London was known for a great many things, not the least of which, in Argent’s opinion, was the legion of grubby, wiry errand boys ready to scamper through the city for a coin. He sent one to Hassan Ahmadi, to whom he’d entrust Millie’s safety for the afternoon. The Arab was a longtime employee of Blackwell’s, and would be a large, very visible deterrent to any possible threats.
The fact that the Mussulman was zealously celibate had no bearing on his decision to send for Mr. Ahmadi.
Whatsoever.
Another boy scampered away to bring his butler, Welton, with a carriage and change of attire. Welton had arrived first, as Argent had known he would. While he dressed in dry clothing in the men’s private rooms at the House of the Julii, he instructed his butler that they were to entertain a woman and her son that night.
Welton blinked several times, which was akin to an all-out fit of vapors for him, and promptly took the hired hackney that Mr. Ahmadi arrived in to make the necessary preparations.
“I will keep your black-eyed woman and her son alive and untouched by the filthy, godless hands of any who would wish harm upon them,” the Mussulman promised.
Leaving his carriage to convey Millie to retrieve her son from his school and then to deposit her at Covent Garden for her performance, Argent strode away, confident that the only filthy, godless hands to touch her would be his own.
By the time he reached the white stone building where he would again find Gerald Dashforth’s offices, Argent’s fists clenched to keep from shaking. He conquered the three flights of stairs wishing there had been more, that buildings were taller and he could keep climbing. It would explain the thudding in his chest.
The hallway where Sir Dashforth’s office was located appeared longer than he remembered. For a man who filled any hall nearly to capacity, this passage still seemed remarkably small, and somehow shrinking as his steps echoed against the expensively papered walls. The floors pitched against his feet, like the planks of a ship tossed by the stormy English Channel, and Argent worked at not giving in to the impulse to run and kick open Dashforth’s door, shattering the expensive gold lettering on the tempered glass.
As it was, the door dashed off the wall as he opened it, and the glass rattled loudly, as though trying to decide whether or not to stay intact.
Dashforth made a ladylike sound of shock and lost what little color he had in his face to begin with.
“I have business to discuss with you,” Argent informed him, trying to squelch the strength of a strange emotion surging through him. Something murderous. Something dark. Something to do with the fact that this man was a threat to Millie.
“How interesting that you should come by today,” Dashforth remarked, scurrying to regain his composure. “I assume your charge is finally carried out and you’re here for your payment?”
Argent ignored the question, stalking closer to the wiry man. “Which of your clients wanted Millie LeCour dead?”
The corners of Dashforth’s mouth appeared beneath his mustache in a consternated frown. “I fail to see how that is relevant—” He made a choking sound as Argent’s hand almost encircled the entirety of his scrawny neck.
“It is not wise to make me repeat myself.”
Dashforth squeaked, scratching at Argent’s hand with frantic fingers. “You don’t—understand,” he wheezed.
The worm was right, Argent didn’t understand. Couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want a brave, vivacious, desirable woman like Millicent LeCour dead. He didn’t understand the power she had over him. And he couldn’t begin to describe the physical phenomenon awakening in his body.
A storm surge of strength, power, viciousness, and violence. A beast of some kind stirred in his cold, dormant heart, and this beast was hungry for blood. For sex.
And for something else he had no name for. Something he knew only Millie could provide. Something he desired above all else, and couldn’t for the life of him identify.
“Tell your employer that Millie LeCour belongs to me now.” Reaching in his pocket with his free hand, Argent retrieved a banknote for the obscene amount Dashforth had offered, and tucked it into the breast pocket of the solicitor’s suit. “She’s not planning to reveal the boy’s parentage. She has no need for blackmail, notoriety, or legitimacy. Millie is not a threat to anyone, but I certainly am.” He released the gaping solicitor to grapple with something he’d thought long dead.
His temper.
“Y-you’re canceling a contract?” Dashforth sputtered, his fingers pressed against his tender throat. “A-are you certain that’s wise? Your reputation … let alone your livelihood—”
“I know you’re not threatening me, Dashforth.” Argent stepped toward him again, and the small man paled impossibly further. “My threats are infinitely more fatal.”
“I’ll tell you nothing but this.” Dashforth dropped onto the dainty couch, his beady eyes gleaming with smug secrets. “They’ll keep coming after her. Though you think you are the only monster that stalks the night, I assure you there are more dangerous men out there, and they’ll do the job you weren’t man enough to do. They’ll kill you, and then slaughter your precious actress.”
An audible crack reverberated through Argent’s bones, as dangerous as a rift in a dam. Except it wasn’t cold water being released from a reservoir. But fire. It ripped through him, crawling through the sinew of his body with startling strength. He was drunk with anger. Swollen with it, awash in the delicious, violent heat of it.
