Clara arched an eyebrow. “Where would you even go?”
For a moment, another place far away from these diabolical streets floated around her memory, the endlessly rolling green hills of the Kent countryside. The family she’d left behind. But in her mind, they existed as she’d left them, a father and two brothers frozen in time, an unaging trio. Tears stuck in her throat. There was no going home. There was no going back from what she’d done. And if she did quit this life and return, Lord Oliver, now that he’d found her, would likely—and gleefully—come for her. And worse . . . her family.
And that’s assuming her once proud papa could forgive the daughter who’d whored herself to a nobleman and then dwelled in a gaming hell—
“Reggie?”
“I don’t know,” she brought herself to say. There was no place for her. She’d deluded herself into believing the Devil’s Den was a home. And for a short while it had been. She held the other woman’s gaze. “I will not begrudge you if you wish to cut me from this.” Reggie spoke over her protestations. “I’m the reason we lost one thousand pounds more to Broderick. All of this is my fault.”
“I’ve already said I will not abandon you, and I won’t. That bastard,” Clara muttered. “Him,” she hurried to clarify. “Not you.” She grabbed one of Reggie’s hands and squeezed hard. “I would never abandon you, but neither can I do this alone without your funds or assistance.” She motioned to the sheet music Reggie had been writing. “If I’d had the idea to start out on my own, I would have established another hell. Another bordello. It’s all I’ve known. You reminded me that I wasn’t always a whore. That I was once a singer.” It had been a piece of Clara’s past that she’d reluctantly shared; her forgotten-but-not-lost love of music, however, had only strengthened their bond.
They fell into silence that Clara was the first to break. “And we’re certain,” she began hesitantly, “the match might not be a welcome one for Gertrude or Killoran?”
It took a moment for the implications of that question to settle around her slow-to-process mind. “What?” Surely she wasn’t suggesting Reggie turn a blind eye while Gertrude married that monster? But then, she’d not shared the ugliest, most humiliating aspects of her time with that devil. How he’d beaten her. Choked her. Mocked her.
“Killoran is determined to have a title at all costs,” the other woman pointed out.
“Not like this,” Reggie said vehemently. Not with this man.
“Are you so certain?”
“Yes.” In this, she was.
“Then why didn’t you tell him last evening?”
Because the moment Lord Oliver became real between Reggie and Broderick, her past would no longer be her own, and her sins and her greatest shame would belong to a man who’d held her heart for the past ten years. “I wasn’t ready,” she quietly confessed. She’d never be ready. How did one ever truly, freely share all the sins Reggie carried? Ones that had left her as tattered as any Covent Garden doxy. “I’ve made many mistakes.” Too many to count. “But I know Gertrude deserves more than a husband like him,” she spoke with a finality meant to signal the end to Clara’s plans to turn Gertrude over to the recently minted duke. Reggie had sold her virtue, her pride, her body, and now the other woman would add her soul to the mix. For the disappointment of that, there was also an ache that settled around her chest. What had driven the other woman to such desperation that she’d sacrifice another in the name of survival?
“Reggie . . .” Clara scooted over and, matching Reggie’s positioning, faced her. “You think me ruthless. Whether she’s a duchess or a whore at the Devil’s Den, or a lover of some undeserving lord, can one ever truly escape that fate? That is a woman’s lot.”
“No.” Reggie was already shaking her head. Yes, that had been her fate, and Clara’s, and too many other women’s. For that Reggie knew better than to give of herself in any way to a man. “I can’t believe that is every woman’s lot.” Mayhap it was naivete or innocence or hopefulness on her part. “Broderick never laid his hand upon a woman.” And he never would.
Clara scoffed. “Because Broderick Killoran once showed you a kindness? His actions since should have opened your eyes to the truth of who he is . . . because it’s who they all are,” she said, drawing out the last five syllables for emphasis. “Men aren’t good and kind.” Hardness iced her eyes. “The one man I thought was proved how very easy it was to turn me out.”
“But this is not about Broderick or Ryker Black or the Duke of Glastonbury.”
Reggie winced as that carefully omitted admission slipped out.
The other woman went motionless. “He’s a duke. Oh, Reggie.” There was such disappointment there that Reggie flinched.
“He wasn’t a duke at the time,” she said lamely.
Clara groaned. “Reggie, as a duke’s son, he was always a duke. You don’t cross a duke. You don’t anger them. You steer clear of them—”
“I know that now,” she said impatiently. He represented the single greatest folly of her eight-and-twenty years. In giving her heart and virtue to Oliver, she’d lost every part of herself in the process: her family, her innocence, her hopes, and now, if she didn’t do as he wished, her future.
Clara dropped her chin atop her knees. “All right. There is a way out of this . . .”
They stared in silence at one another.
“There isn’t.” Reggie was the one to finally say it. “Not unless I’m willing to trade my future for Gertrude’s.” And Clara’s.
It hung unspoken between them, clear, with Clara not needing to even toss that accusation at Reggie.
With a resigned sigh, Reggie stacked books. “I have to return.”
Stephen’s daily lessons would conclude soon and thrust Reggie back into the role of companion. To a woman who, since Reggie’s betrayal, had said fewer than a hundred words altogether to her.
“Your loyalty will be your downfall, Regina Spark,” Clara said, joining her on her feet.
Reggie collected her cloak. “Some might say the same of you,” she pointed out, shrugging into the wool garment.
“It is different,” the other woman muttered.
“Is it?” she countered, latching the grommets at her throat.
“Those Killoran girls always had one another. They’ve had Killoran and even that miserable cur of a younger brother.” Since Clara had come to the Killorans from the Hell and Sin Club, the boy had never been able to see past his hatred and mistrust for her association with their rivals. “We have lived with only ourselves to rely on. That is the difference. And that is why you should not sacrifice your own existence for a family who won’t even remember you when you’re gone.” The matter-of-fact pragmatism to her delivery hurt more than had Clara hurled the words as a mocking barb.
Wordlessly, Reggie picked up the small stack of books. As they started for the door, she tried to speak. “I . . .” Apologies were useless. Promises to make it right, impossible.
Clara waved that off. “I’ll pay a visit this afternoon to Phippen’s offices.”
“And you have the calculations we’ve gone through on . . . ?”
“The building redesign? Yes.”
On a venture that Lord Oliver could see dismantled with nothing more than a few ill-placed words about the proprietress. The walls closing in on Reggie’s existence narrowed all the more.
As Clara reached for the handle, letting Reggie out, the former madam made one last appeal. “Reggie?” Reggie paused. “How forgiving will Broderick be if he finds out you’ve brought the wrath of a duke down on his family?”
Either way, she was doomed.
For there was either her soul on the line or her future.
Her stomach sick, Reggie closed the door behind her.