“Miss Smith,” Steele said with a gentle firmness.
Julia let her arms fall, and she stared blankly at the man seated across from her.
He rested a hand on her shoulder, jolting her from the torturous thoughts spiraling too fast out of control. “Who sired you doesn’t define you. Nor do the actions you were forced to take as a child.”
I didn’t take them, she silently screamed. Except, she might as well have. If what he spoke was true, she was as complicit as her mother and every other man or woman who’d committed crimes on the streets of London. Her pulse pounded hard in her ears.
“I was a pickpocket. My wife… sired by Diggory.”
She raised a vacant gaze to his. What was he saying? His wife…
Julia jerked her stare from his. It was another detective’s trick. “What do you intend to do?” she asked.
“What I have to. Inform the Duchess of Arlington the information I’m now in possession of.”
He had to tell them. The duchess employed him. And Julia was a stranger. She was nothing more than a stranger.
But I can make this right. He’d all but given her the names of those in the Dials who’d have a hand on Adairia. If she got to them… If she could find Adairia… “May I tell them… first? About my mother, that is,” she pleaded, searching for more time for herself. “I promise, I will…”
“Miss Smith,” he said kindly.
Julia bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. “No. No. I understand.” She glanced down at the page in her hands.
“That one is for you.”
A panicky laugh built in her chest. Like a little gift. A damning, shameful gift he’d proffered. There was another for the duchess… and Harris.
And there could be no doubting that Harris, with the past heartbreak he’d known at his late wife’s hands, would never trust that Julia’s motives had ever been anything pure. Unless she righted past wrongs. She scraped a hand through her hair, knocking loose combs that clattered with little pings upon the hardwood floor.
“If there is anything you can tell me… if your mother made mention of any of his hideouts, places that I and others might not be aware of.”
He truly believed she was in bed with Diggory’s accomplices. “I don’t know these things,” she whispered. “My mother told me nothing about him. Everything I know is because I lived in East London the same as anyone else. He didn’t…” Hide.
A memory slipped in.
Your father wasn’t a man who hid. He was as swashbuckling as a pirate. Bold as you pleased.
“Miss Smith?”
She blinked slowly.
“Is there anything else you think you might provide that could prove helpful in locating Adairia?”
The one who’d stepped in to fill the void left by Diggory also would not hide. Nor would he allow an investigator to slip through his doors and freely take something, or someone, out from under him.
She shook her head. “I… don’t know.”
Steele stood, and she had to remind herself to move. She shot to her feet. “That will be all, then.” With that, he collected his belongings. “I intend to share all of this with Her Grace and Lord Ruthven.”
As he should. He’d been hired by them. Julia had another urge to vomit, and she swallowed reflexively again the bile burning her throat. “Of course.”
If what he’d said was true, then Adairia had not been lost that day outside the Covent Garden theater. She’d been all but kidnapped by Julia’s mother as an offering to Mac Diggory. Julia’s entire life proved a lie. Her mother’s motives, once seeming good and pure, were soaked in the evilness of what had truly driven her.
There could be no doubting that every ill opinion held by Harris would only be confirmed when he learned about Julia’s mother’s actions. Nay, neither he nor the duchess, nor anyone, for that matter, could or should forgive Julia. Not given what, according to Steele, her mother had done.
And it turned out she’d lied to him after all. She did have a surname, and it belonged not to a kind Scottish sailor who’d failed to return, but rather, to the most ruthless, hated man in all of East London.
She steeled her jaw. There was just one thing left to do, one thing that could make up, in some small way, for her mother’s sins. She would find Adairia and bring her back to the home she’d always wished to be.
With that, Julia did what she should have done that first moment that lie to the duchess and Harris had left her lips, she fled.
Chapter 19
The duchess’ niece was alive.
It was a familiar tale they’d been told countless times before.
This time, however, those suspicions had been brought by one of London’s most successful and famed detectives.
When Steele finished his telling, the room remained silent. The older women, who were never without a word between the three of them, were absolutely quiet.
From where he stood in the corner of the room, Harris took in the duchess’ reaction.
“Adairia is… alive,” the duchess whispered.
“I have every reason to believe she is,” Steele affirmed. “I have spoken to the young woman to ascertain just how much she knows of Miss Adairia’s fate. I cannot say for certain as to whether Miss Smith had a hand in the lady’s disappearance.”
Harris’ body tensed, his chest tightening as he silently screamed a declination. She couldn’t have. Even as she’d proved a deceiver in other ways, he could not believe she would be capable of… that evil.
The duchess frowned. “Of course she did not have a hand in her disappearance,” the