He snatched up the solicitor by the lapels and gave him a shake like a mongrel’s chew toy. “Listen here, you weakling boy-fucker, if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I will kill you. Slowly.”
“Not as slowly as some,” the solicitor said, an odd sort of acceptance creeping into his eyes. “If you want the actress, take her before he comes for her. Because nothing will stop him.”
Awash in a rage the likes of which he hadn’t been subject to for decades, Argent growled as he slammed Dashforth into the wall, relishing the sound of the man’s head cracking against the solid wood. “Give me a name!”
The solicitor slumped, his eyes rolling up behind fluttering lids, his neck no longer holding his head aloft. It lolled to the side, and Argent could see blood painting the wallpaper where the skull had collided. In his anger, he’d forgotten the true force of his strength.
He didn’t have much time.
“Talk, damn you.” Argent commanded, shaking the limp body.
“Thurston … Thinks … he’s the father … of the boy,” Dashforth roused himself to say. “You’re too late … took … too long. There’s another.”
“What do you mean?” Argent demanded.
The man slumped, completely unconscious and heavy in his arms.
Argent let him drop in a heap to the floor, and then ran trembling hands through his hair. He’d been too hard, too out of control. He could have used different means to extract information, manipulation, intimidation, or compulsion. Now, though Dashforth was still alive, he might not survive his head wound. If he did survive, he might warn Fenwick that Argent was coming for him.
Because come for him, he would.
Extracting his garrote from his pocket, Argent stood over the prone man who’d landed on his face. Blood trickled from his slick hair down his thin neck.
This wouldn’t take long.
Dashforth wouldn’t be visiting the bordellos tonight. The young boys would be safe from him. The wealthy would have to find another unscrupulous solicitor to do their bidding.
In a fluid motion, Argent made certain the man would never again wake.
“Sir Dashforth?” A shadow appeared behind the tempered glass a moment before the rap of a knock slammed Argent back into cold reality. “I heard a commotion, Dashforth. Are you all right?”
Argent dove for Dashforth’s office as the handle rattled, and he barely made it behind the wall in time for the door to open. He used the astonished exclamations and calls for the police and doctor to cover the noise of the window latch as he stepped out onto the ledge and pressed the window closed.
Damn. The streets were full of people. The bobbies were being sent for, and if he didn’t work fast, the ruckus would draw attention to the building and he’d be spotted for certain.
The building next to Dashforth’s offices, a red-brick mercantile of haberdashery supplies, was only separated from this structure by perhaps the width of a coffin. Excellent. Balancing with his back to the wall, he inched along a ledge that barely deserved the name until he came to the tight alley. The trouble with buildings in this up-and-coming part of town was a preponderance of embellishments, such as ledges, for example, that only adorned the front of the building facing the street. The alley, barely half again the width of his shoulders, was hardly more than a glorified gutter and, apparently, a place to store rubbish.
Argent glanced out to the street. For a late-winter day, the sky was surprisingly clear. The chill kept people bundled, their necks bunched down into their scarves and cloaks, scurrying on their way, hoping to find a warm hearth at their destination. No one seemed to be looking up.
Three tall stories separated him from the ground. From freedom. His only option was to use an ability that he’d acquired by climbing the flat stone walls of Newgate, and perfected during bloody ambushes in the Underworld War.
He’d have to act quickly.
His legs were long enough to bridge the gap. Keeping one foot firmly on the ledge, he kicked his other leg and arm out to catch his weight on the adjacent building. Once secure, he pulled his foot off the ledge and caught his downward trajectory with one hand and one foot braced against each wall. He ignored the sharp brick that abraded his palms as he spider-crawled down the building sides, allowing his legs to slide, and then his arms in succession, until he could safely drop to the cobblestones below.
He caught his fall with a crouch, and only one bundled-up woman passerby started at his landing. A true city dweller, she decided it was safer not to question odd happenings, nor tarry in their wake, and she sank deeper into the hood of her cloak, quickening her steps along the way.
Straightening, Argent curled his throbbing palms into fists, knowing the pain would subside the colder he let himself get.
Though how the cold could penetrate the flood of molten heat still pouring through him would confound even the most scientific minds.
What the devil had just happened up there? What he’d meant to be a patient and informative interrogation had quickly become an unmitigated disaster. And here he stood, in the shadow of an alley, blood throbbing, hands smarting, and none the wiser.
His sound of frustration echoed off the stones before his fist collided with them. Though his knuckles didn’t splinter, the skin broke and bled. He needed the pain. Pain always grounded him. Focused him. Sharpened his edge to lethal.
