pinned on his back.
A hand slid over the man’s shoulder. “He ain’t there anymore, lad,” an older man said gruffly. “Let ’im go.”
“No! Give him more of the hemlock.” Light gilded the man’s coppery hair and all Lynch saw was the color of blood. “We wait him out. He’ll come back.”
Then he was slipping into darkness, his body slackening against the steel that kept him pinned. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn’t catch even a hint of that familiar lemon scent.
Rosalind wrapped her arms around her and peered through the gloom. Beside her the soft rasp of Jack’s breath through the air filter itched over her nerves.
“Where is she?” she murmured, shivering against the cold. She felt it so deeply tonight. As if the fright of last night had leeched into her bones. She’d thought Lynch would be fine when they got him back to the guild. But he wasn’t.
“She’ll be here,” Jack said, his voice smooth and melodious. His throat was the one part of him that hadn’t been damaged by Balfour and his steady drip of acid. His lungs were another matter, hence the air filter in the mask. The thick coal-choked air of London was too rich for him, sending him into paroxysms of coughing without it. Sometimes she wondered if he wouldn’t be better off in the country, or somewhere along the Mediterranean, where the air was clear and warm. Maybe Italy, where there were no blue bloods and the church ruled supreme. He’d like that.
Rosalind dragged her pocket watch out of the tight waistcoat that cinched her curves and examined it. The back was a clear bubble of glass, revealing the winding brass cogs and gears within it, while the face was sheeted in pearl. A flicker of gaslight caught the pearl and turned it into a rainbow shimmer.
“Ten,” she muttered. As if to spite her, a bell rang nearby, over the rooftop spires of an old half-burned church. Once, twice, thrice… It droned on, cutting through the thick fog.
“I should have gone with Ingrid,” she murmured.
Jack shot her a look, his monocular eyeglass gleaming eerily in the low gaslight. “We only just got you back. I’m not letting you out again, not with those bleeders out there.” His voice roughened. “I’m not letting you near them ever again.”
She had nothing to say to that. If he found out the truth—the reason for the blood on her skirts when she’d fled back to the house and the shaking that she couldn’t quite stop in her hands—he’d have gone after Lynch with a pitchfork. As it was, she’d had to make up some story about being accosted on her way home by an anonymous blue blood.
It was the first lie she’d ever told her older brother. Growing up in the grim streets had hardened them both to the world and made them cling to each other. They couldn’t trust the world. Only each other. He’d had her back and she his for years, until that fateful day when she’d dipped a pocket and Balfour had seen her.
He’d recognized her as his own, one of the three children her mother had taken from him when she’d broken her thrall contract and fled from him. Rosalind had never truly known why her mother did that, though she could perhaps guess. By that stage, she’d been long dead and both Rosalind and Jack had done what needed to be done to survive. Jack knew her down to the very last inch of her soul.
“I’m fine,” she told him. “It was nothing that I couldn’t handle.”
“Wasn’t it?” He opened the small, copper air filter in the middle of his leather half mask and cupped his fingers around the hole, breathing into them to warm them. “You’ve been distracted of late.”
“I’m worried about Jeremy.”
“Are you?” The dipping baritone of his voice drew her gaze.
“What do you mean? Of course I’m worried about him.”
Slowly Jack lifted a gloved hand, his index finger sweeping a strand of her hair out of the way. His finger brushed against her neck tentatively. “You have a bite mark on the back of your neck. The kind a man gives his lover.”
She couldn’t breathe. Lynch. In the bathing room. He’d bitten her there, suckling the skin until she bruised and she’d forgotten all about it. Rosalind ducked away from his hand, tugging the collar of her coat higher. “Don’t.”
“You’re troubled,” Jack said quietly. “The last time I saw you like this was when you were sent to spy on Nathaniel.”
Rosalind turned away, staring out over the narrow alley. The brick was pitted and scarred and sheathed in thick coal dust, but she didn’t see any of it. Instead, Nate’s face swam into her mind.
Head of the humanist movement in London, he’d been an irrepressible fool who’d argued in the streets for human rights and had then dared take his arguments to the Ivory Tower. Organizing an interview with him, she’d had him wrapped around her finger before he’d even finished stammering a greeting. A ripe plum for the plucking. A week later, they’d been wed and she was Mrs. Nathaniel Hucker, the snake in his bed, reporting everything she heard back to Balfour.
A dreamer, yes. Naive. Blind. Yes. And the very best of men. Four months for him to melt her heart and make her start questioning everything Balfour had ever told her. She’d kept her doubts secret from Balfour, but not from Jack. Slowly the tides turned. She reported back to Balfour but only enough to ease his suspicions. And as she’d started listening to what Nate preached about human rights, she’d started to believe.
The conflict of loyalty had torn her in two. She’d fallen hopelessly in love with her husband, but by that time, Balfour had owned her body and soul for eight years. She’d killed for him. Spied for him. His little falcon. She’d have done anything for him.
Except kill Nathaniel.
“Who?” Jack asked simply.
Tears burned in Rosalind’s eyes. She shook her head and kept her gaze turned irrevocably away. What would he think if he knew what secret thoughts her heart kept producing? Nathaniel had been human but Lynch was not. Lynch was the very creature that Jack most feared.
“Lynch?” he asked, a hint of anger warming his voice. “Did he do this to you? Did he force you into his bed?”
“For God’s sake Jack, do you think any man—blue blood or not—could ever force me to do something I didn’t want to do?”
His gaze sharpened and she realized her mistake. “So you wanted him to bed you?”
Scraping a hand over her face, she looked for Ingrid. “He can help me find Jeremy. I need to lure him close, to—”
“To seduce a blue blood? You could let him actually touch you? To lay his blood-soaked hands on you?”
“He’s not like that.”
Jack fell silent. “This is exactly like Nathaniel.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I loved my husband. This is nothing like that, but I can’t deny…Lynch is… He’s nothing like the rest of the blue bloods. He tries to fight it.”
“Don’t forget what he is.”
“I know better than anyone what he is.”
“And what the hell does that mean?” Jack grabbed her arm.
“Nothing.” She pressed her lips together. This morning she’d stopped by the guild to see if he was recovering, but he still couldn’t recognize anyone. Garrett had refused to let her see him, stating that all Lynch wanted was her.
It scared her. She’d thought at the time that the worst thing he could do to her would be to drink her blood and drain her dry, but she’d been wrong. Instead, the demon inside him had claimed her as his own.
Imagine his fury when he discovered how she’d played him. Imagine…his hurt. Rosalind swallowed hard. She felt like she’d trapped herself in her own sticky spider web of lies and the weight of it was crushing her. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was too good for that.
Jack watched her, no doubt drawing his own conclusions. “You shouldn’t go back there. He’s making you
