Her friend rushed over, closing the distance between them. “You’re here!” she said happily.
“What is going on?”
“This is… Rand…” A pink blush fell over Adairia’s cheeks. “Mr. Graham.”
Rand. “Mr. Graham?” she echoed in disbelief. Her gaze slid over to him.
“Yes, we were just playing a game of faro.”
“Faro?” she said, knowing she sounded like one of those parrots with which the old sailor Captain Marlow had limped around their end of London, but there was no helping it.
Adairia beamed and nodded. “I’m quite good.” She looked to London’s most ruthless gang leader. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Graham?”
Julia’s gaze swung to the well-clad figure with whom her friend spoke so easily and comfortably.
His dark lashes fell like blankets on his cheeks, making his eyes narrow pinpricks that revealed absolutely nothing, but not before she’d detected the absolute deadness in eyes so dark blue they were nearly obsidian.
Julia shivered, drawing her cloak closer. “If you’ll excuse us for a moment, Mr. Graham,” she said tightly.
He pushed back his chair and slowly unfurled to a towering six feet, five inches and stalked over.
She tensed as he paused beside her, giving her a once-over. And then, shockingly, he continued on for the doorway. The moment he’d gone, he closed the door behind himself, and some of the tension slid from her shoulders. His footfalls, however, never moved far beyond the hall, and she’d wager both her and Adairia’s lives that, at that moment, he lingered at the door to listen in.
Finding herself, Julia stalked over to Adairia and immediately drew her into her arms. The relief at finding her alive outweighed her shock and annoyance at the seeming friendship she’d struck up with the very man who’d been attempting to kill the both of them.
“I thought you were dead,” she rasped. Closing her eyes, she buried her head against Adairia’s shoulder.
“No. I’m quite alive and well.”
Julia made herself release her friend, but kept her hands upon her shoulders, afraid if she ceased touching her that she’d disappear from Julia’s life once more, and this time forever.
“I am ever so happy to see you,” Adairia said casually with a smile.
A smile? She would smile about this? As though there was any humor to be found in the fact that she’d been taken and Julia and the world had believed Adairia dead? “Why do you look so happy?” she asked, desperately trying to understand. “He’s a vile, deplorable man,” she reminded Adairia, keeping her words quiet.
But then, aside from the day she’d been sobbing for her mother outside that theater, Adairia had always worn a smile. In the hardest, coldest winters, when they’d had to snuggle close under a threadbare blanket to steal whatever warmth they could, to the times they’d had no food and only the tempting scents wafting from the bakeries they’d passed on the way to their work.
And Julia was proven wrong as, for this time, a frown brought the younger woman’s lips down at the corners. Adairia stepped out of Julia’s arms, putting several steps between them. “He’s really quite friendly and kind… and misunderstood.”
Friendly?
Kind?
Misunderstood?
Julia briefly closed her eyes. Only Adairia could and would see potential good in a place where absolutely none existed.
“He’s been trying to kill you,” she spoke bluntly. And because that apparently meant nothing at all to the other woman, she added, “He’s been trying to kill me.”
“Actually, he wasn’t.” Adairia returned to the velvet-covered gaming table and proceeded to gather up the cards, stacking them and adjusting the deck so it was neatly ordered. “He was attempting to bring us each in to meet with him so we could talk. There are others within Mr. Diggory’s previous faction who are attempting to silence the Lost Lords and Ladies. But Rand is decidedly not one of them.”
“Rand?” Julia couldn’t keep from asking. Her friend was on a first-name basis with the ruthless gang leader.
Dread deepened in her belly at the pale pink blush that marred Adairia’s cheeks. “Yes, Rand.”
Oh, God. This was even worse than she’d feared. Her impressionable, romantic sister from the streets had gone and fallen for him. “Surely you don’t believe that,” Julia implored anyway, refusing to believe that Adairia could ever come to care in any way for such a man.
Adairia paused in her tidying and looked across the table to Julia. “I do believe that,” Adairia said with the strength of conviction. There was a maturity to her tone, and her command of this exchange didn’t fit with the gentle, innocent soul after whom Julia had looked these years. And what was worse was the hardness in Adairia’s pretty blue eyes.
“Rand has been perfectly kind and polite.”
But the naïve belief she had in Rand Graham, however, was so very patently Adairia.
“He’s kept you here,” Julia said sharply. “Has he not?” Because the alternative was that Julia had been suffering with the grief of losing Adairia and the guilt of her inability to save her, while Adairia had been able to come back to her, but had chosen not to.
Adairia hesitated, and for a horrifying moment, Julia believed that Adairia had fallen so far under whatever spell Rand Graham had woven, she’d chosen to remain after all. “He was always going to allow me to leave. But he felt this was safer for me, and I knew you were in the duchess’ care, so we were both protected.”
He was a master manipulator, was what he was.
But then, everyone in the Dials and St. Giles, and all of East London, for that matter, had always known precisely that about the man who’d replaced Diggory.
It didn’t matter. Or it soon wouldn’t. After she got Adairia out of here, her sister would forget him, and
