They rolled her up like a rug and Hugo carried her into the decrepit old coach he’d hired. He lowered her onto the seat and sat beside her, holding her propped upright.
Kenny shut the door, climbed on back, and the wheels started rolling.
Hugo peeled back the cloak just enough so that he could see Laura’s wide, red-rimmed gaze.
He clucked his tongue and carefully tucked some of her brittle blonde hair behind her ears. “Didn’t expect to see me back here, did you?” Hugo smirked when she tried to speak around the mouthful of rag. “No, no, you don’t need to talk just yet. There will be plenty of time for that shortly.” He chuckled. “Someday—not tonight, of course—I will have to tell you about the lovely journey that I took thanks to you. But for now, just rest assured that I am back and going nowhere. You, however—but I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I’ve been watching you these past days and nights, darling, because I wanted to see the state of things at Solange’s before we had our little chat.”
Laura’s eyes widened and she began making noises.
“What I learned surprised me—and not a pleasant surprise, either. It appears you’ve gambled away not only your half of the business, but also managed to transfer my half to Bev Davies—a man whose hobbies include torturing and killing people. It seems like the only way I’ll ever work at Solange’s again will be on my bloody back.”
Two fat tears slid down her cheeks, which only infuriated Hugo more.
“Fifteen years of hard work gone without a trace. Well done, you sodding bitch.” Hugo shoved her away. He’d never struck a woman before and he’d be damned if he allowed Laura to drag him down any further.
They rode for a while in silence while Hugo glared out the window into the London night and struggled to get himself under control.
When the carriage slid to a halt a quarter of an hour later, he was almost calm. He turned back to Laura, who was quietly sobbing behind her gag.
Hugo experienced a pang of remorse.
And then instantly wanted to punch himself in the face.
How dare you feel sorry for this gin-soaked, card-obsessed, duplicitous slattern? he demanded of himself, giving vent to a muffled growl of fury before he flung open the carriage door.
The air stank of rotting fish and the eye-watering stench of the Thames at low tide.
“Carry her inside,” Hugo told Kenny as he navigated the buckled cobblestone, passing below a tattered wooden sign proclaiming: Drunken Duck Tavern, Est. 1687.
The front door swung open before Hugo reached it, exposing an almost painfully handsome young man named Daniel Charters. Like Kenny, he’d also worked at Solange’s before Laura had sacked him and a dozen other servants in her quest to save money.
“Everything is ready, Mr. Hugo.”
“Thank you, Daniel.”
The inn had been one of the busier hostelries on the water for decades but had closed when the silt made this part of the river inaccessible to big ships. The owner had been pitifully grateful to rent the derelict building to Hugo for a few nights, no questions asked.
Only one of the inn rooms on the second floor was lighted and Hugo went inside, pleased to see that Daniel had covered the window as he’d asked.
Hugo had been tempted to throw Laura into Newgate—naked, as she’d done to him—and let her kick her heels in some true squalor and misery, but the deciding factor had been his aversion to visiting the rancid jail in order to speak to her.
“Put her on the pallet,” he told Kenny.
The moment the giant man put Laura down she began to thrash. Hugo leaned against the wall, crossed his arms, and waited for her to free herself from the cloak.
Once she’d done so she pulled the rag out of her mouth and pressed her back against the wall, her blood-shot eyes darting from Hugo to Kenny to Daniel like a cornered animal.
“If not for me you’d be dead,” she said, her voice hoarse from screaming into the gag. “He wanted—”
“Shut up,” he said, more than a little surprised when she obeyed. He jerked his head at Daniel. “Daniel had some very interesting things to tell me.”
She scowled at the gorgeous young footman. Hugo knew for a fact that Daniel didn’t swing toward the ladies so that must have doomed him as far as Laura was concerned.
“You can’t believe him, Hugo. He’s just angry I fired him.”
“Because you sold the bloody place to a bastard too cheap to pay a decent wage, you gin-soaked, worn-out slattern,” Daniel shot back.
Laura opened her mouth to argue.
“Shut up, Laura,” Hugo said again. “You should be grateful that you’re here in this filthy little room and not floating in the Thames, locked in Newgate, or currently headed toward warmer climes” He narrowed his eyes. “Now, tell me how much? How much did it cost for Bev to get his hands on my bloody business?”
Laura caught her lower lip in her teeth. “I don’t know exactly—”
“An estimate.”
Laura named an amount.
“Holy fuck!” Hugo yelled. He felt as if every nightmare he’d experienced in his entire life had returned all at once. “Are you bloody mad? How in the name of hell did you manage to lose so much?”
Tears slid down her ravaged cheeks. “He let me punt on tick, didn’t he? And before I knew it …” Her shoulders sagged. “At first he just said he’d take payments. But there was interest, too. I gave him almost everything and it still wasn’t enough. And … and—”
“And you continued to visit his gaming hells?” Hugo guessed.
She shrugged.
“He wanted you to keep playing, didn’t he.”
She didn’t need to answer.
“So once you were over your head he gave you the option of getting rid of me and then signing over the business?”
She chewed her chapped, peeling lip and cut him a
