What Angels Fear

“Yes, miss.”

She paused on the footpath to stare up at the classical facade before her, lit softly by the gleam of flickering oil lamps. Like so much else about Leo Pierrepont, this house on Half Moon Street was carefully calculated to create just the right impression: large, but not too large, elegant, and with a touch of the faded grandeur to be expected from a proud nobleman now forced to live in exile. When one lived a life that was, essentially, a lie, appearances were everything.

She found him alone, in his dining room, just sitting down to a table laid for one with fine china and gleaming silver and the sparkle of old crystal. He was a slim, delicately built man upon whom the passing years, however difficult they might have been, nevertheless seemed to have rested easily. His face was largely unlined, his light brown hair barely touched with gray. Kat had never known his precise age, but given that he’d been almost thirty when driven from Paris by the Reign of Terror, she knew he must be in his late forties by now.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Leo said, his attention seemingly all for his soup.

Kat jerked off her gloves and tossed them with reticule, pelisse, and hat onto a nearby chair. “Whose reputation are you afraid will be compromised, Leo? Mine, or yours?”

He glanced up, gray eyes gleaming with a faint smile. “Mine, of course. You have no reputation left to lose.” He signaled for the servants to leave them, then sat back. The smile faded. “You’ve heard what happened to Rachel, I suppose?”

Kat pressed her flattened palms against the tabletop and leaned into them. Beneath the silk bodice of her gown, her heart thudded hard and fast, but she managed to keep her voice calm, steady. “Did you do it?”

If he had, he wouldn’t admit it; Kat knew that. But she wanted to watch his face while he denied it.

Leo dipped his spoon into his soup and brought it carefully to his lips. “Come now, ma petite. Even if I had wanted Rachel dead, do you seriously think I would have killed her in such a spectacular fashion? In a church? From what I understand, the walls were practically painted with her blood.”

Kat watched his long, slim hands reach for a piece of bread. “One of your minions could have got carried away.”

“I choose my minions more carefully than that.”

“So who killed her?”

A shadow touched the Frenchman’s features, a brief ghost of concern that Kat almost— almost—believed might be genuine. “I wish I knew.”

Kat turned away, her quick, long-legged stride carrying her across the room and back again.

Leo shifted his weight in his chair and watched her. “Ring for another glass,” he said after a moment. “Have some wine.”

“No thank you.”

“Then at least stop pacing up and down the room in that fatiguing way. It’s not good for my digestion.”

She hesitated beside the table, but she did not sit. “Who was Rachel scheduled to meet last night?”

Picking up a knife, Leo calmly spread his bread with butter. “No one that I’m aware of.”

“What would you have me believe then, Leo? That she went there to pray?”

“It’s what people generally do in a church.”

“Not people like Rachel.” Kat went to stand before the hearth and stare unseeingly at the glowing coals. There was always danger in this game they played; they all knew that. But whoever had met Rachel last night was more than dangerous; he was evil. And what he’d done could threaten them all. “They’ll be looking into her death— the authorities, I mean. They could stumble across something.”

“Careful, ma petite,” said Leo, reaching for his glass. “The walls have ears.” He took a slow swallow of his wine, then frowned. “But no, I don’t think the authorities will learn anything that need concern us. I went past her lodgings this morning as soon as I heard what had happened, but the constables were there. I’ll go back tonight and make certain she left nothing that could be incriminating.”

“You could be too late. They might have found something already.”

Leo huffed a soft laugh. “You can’t be serious. This is London, not Paris. They’re fools, these Englishmen. So afraid of the danger to their liberties posed by a standing army that they’d rather see their cities overrun with thieves and murderers than establish a proper police force. Those constables won’t have found anything. Besides”—He thrust another piece of bread in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed—“they think they already know who did it.”

Kat swung to face him. “You said you didn’t know who killed her.”

“I don’t know who killed her. But the London authorities think they do. He’s doubtless under arrest even as we speak. Some viscount with a reputed propensity for slaughtering his fellow men. He has a strange name. Something like Diablo, or Devil, or—”

“Devlin?” Her breath coming uncharacteristically shallow and fast, Kat left the fireplace and walked up to Leo, her gaze searching his face.

“That’s it.” He gave her a wide-eyed look and she knew he was playing with her, had recalled Sebastian’s name all along. “Ah. I remember now,” he said, his head tipping to one side as he smiled up at her. “Devlin was one of your protectors, once. Is that not so? Before he went off to the wars to fight for King and country against the forces of evil and the Emperor Napoleon.”

“It was a long time ago.” Kat swung away and reached for her pelisse. She felt a sudden need to get away. To be alone.

Pushing back his chair, Leo came to his feet in one smooth motion, his hand reaching out to close on her upper arm, stopping her, forcing her back around so that he could look searchingly into her face. He was so languid, so slender and effete-looking, that one sometimes forgot both how swiftly he could move and what strength those long, thin fingers possessed.

She stared blandly back at him, calling upon all her training as an actress to keep her features inscrutable and willing the rapid, betraying beat of her heart to calm.

But he knew her well, Leo. He knew her talents and he knew, too, this one weakness she refused to admit, even to herself. A wry smile twitched one corner of his lips, then stilled. “When you’re only twenty-three,” he whispered, his hand coming up to touch her cheek in a movement that was not quite a caress, “nothing in your life was so long ago.”

Chapter 11

Sebastian spent what was left of the night in a small chamber above the Black Hart’s rear court. After one glance at the bed, he took off his boots, spread his greatcoat on a narrow wooden bench, and lay down upon it. He’d known worse, in the war: watchful nights spent on a cold, stony ground or listening to the scuttling of cockroaches across a dirt floor.

He did not sleep.

When dawn came, he rose from his makeshift bed and crossed to the window overlooking the rubbish-strewn yard below. The morning was raw and bitter cold, but he swung the casement open wide and drew the acrid air deep into his lungs, his thoughts on the events of the evening before.

It had always seemed to Sebastian that such moments came in every man’s life; pivotal instants when a chance occurrence or seemingly trifling decision could wrench a man away from what had appeared to be an inevitable future and send him hurtling in a different direction entirely. Yet it was difficult now to determine precisely when that moment in Sebastian’s life had come. With his own flash of quick anger and the constable’s misstep? Or had it come before that, the night before, with a promise given to a frantic, fearful woman?

Sebastian pursed his lips and blew out a long sigh. Despite everything that had happened, he couldn’t regret that promise, nor could he betray the woman to whom it had been made.

Drawing a small notebook from his pocket, he tore out a sheet of paper and scrawled quickly, Please give Melanie my assurances I shan’t betray her. No matter what happens, she mustn’t say anything to give herself away. Her life depends upon it. D. Folding the page once, twice, he wrote the