"That's what I pay others to do."
"I see." Adele captured her skirts and swished around the desk, keeping it between them as she moved. Nervousness lit along her spine. She wasn't precisely certain what put that look in his eyes, or what he intended to do with her. None of this was what she'd expected, but she was starting to put the pieces together. "Just why do you have a photograph of the bomb scene from our engagement party on your map?"
"Maybe I planned it."
Adele's eyes narrowed. "It's not your style."
"Oh. What is my style?" Malloryn undid his cravat, dragging it from around his throat and curling the strip of linen around his fist. The movement was oh-so-precise and hearkened back to the other morning in her bedchamber when he'd bound her wrists to her bed. Probably meant to intimidate her, but then she was starting to understand this man. Starting to learn all of his tells.
The second she let him intimidate her was the second she let him play her. She'd grown up under her father's thumb; Malloryn was good, but he had nothing on Sir George Hamilton.
With a smile, she stopped by the brandy decanter and poured herself a drink, nursing it as she leaned back against the bookcase. "The bombing was far too messy. Your style is a knife in the dark, isn't it? It's a disappearance that cannot be accounted for—rather like Ulbricht. And there's never, ever, any messiness left behind. You hate it when I rearrange the saltcellars on the dining table" —which was precisely why she did it so often— "and you have to put all the books back in their right place after I've been through your library and left them lying around. And interrupting your daily schedule makes that muscle in your jaw jump, just like it's doing now." Lifting the brandy to her lips, she sipped it, the fiery liquor scoring her mouth. "You like the queen. You keep the pin she gave you after you helped her overthrow her husband in your desk drawer. You like the Duchess of Casavian and her husband, Lord Barrons, and they were directly in the path of that bomb. Which brings me to the conclusion you didn't plan it." She looked at the board, at the map, all those pins, and felt again the revelation she'd discovered earlier. "You're trying to find who did."
It made sense.
He had been taking care of business, after all.
Someone was taking all of Malloryn's neatly ordered plans—his precious London, the city he'd fought so hard to bring to order—and casting chaos into its midst.
"Those people downstairs.... I remember them from our engagement party when that vampire suddenly appeared. And from our wedding, when someone tried to kill me. They stopped it all from happening. They're working for you. They're trying to hunt the people behind all of this." She was breathless. "That's what you're doing here, isn't it?"
Silence.
"You put all of that together... from a map?" he asked incredulously.
Malloryn wasn't the first person who'd underestimated her. But it infuriated her suddenly. Her father had scorned her mind and forced her into her preordained role as a thrall. Her mother had never offered her a chance to escape. She'd always known she was more than what they'd tried to make her.
And somehow, in the last week, she'd begun to feel as though her husband believed it too. "Did you think me an idiot?"
Malloryn blinked. Then those gorgeous eyes became half-lidded again, as if he was sorting through possible answers in his mind. "No. Never that. How did you find me?"
"I asked a friend of mine to follow you. I thought you were with.... The letters that kept arriving at the house at all times of the day. The constant 'something came up' or 'business.' I thought you were still seeing her."
"Her." Her husband stared at her, his eyes calculating and only his fingers twitching slightly as he caressed his cravat. Slowly, he let it drop. Then he crossed his arms over his chest. "Her, who?"
"Your bloody paramour—" She paused. Malloryn wasn't stupid, and he looked cautious now. That wasn't a denial, but more of a sounding out. "Who else would you have thought I suspected?"
Was there someone else?
"I have many contacts. I just wasn't certain who you were referring to."
"Contacts? Like the women downstairs?"
"The women downstairs work for me," he replied. "And if I even looked twice at any of them, I'm sure their husbands would take askance at such a thought."
Something wasn't right here. Her husband was known for playing games, for dictating the narrative about his life. "Was there even a Mrs. Danner?"
"There is a Mrs. Danner onstage at the Capitol," he replied calmly. "A very voluptuous brunette with a known temper. I send her flowers once a week, and spend at least one evening out on the town with her before we 'retire.'"
"Retire?" She hated how stupid it made her sound.
"Giulia goes to bed and reads, and I slip out her back window where no one can see me."
The floor dropped out from under her. "You let the world believe you were having an affair with an Italian soprano?"
"Is it the world that has you so bothered, or is it you?"
"You let me believe you were having an affair with an opera singer."
Just to be clear on the matter.
"I didn't let you believe anything. You reached that conclusion yourself. It was convenient for me to have a reason to disappear at times. Mrs. Danner played into that illusion. I paid her quite handsomely to be discreet and to make reference to me, and in return I got to slip quietly about London when people think I am elsewhere."
Adele's mouth fell open. She had been played. And right on the heels of that realization came other conclusions. The photograph with Devoncourt. The begetting of an heir. The sudden interest her husband took in her.
It left her breathless.
If he'd wanted an heir, he would have bedded her. But no, he'd been amusing himself with her. Whispering promises of seduction... and fulfilling none of them.
There were too many doubts suddenly rearranging themselves into suspicions in her head.