But I’ve found him . . .
Broderick stopped over him. He kicked the prone man in the side with the tip of his boot. A hiss of pain whistled past the drunkard’s lips as he jerked awake. Broderick took a perverse pleasure in the fear that replaced the confused glint in the man’s eyes.
“You,” the man rasped.
Broderick smirked. “Me.”
“Oi didn’t think ya’d find me.” The faint slur hinted at a man with a weakness for cheap spirits and a carelessness that should have seen him with a blade in the belly long ago.
“You should think less and run more, Walsh.” Broderick gleefully doled out the first advice Mac Diggory had given him, a blubbering mess of a boy scared of his own breath.
The greying man struggled up onto his elbows. “Why would Oi run?”
“Because you kidnapped a marquess’s son.” A boy who became a brother to me. Broderick forced an icy smile. “Because I now intend to drag you to that very marquess himself.” Only this visit would not be one of empty words about what had happened that no nobleman would ever trust, but one with the thug truly responsible for those crimes in tow.
Except . . .
There was a marked calm to Walsh.
He was . . . too calm.
Broderick swiped his blade back and forth over his gloved palm. “You are not the only one I’m searching for.” He did a sweep of the narrow alley, all the while knowing the other wretch he sought had gone. But he had one, and for now, that was enough.
A cocksure smirk marred Walsh’s gaunt face. “She ain’t ’ere.”
Bloody fucking hell. Broderick flashed a hard grin. “I’ll find her later, then. For now, I’ll deal with just you.” He ground the bastard’s hand under the slight heel of his boot.
“Ahhh!” Those cries carried forlornly and familiarly around Monmouth, cries that would be heard and invariably ignored in these merciless streets.
“You deserve this.” Broderick buried his foot in the bastard’s stomach. He’d brought a stolen child into Broderick’s life, and that same boy who’d become a brother to him would now go on to another—to his rightful family.
Agony spearing him, Broderick kicked Walsh again.
The street rat rolled onto his side. Clutching dirt-blackened hands around his middle, he glowered up at Broderick. “Ya think torturing me will make a bloody difference,” he panted. “Ya’re strong, but ya’re nothing compared to a bloody nob.”
Aye, that much was true. Having been born to a powerful nobleman’s man-of-affairs, Broderick had known precisely how the world was ordered and his place in it. “Ah, but you see . . .” Leaning down, he stuck his blade against the man’s enormous Adam’s apple. Walsh’s throat bobbed wildly, and Broderick reveled in the scent of fear that clung to Walsh, more pungent than even the cheap whiskey on his breath.
“I don’t need to be more powerful than a nob,” he whispered, trailing his knife tauntingly back and forth. A crimson bead pebbled on Walsh’s skin and trickled a winding path down his threadbare, stained white shirt.
“P-please,” Walsh sputtered. A damp circle formed on the front placket of the coward’s pants.
Broderick chuckled, and with one hand he dragged the man to his feet. Gripping his throat, he shoved him against the building. Fragments of a shattered brick sprinkled around them. “I’m not pleased with you, Walsh.” The thief’s face grew a mottled red as he struggled in vain against Broderick’s grip. “You gave me bad goods.” Even uttering that latter part left a jagged mark upon Broderick’s soul. For these weren’t watered-down spirits or rotted shank they spoke of. His grip tightened reflexively, and he reveled in Walsh’s near noiseless rasping.
The man’s thin lips moved, but speech was impossible because of Broderick’s hold. He kept the pressure there and then released his hold.
Hands rubbing at his throat, Walsh fell hard to his knees. He sucked in great, gasping breaths. “Diggory a-asked for a ch-child.”
Broderick backhanded him. “I asked you for an orphan, you pisser,” he hissed. Diggory had been running the clubs, and acting as his second at that point, Broderick had been calling the proverbial shots on his master’s behalf. “I asked you for a fatherless babe, and you brought me a fucking marquess’s son.”
“D-Diggory l-loved the n-nobs,” Walsh said in weak, graveled tones.
“I asked you for the child.” Broderick seethed. “I gave you the orders.” What had been his attempt to save some boy from the fate he himself had known as a young lad had been twisted and turned and warped into an evil act perpetrated by the one before him.
But I can get to the marquess. I can give him the ones he really seeks. The ones truly deserving of his wrath and ire.
“Pfft, the babe came to ya in foine garments. Ya knew precisely what he—aheee,” he howled as Broderick buried his fist in his nose, reveling in the crack of shattered bone and the spray of blood.
And yet, with Walsh twisting and squirming at his feet, the dread that had wound about him since he’d learned Stephen was in fact a marquess’s stolen child blossomed. Guilt stuck in his gut, sharp in its intensity. “I didn’t order you to do that,” he said hollowly. “You stole that child. You and that whore who served as nursemaid.”
Broderick’s family’s only hope for surviving this was in turning Walsh and Lucy Stoke over to the marquess . . . before they paid him that favor first.
While the man writhed and groaned on the hard ground, Broderick’s mind raced.
There would be no mercy for the soul who found himself in the vengeful sights of the nob whose son had been stolen. Broderick’s sources had turned up a file on the Mad Marquess, as the widowed gent was known. His wife burnt to death in a fire set by this man before Broderick, and his only child and heir stolen, the Marquess of Maddock wouldn’t forgive a single soul linked to Diggory.
But if Broderick could hand-deliver to the marquess the ones who’d wronged him, and present himself and his family as the saviors who’d given Stephen a home, then he could escape ruin—escape ruin, at the expense of losing Stephen.
Agony swept through him. With a curse, he dragged Walsh back to his feet. He forced the smaller man on his tiptoes and stuck his face in his. “You will pay the price. I’ll have my meeting with Maddock, and he’ll know precisely what you and your whore wife have done.”
He welcomed the flash of terror and the frantic pleading . . . that did not come.
A slow, hideous chuckle rumbled from Walsh’s concave chest until his entire frame shook with the ugly expression of mirth. “Ya’re a day late to that meeting.”
For the first time since Broderick had set out to find the pair who’d stolen Stephen and drag them to the marquess for their belated day of reckoning, unease pitted in his gut.
“What do you mean?” When Walsh only continued laughing, Broderick propelled him against the wall once more. “I said . . . what do you mean?”
But he knew. Knew it with an intuition that had saved his life countless times in the streets.
“I got to His Lordship. He knows ya ordered a nob’s babe for Diggory. And . . .” Walsh’s lips curved in a triumphant smile. “He believes me.”
All the air left Broderick on a swift rush.
His hands went slack. “Impossible.”
Walsh struggled out from his hold, and with the tables now turned, the vanquished became the victor. “Not so impossible? Ya thought yarself better, but to that nob, we’re the same.”
They were. God help him.
Walsh crowed. “Not so tough now, are ya?” He spat at Broderick’s feet. “Only a matter of time before His Lordship comes a-calling with the constables in tow to take down the one who filched his boy.”
Broderick stumbled back a step. No.
Walsh smirked. “Yes,” he said, confirming Broderick had spoken aloud.
Dread slithering through him, Broderick backed away from the street rat, and with Walsh’s triumphant laugh trailing after him, he took off running.
Chapter 1
At that same time