A quick glance at her pocket watch told her she’d best hurry. It was almost half eight and she had to be home before nine. If she were caught out, she’d be arrested.
Fifteen minutes later, she took out her key in front of the door that led to her leased apartment. The door jerked open.
Rosalind slapped a hand to her chest as Ingrid glared at her over the threshold. “Damn it, Ingrid. Are you trying to give me a fit of the nerves?”
“Nerves?” Ingrid asked in a smoky voice. “You?”
Rosalind pushed past. The door slammed and then the lock clicked behind her as she tugged at her gloves, each finger at a time. She hated wearing them; they made her right hand sweat and it was difficult to grip a pistol with them. But if anyone caught a glimpse of her bio-mech hand, they’d alert the authorities. It was clearly not enclave work.
Mech limbs never came cheaply and it sometimes took as many as fifteen years in the enclaves for a mech to pay off his debt. After they had worked off their bond, they often returned to the enclaves as free men—or women. The streets of London weren’t the same for a person with a mech enhancement. The Echelon saw them as less than human and, therefore, without even the punitive rights most humans lived by.
Sometimes Rosalind wondered if it would be better if she’d not had the replacement, not that she’d had the choice. It made her stand out and that was dangerous in her world. But it also gave her two working limbs and that was invaluable for an assassin.
Rosalind tossed the gloves aside, flexing her steel fingers.
There’d been five of them in total. Balfour’s enemies. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing they’d been blue bloods. Still…
Shoving them aside, into that little mental compartment in her mind that she kept locked, she turned toward the sitting room and the decanter there. The fire was stoked, casting a merry light over the stuffed armchairs, with their wilted lace doilies clinging to the backs and a mahogany table between them. Sparse accommodations, but then she didn’t truly live here. This was just a facade for her little game.
Silence lingered and she cast a distracted glance over her shoulder. Ingrid leaned against the doorjamb, a frown drawing her dark brows together. “You
The problem with living with a verwulfen—their enhanced senses could smell anything. Rosalind shrugged out of her cape and feathered hat, discarding them on an armchair. “I’m tired. I’ve been dragged to Kensington and back, upstairs, downstairs, and then home again, with no luncheon or refreshment to speak of. The man’s a machine—a well-oiled machine that runs on fumes.”
She sank into the remaining armchair and slumped in an unladylike manner. Lynch had been an unstoppable force today, his mind making leaps of logic that even she struggled to follow. He questioned everything, checking over every inch of the house. The only aberrance they’d found had been a pair of small metal balls in the dining room that looked somewhat like the clockwork tumbler balls children played with in the streets. The sickly sweet smell lingered around them, though undoubtedly the children had been behind their presence.
Ingrid stepped closer, dragging a footstool forward and tugging Rosalind’s boots up before straddling the edge of the footstool herself. “Got something for you.”
Slipping a slim, rectangular box out of her waistcoat, she handed it to Rosalind. From the weightlessness, the box might have been empty.
Rosalind opened it. A thin, pale glove of almost translucent material lay on crumpled tissue paper. The artistry was exquisite, with fine blue veins of cotton barely showing through the outer layer of synthetic skin and slick scars that looked like ancient burn marks marring the back of the hand. Small oval scales were embedded into the fingertips with painted half-moons and a rosy hue.
“Synthetic skin,” she murmured. “Where did you get this?”
“There’s a man in Clerkenwell who knows someone who does this sort of thing. I asked him for it.”
“This must have cost a fortune.” Rosalind looked up. “Ingrid, how did you pay for this?”
Their eyes locked, the burnished gold of Ingrid’s irises flaring. “Made some money in the Pits,” she admitted.
“Ingrid!” The Pits were notorious dens in the East End where men pitted themselves against other men—or even beasts. Sometimes the fights stopped when a contestant was unconscious. Sometimes not.
Forbidding it wouldn’t stop the other woman. Indeed, quite the opposite. Still, she had to say something. “You’re not invulnerable.”
“The fighting helps to keep me temper under control. And I don’t like you being unprepared. If the Nighthawk asks to see your hands,” Ingrid said, “then what shall you do?”
Rosalind slowly closed the lid over the glove. “It won’t hold up under scrutiny.”
“No. But all you got to do is let him catch a glimpse so he don’t start getting suspicious.”
“Thank you,” Rosalind murmured.
Ingrid nodded gruffly. She’d never say how worried she was, but she was fretting and that would put her on edge. They’d first met when Ingrid had been just a little girl, trapped in a cage in Balfour’s menagerie. Rosalind had been well fed and cared for, but she had been a pawn-in-training, just as alone in some ways as Ingrid. The pair of them had struck up a friendship and eventually Balfour had let Ingrid out of the cage at times to duel with her. Of course, pitting her against an opponent who was stronger and faster than her, but untrained, had been nothing more than a test of her skills.
He’d underestimated the bond the two girls had struck however.
Ingrid cleared her throat “No word of Jeremy?”
“I haven’t had a chance to look. There was a massacre.” Rosalind didn’t know what else to call it. “Lord Falcone tore his household apart then tried to do the same to us.” She swiftly relayed the day’s events as Ingrid tugged off her boots. The woman dug her thumb into Rosalind’s heels and her eyes glazed. She was half tempted to shut them, but the memory of Mordecai’s face flashed through her mind. She’d been trained to always finish her report, no matter what state she was in. “I saw Mordecai there. He was outside, watching the house.”
Ingrid froze, then her thumbs slowly resumed their massage. “Did he have anything to do with it?”
“I don’t know.” Rosalind rubbed at her forehead. “I’m beginning to suspect they had some plan up their sleeve when they broke with us, something they didn’t deem fit to share with the rest of us.”
“A weapon?”
“Something that drives a blue blood into bloodlust.” She’d considered the thought many times today. “I’ve never heard of the like. But why else would he be there? And how did he do it? Is it a poison? A toxin in the air or in Falcone’s cup of blood? An injection perhaps?” She shook her head. “No, not an injection. Lynch had the body examined thoroughly this afternoon, back at headquarters. He wouldn’t have missed something like that.”
“He might have.”
Rosalind laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t know the man. He’s painstakingly thorough.” Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe I’m aware of half of his thought processes. There’s nothing on his face, but I know he’s thinking. Always thinking.”
“Does he suspect you?”
“I don’t believe so,” she replied. “He was distracted by the case.” Rosalind considered the day’s events and the way Lynch had glanced at her. “And he would never suspect his pretty young secretary is his adversary. He’s attracted to me.”
Why had she blurted that out?
Ingrid’s eyes narrowed. “You smell nervous again.”
Rosalind shoved to her feet, her skirts swishing around her stockinged ankles. “Of course I’m nervous. The man’s a blue blood.”
“As long as you don’t forget that,” Ingrid said.
“I never forget.” Nathaniel’s face swam into her mind and a pang of grief soured Rosalind’s embarrassment. She still felt his loss each night, when she slid into her blankets and he wasn’t there. The days weren’t so bad, but the nights… She had nothing to distract herself then.
The blue bloods had taken him away from her forever. It might have been Balfour’s hand, but it was by the Council’s edict. The threat of the humanist movement had been so terrifying to them that they’d had a harmless
