next generation.”
Argent punched him in the throat.
“Look. Away. Now,” he ordered softly over Dorshaw’s wheezes.
The child nodded, hugging his art supplies closer and squeezing more droplets out of his eyes as he clenched them shut with all his might, using his round cheeks to help.
Satisfied, Argent went in for the kill.
“Stop right there!” The door bounced off the wall.
Argent squeezed his own eyes shut and let a hiss of breath out of his throat, swallowing a surge of intense irritation. If there was one thing worse than a useless, provoking, bothersome, inept, ill-timed policeman, it was a gaggle of them stuffing themselves into the dressing room door, preventing him from carving Dorshaw’s defective brain out of his skull.
