Corroded

scuffle with a woman gone mad nearly a fortnight before. I’d solved the mystery surrounding her murdering spree, had revealed her tricks as a misuse of an alchemical serum, yet it had not ended well for either of us. She’d plummeted to her death, and nearly taken me with her to an unsightly grave.

It had been the last of my adventures before my subsequent marriage—and that the same night Hawke had offered me a bargain. Marry the earl, retire from this life of collection and London low escapades, and my debts would be forgiven.

I had done just that, taken that covenant with some small misgiving. I had hoped to earn for my staff the security of a countess.

If I had also hoped to rid myself of Hawke’s looming presence once and for all, I would never admit it aloud. What a fool was I. Although I had married my earl, it had only ended in blood.

I did not keep to my bargain. I returned to London below the drift, seeking sanctuary from my mother-in- law’s vengeful grief, and in so doing, found myself enslaved by the very debt I’d hoped to shake.

Hawke had never said what the bargain had cost him. I did not possess the fortitude to ask.

Hawke glanced over his shoulder. Though the Veil had spoken last, it was not to the voice he looked, but at me.

The breath stilled in my lungs. Even the tickle in my nose and throat, the faint queasiness the air instilled, faded to an aching point of pain at the bones of my wrist and the vivid blue flame trapped in the darkened gold of his stare.

Something cruel shaped the edge of his sculpted mouth; a frown that was as much a declaration of violent aversion as supreme conviction. “Shi.” A single syllable. I heard it often from the Chinese, and took it to mean yes.

Hawke, whatever was said, had agreed to something.

Laughter, strangely tinkling, provided me no answer at all.

I tugged at his grasp. “Unhand me this instant, Mr. Hawke.”

His nostrils flared with a sharp breath. “For once in your misspent life,” he said between gritted teeth, “hold your fool tongue.”

Where I would have ardently contested his summation of my history, I had no chance. He all but wrenched me off my feet, my shoulder twisted high and straining in its socket. Faced with the very likely risk of hurting myself, I seized the back of his shirt in my hand for balance and did my best to keep up with his stride.

The Chinese men watched me pass, and the Veil said nothing more.

Hawke did not so much unhand me as utilize my captive arm as a lever and maneuver me, tottering wildly with the suddenness of it, back out into the vast hallway. Servants passed, humble things that did not look up at the fracas, and I ignored them in turn as I whirled on Hawke. “How dare you?”

“Go make yourself useful.” He did not address my futile temper. “Do not make me regret this moment.”

“I regret this moment,” I snapped.

The hard line of his mouth tilted. A faint lift at one corner that was not a smile, not truly. The harsh edges of his exotic and sensual features, from square jaw to pronounced cheekbones, did inexplicable things to my innards. Most notably, that place between my legs where he had already tasted.

In that moment, I believed that a Gypsy woman had borne him; that he was Satan given flesh, a veritable serpent in his very own Garden of Eden.

And that I, an unwilling Eve, was ever so close to temptation.

I clenched one hand over my corset, like a silly miss determined to still a pounding heart. It did not succeed.

Hawke did not give me sign or signal that he knew. Instead, inclining his head in one of those infuriatingly mocking half-bows of his, he only murmured, “Good day, Miss Black,” and returned to the Veil’s room of crimson and gold.

The door closed behind him.

Belatedly, I shook my fist. “Not any more!” I shouted, hoping that the paneling was not so thick that he couldn’t hear me.

Servants gave me a wide berth, many carrying trays or baskets, and even the often painfully polite Chinese were staring as I glared at the door that had almost spelled my doom.

I was no stranger to the concept of copulation. I had grown up among auction rings and flesh-peddlers, be they high—or low-class. Yet I was virginal in true definition, and the ache Hawke left me with was enough to send me fleeing for less dangerous waters.

Like a collection. Or even a round in the pugilist rings where women were not allowed to go.

Or a forest full of hungry wolves.

My fingers cramped into fists; I smoothed them out. I was not as unintelligent as I’d made myself out to feel. I’d known what had nearly been laid upon me by the Veil’s impatience, how narrowly I’d escaped some unfortunate sentence involving more time spent servicing the Menagerie in one manner or another.

I had foregone my duties, my debts. It was well within the Veil’s rights to place me elsewhere on his roster.

Yet Hawke’s timely intervention had forestalled the judgment. The rapid syllables exchanged between them, culminating in a single, baritone, “Shi,” had gone too fast for me to follow. I could not even ask for translation; much of the dialect blurred.

He had saved me. Again. I had no doubt of this.

How much debt could I earn from one man?

More, if one debt was to the man who had acted for the Veil, and the other was to the man for acting against the Veil, where did that leave me?

I didn’t know. For now, I had been given a reprieve, and I had no recourse but to take it.

Quickly, before either body within that chamber could change his mind, I back-pedaled swiftly, turned and hurriedly made my way back into the gray daylight. I did not look at the servants—did not stop, this time, to care if they were English or immigrants; fair-skinned, yellow or black.

The Veil hired, indentured, and—I had no doubt—enslaved all who were willing to work. Or unwilling to pay.

I had fallen among that number. The narrow escape afforded by Hawke’s timely intervention would not last. Whatever my half-formed plans and ideals had been, I had no choice but to face the truth of it: the Veil was very much aware of my existence.

Not only of my existence, bad as that was, but that I had hopes of cheating them out of the debt they demanded of me. The one was difficult enough, for it drew the Karakash Veil’s eye upon me. I was an independent resource, an uncertainty in the Veil’s structured Menagerie.

Or, rather, I thought of myself as such.

The Veil had just corrected that fallacy.

I could not hope to collect man after man and earn nothing for it. It would no longer suffice to ease my debt.

Damn the Veil and the Menagerie with it.

The impossibly narrow tightrope I walked had just been made apparent. A fitting metaphor, certainly, for I had been in that overly warm chamber before. I bargained for my life, wagered the price of my flesh against the debt they demanded of me—all I’d managed to ensure was that I would not take part in the flesh-peddling auction rings the Menagerie placed its sweets within.

That left far too much I could be forced to do. Whatever the Veil had intended to say before Hawke’s bold interruption, I shuddered to think it may involve the large red canvas and the circus I had no desire to see, much less participate in.

I did not know what I would do if they placed me in that big top tent.

Simply thinking of it was enough to sour my insides, turn anger and indignation to sickly cowardice and choking fear.

I may not remember all that had been done to me in Monsieur Marceaux’s Traveling Curiosity Show—I might even think of some fondness about the bits I cared to recall—but what I could not recall in daylight hours woke me, gasping for air and bathed in clammy sweat, in the darkest of my nightmares.

Death was a mercy for those who were lucky enough to fall, to move just wrong enough, to bend when they