This time, it was little help.
He hurried away from Dashforth’s office until he found another dark, narrow alley, where the windowless stone walls could see nothing, and therefore tell nothing. To mitigate the feverish throbbing, he turned and pressed his head to the cold, cold stone, trying to absorb some of it back into his soul.
The alley became his purgatory, a place to endure, to reflect. Alone in the center of a city nearly as heartless as he’d always been.
If you don’t kiss me, I’ll die.
The chill in the wind became a memory of Millie’s warm breath against his mouth. If he hadn’t kissed her that night, she would have died—by his own hands. He wondered if she knew that now. Now that she knew who he was. What he was.
There, even in the darkness of the stairwell where he’d first kissed her, her features had glowed with a light he’d never seen before. He’d been about to do it. About to snap the pretty bones in her neck, and break the spell she’d cast upon him while dancing. It would have been so easy to extinguish the light glowing from beneath her golden skin, from inside those obsidian eyes, on the night they’d shone the brightest for all of London.
If you don’t kiss me, I’ll die.
She’d said it as though she’d known her life was in his hands, and with a kiss, he could save her.
He’d never saved anyone before. Never given in to impassioned pleas for a victim’s life. He showed no mercy, gave no quarter, and hadn’t even been aware that he was capable of hesitation. The ghosts of his sins didn’t haunt his dreams. For he never had any. Easier not to dream than to rip oneself from nightmares that never seemed to end. Fear had been equally as absent from his life as regret. What had he left to fear? Whatever nightmares the future held were dreams compared to what lay buried in his past.
But in that moment, standing with their bodies pressed together, everything had changed. She’d not been afraid of him, nor had she been aware that she’d begged death, himself, to kiss her. She’d been nothing more than a woman stripped of artifice and pretense, a woman trusting the touch of a man, letting instinct and sensation suffuse that vibrant light inside of her until Argent had been certain with every fiber of his black soul that if he didn’t kiss her she would, indeed, have died.
And … He’d desired her to live. So he could have her. So she would be his.
For a man like him, desire was dangerous. To want something, to have something, gave him something to lose. Something for his enemies to use against him.
He never should have given in to desire. Because now the softness of her lips haunted his every moment. The warmth of her mouth suffused him until need and lust twisted and ached within his very core.
She’d wanted him. He couldn’t let that go.
She’d been panting and open, soft and willing. No woman had done anything to or for him unless money had changed hands. No one had cared to. In his world, one didn’t get swept away by passion. No one crept into dark nooks to share sighs and pleasure and flesh. Someone like him might be lurking in the shadows. And money mitigated the risk.
But that night, on the eve of her greatest stage triumph, Millie LeCour, London’s darling, considered the most beautiful woman in the empire and beyond. She’d desired him.
Well, she’d desired Bentley Drummle.
But it had been sweet, unbearably sweet to think that for that moment in the dark it was Christopher Argent, not Bentley Drummle, that she’d begged to kiss her. A shackleborn bastard. A man who’d once been a weak boy. A boy who’d been beaten, raped, whipped, stabbed, starved, and terrorized. A boy who’d lost his humanity in a dank cell surrounded by blood. By the blood of the last human being who’d cared whether he’d lived or died.
He’d lived. To spite them all, he’d lived. And in order to do so he’d given his life to the spilling of blood. At first for vengeance, then for survival, and finally for profit. Under the careful tutelage of Wu Ping, he’d learned to kill a man before he’d learned to lace a boot.
It was all he knew. All he was good at. And never in his life had he questioned his place, never looked back into the abyss of the past. Never thought of that pathetic, powerless boy he’d once been.
Or of that night he’d lost his soul.
Until her. Until Millie had begged for her son’s life. Until she’d submitted to his demands in order to survive, because life meant enough to her that she would not only suffer the indignity of lying with him, she’d overcome it. She’d not only endure, as he did now. As he’d always done. She’d thrive. He knew this about her intrinsically. He had a feeling that, as strong and pitiless as he could be, even the ruthless Christopher Argent couldn’t snuff out her light. Certainly, he could kill her. But her light would remain in the glow of the lamps on every stage she’d ever graced. In the smile of her son, secure in the knowledge of her love. It would live on in the many portraits and photos of her.
Millie LeCour was immortal.
And for one night in his wretched life, she was going to belong to him.
He couldn’t fucking believe it.
Curling his wounded fist, he stepped into London’s heavy afternoon foot traffic and angled west, toward Mayfair. He had one more place to go. One more loose end to tie up before he returned to claim what was his.
