… relationship with Diggory lasted two years…
… the relationship also bore a daughter… by the name of Jewels…
… sold flowers with her mother from the age of four or five, until her recent disappearance…
Julia slammed the page down. “You’re wrong.” Her heart raced. He had to be.
“I’m not, and I trust you know that.”
“I don’t know that,” she said sharply.
And yet…
Your father was a sailor. Big and brawny and powerful.
Julia frantically searched her mind for everything she remembered about the man named Diggory. Tall. Powerful. Sweat popped up on her skin.
A Scottish fellow named Mackenzie. Everyone feared him, but he was ever so gentle with me.
Mackenzie…
Everyone feared him.
A little moan escaped her, and she bit her lip to keep the remainder of that misery in.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she fought to breathe, but her airflow was nonexistent because of the cinch about her lungs. If what was written there was truth, then that would mean Julia shared the blood of London’s most evil, ruthless villain. A monster among men whose reach had been so great, it extended beyond the grave and lived on in a crew still loyal to upholding his memory and the power he’d amassed.
Her entire being arched and twisted away from that truth.
“Diggory had an obsession with the peerage.”
“I know that,” she said tightly. Between his clubs and the tales of the children he’d kidnapped, the whole world had known of that sick fascination.
Steele leaned in. “After she fell heavy with child, your mother ceased to have any contact with Diggory, but it did not stop her from believing she could reestablish her connection. There are some who’ve confirmed her efforts. Your mother, Delilah…she found a child with noble roots.”
It took a moment to register what he was saying, what he was suggesting. And when she did, Julia went first hot and then cold and then hot again all over. She was already shaking her head.
“It is my belief that she did so in an attempt to make herself appealing once more to Diggory. At that point, however, he’d no interest in daughters born of the peerage.”
She jerked, feeling like she’d been run through. “I don’t…” Believe this or understand.
Except…that day she had first spied Adairia slipped forward.
“Look at that little girl, Julia. She is lost. Go fetch her.”
It had been her mother who had pointed out the sobbing child. It had been Julia’s mother who’d urged her to collect her.
And Julia had. God help her, she had done precisely what her mother wished that day, never knowing…never suspecting that anything other than altruism had guided her.
I am going to throw up.
“That girl your mother found and didn’t return was Adairia,” he finally said, jerking Julia from her tortured thoughts.
Her mother had found Adairia, but she’d never made any effort to locate the girl’s family, and in that failure, what she’d done was no different than had she kidnapped the child. And no matter how unwitting, Julia had been just as responsible.
She dug her fingertips against her temples.
Steele dragged his chair closer, sitting so near their knees almost touched. “If you knew, Julia,” he said quietly, “there is no crime—”
She let her shaky hands fall to her lap. “I didn’t,” she cut in on a whisper. “I’m not…” Nay, she wasn’t the things this man claimed. She wasn’t evil.
Oh, God. Her entire body recoiled from what he’d shared. Lies. Untruths.
“Perhaps you felt you had no choice. You were a child yourself,” he said with a gentleness she’d wager he used with all the criminals whose sins he sought to pull from lying lips. “I knew Diggory. No one would fault you for doing that which you had to… in the name of living.”
No.
Had she known?
Closing her eyes, she dug her fingertips against her temples. Think. Think.
What if she’d known?
Pretty as a princess, she is. A real ladylike sort, isn’t she?
“Your mother fell out of his favor. He’d no need for”—Julia—“children who didn’t fit with his plans,” Steele said. “She saw her. She took her.”
Julia gave her head a shake and pushed the page back at him. “No,” she repeated. Steele, however, refused to take that sheet.
“She saw Adairia as a way to curry favor with the one man who held all the power over St. Giles.”
A moan escaped her, and her fingers curled into balls, wrinkling the paper. “You’re wrong.” Only, now it made sense as to why Rand Graham’s men had attempted to silence Julia. Graham and the ones involved assumed she knew something.
“I’m not,” he said quietly, and the sadness in his eyes was real. The pity.
And that was when she knew the truth he handed over, the one she’d known deep inside.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling you this because I’ve reason to believe Adairia is alive, and if she is, and you have some connection with Rand Graham and his gang, you might be able to lead me to her.”
Her entire body jolted as through the horror that had gripped her came a slashing bright light of hope. Julia scrambled to the edge of her seat. “What?” she whispered, afraid to dare hope he spoke the truth. Afraid to believe this one piece she desperately wanted to be real.
Except, if what he said was true, then that would mean… Julia had left Adairia to her own devices.
Her hope died a swifter death than a flickering candle in a gust of wind. “They would have killed her already.”
“An ethereal woman with whitish-blonde curls was seen with Graham…”
Oh, God.
Julia choked on her horror. Death… it would have been preferable… to this. She pressed her palms against her face, wanting to blot
