“Aye, I’m scared. I’m scared that we don’t have enough money to fill our bellies. I’m scared we’ll have to turn ourselves to whoring.” Which, by the grace of God—nay, to hell with that fake figure. Which, by the grace of Adairia’s songbirdlike voice, which she employed at the start of and end of every Coven Garden production, they’d been spared. “And you know what else I’m scared of?” she demanded, taking a furious step closer and angling her head back to meet the taller, willowier woman’s gaze. “I’m scared that you don’t have the sense God gave a damned flea to know this is a ploy of Graham’s, one where you end up dead or worse.” A test that Adairia was failing mightily.
“What kind of ploy could it possibly be?” Adairia asked with all the exasperation only one of her innocence could manage.
“I don’t…know,” Julia said. “Perhaps he’ll use you to get money from the peerage. Or perhaps he wants to see if you would point fingers of blame at people from these streets. All I know is I can’t get it through your goddamned head,”—Julia jammed a finger into her own forehead—“there isn’t a damned way out for you or me. We do not have time for children’s games and bloody fairy tales. You aren’t the damned princess you claimed to be the day we met, and you certainly aren’t one now. My mum went where you said you were from and asked whether they’d lost a child. There was no lost daughter. There was no earl. Now, if you could just… let this rest, before Graham’s people get wind of it and nick the both of us.” Cursing herself for saying all those damning words as loudly as she had, Julia lowered her voice to a whisper. “Please, Adairia.”
Adairia’s stricken eyes stared back, ravaging even Julia’s life-hardened breast with guilt.
Hell. Fear made a person do shite things in life. But yelling at one’s only family? That was the worst. “Oi don’t want ye to feel bad,” she said gruffly, slipping briefly from the proper King’s English to the coarse cockney her mother had abhorred and had gone to efforts to instruct her out of. Julia looked about and moved closer to her sister. “It is just the more you spin this yarn, the more likely it is we’re going to find ourselves… in a bad way.”
Nay, there was only one fate that awaited them were Adairia’s wishful imaginings about being the niece of a duke overheard. Gooseflesh climbed along her arms. Dead. They’d find themselves dead, and likely raped, beaten, and bloodied bad enough beforehand that they’d be grateful when that blade was last stuck inside them, ending their misery. Because those who’d been involved with the children being taken and sold to Mac Diggory wanted nothing more than their role in those abductions to go away.
Even so, she didn’t want to hurt the other woman. “I’m sorry they’ve filled your head with this, Adairia,” she said with all the gentleness she could. “I truly am.” A pained laugh spilled from her lips. “Do you truly think I wouldn’t, more than anything in the world, want this to be real? But it’s not.” She held the younger woman’s eyes, trying to will her to see the truth. “It’s not, Adairia,” she said, this time infusing a greater emphasis meant to puncture the fantasies her friend had let herself believe these past years.
“It is,” Adairia whispered, touching a hand to her heart. Such intensity radiated from within the blue depths of Adairia’s irises that Julia shivered. “I know it. I believe it. And this is our path out.”
Our path out.
As if there was such a thing. How did a person even come to believe such a thing in these parts?
Because that was what kept her sane.
“There’s no path out, Adairia,” she said quietly. “There’s just work and more work. There isn’t the happily-ever-afters of the stories you used to tell. And then we die. I’ll head to Colvill’s for their day’s refuse,” she said, of the exotic nursery near Sloane Square. “You head to Knight’s.” Because as it stood now? They didn’t have a damned bloom to sell.
Adairia beamed. “We’ll be fine. You’ll see!”
With that, Julia wheeled around and went in search of the hothouse-flower shops’ waste. “Stupid, silly magic,” she muttered as she trudged onward to Hillier’s Flower Shop.
Stepping quick, Julia headed westward toward the florist. She should have gone there first. But she, like all the other peddlers, had seen that handsome toff raining flowers down on them.
She should have known better. Julia did know better. She’d gotten careless.
It was all Adairia’s talk of magic and easy living and—
Two figures stepped into her path, bringing her up short.
Oh, bloody hell.
She eyed the hulking pair warily.
Both bald, both toothless, and both attired in matching crimson garments, they might as well have been twins. The similar look of them, however, marked them as members of Rand Graham’s gang.
“We got questions for ye.”
Julia eyed the pair and the path behind her. “Step aside,” she demanded. “I’ve a place to be.”
One of the fellows took a step forward, and she instinctively backed away.
“Ye were given a cloak. ’Ad some dealings ye did with a lady?” he asked. “Or was that the other one?”
Oh, God. No.
“It was me,” she said quickly. That damned cloak. A gift given to her by some benevolent lady on the street. She’d said she’d be wise to sell it. She’d known it made her and Adairia a mark of some sort, but Adairia had desperately wanted it.
Both brutes peered more closely at her.
“You wouldn’t just be saying that now, would ye?”
Calm. Be calm. Revealing too much in these parts was perilous. “I wouldn’t,” she said evenly.
