“Pfft.” The marquess scoffed. “Arrogant and hopeful until the end. But that is what you people do. You survive. You scurry about like cockroaches, escaping gaol, a hangman’s noose, a constable’s capture. But not this time.” His eyes bore the glimmer of a man possessed. “This time, I’m going to end you. I’m going to take down your empire and leave those street rats you call siblings mourning for their guttersnipe brother.”
“Stephen is your son,” he said quietly.
“Get out,” the marquess thundered, exploding to his feet with such force the chair toppled behind him. A crack in his kingdom. His chest heaved, and his face flushed. Maddock closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, those dark irises had been transformed to their deadened state. “You asked what I want? Your ruin. And I’ll have it. You’ll not know when it’s coming. You’ll mayhap think yourself able to escape your fate. Now, get out,” he spat.
Broderick quit the marquess’s office. Where revenge was exacted swift and precise in the Dials, the marquess was so mad he either didn’t know or care about all that might go wrong in one’s waiting. And that was the only fledgling of hope to take from this.
The butler, hovering in the hall, jerked to attention. “This way,” he said tightly, motioning for Broderick to proceed. When they reached the hall, a servant stood in wait with his cloak. The butler took the garment from the footman and tossed it hard at Broderick.
He caught it against his chest.
“You are deserving of it, you know. Any revenge he exacts.” He jerked the door open. “Get the hell out.”
Even with that ire directed his way, there was a loyalty to the lanky young man Broderick appreciated. “I know,” he said quietly, shrugging into his cloak.
Gathering the reins of his mount from the street urchin he’d handed him off to earlier, Broderick tossed over another purse.
“Ya’re Killoran, ain’t ya?” the boy whispered, a reverent awe there.
He stiffened.
“They say ya’re hiring children. Lots of them.”
He had been. Not because of any honorable idea on his part, but because of his sister. It was a hard day when one looked at oneself and found how little good there was in him. “I am.” He tugged out a card and handed it over. “Ask for the guard MacLeod. Inform him that I sent you and urge him to find you work.”
The painfully thin lad’s eyes formed round circles. “Ya ’aving a laugh?”
He started. The high-pitched timbre revealed not a small boy but rather a girl. Similar in age and size to Cleo when Broderick had first entered the Killoran gang. “I’m not. MacLeod will help you.” But then, who would help her thereafter? Broderick’s stomach twisted.
Climbing astride his mount, Broderick guided the horse on. He rode through Mayfair and Grosvenor Square, those exalted streets home to London’s luckiest, and then continued on until the streets grew narrower and the cobblestones grimier but the crush of bodies thicker, even as the night sky rolled in, ushering a cover of darkness that opened up the Devil’s playground. Whores crept from the alleys and found their places alongside crumbling walls. Children wove through throngs of passersby, their desperate gazes trained on the next purse.
This was the hell he’d come to call home, and it had been for the family he’d found in his sisters and Stephen . . . and Reggie.
He closed his eyes. Reggie, whose loyalty and friendship he’d repaid with resentment. And sitting there, he confronted the truth . . . he didn’t much like himself. He’d been so bent on survival . . . nay, not survival, but rather on being the best, that he’d not given a thought to whom he’d wronged on his way to the top of his empire.
The marquess.
Stephen.
His sisters.
And now, Reggie.
They had all paid the price in some way.
Some sins had been unwitting on his part, but they were marks against his soul still.
And Reggie had known it. She’d called him out on his ruthless determination, seeing what he’d been unable to, the soulless world of the peerage. He smiled wistfully. But then, that had always been Reggie. More clever than most, she’d forever been unafraid to challenge him when he was wrong.
Loud shouts broke out in the distance, and his mount danced nervously under him.
Giving his head a shake, Broderick wheeled the horse around and then guided him across London toward home. Dismounting outside the townhouse, he handed the reins over to a servant and climbed the steps.
“My lord,” the butler murmured, taking his cloak.
Broderick had one foot on the bottom of the stairs when Stephen came sprinting down the narrow hall. He skidded over the slick marble and slid into Broderick.
“Whoa,” he said, steadying the boy by his shoulders. A wave of emotion threatened to overtake him.
“Did ya meet him?” he whispered after the servants had slipped off.
Just this morn, there would have been a panic at the risk of so much as breathing aloud the hint of the “him” in question. After his meeting, Broderick was overcome with a calm acceptance.
He sank onto the bottom step and motioned to Stephen. “I did,” he said after his brother sat beside him.
“And?” Hope glimmered in Stephen’s eyes. Lord Maddock’s eyes.
Broderick shook his head slowly.
All light went out of Stephen’s gaze. “No.”
“Yes,” Broderick countered.
And then a shuddery hiss seeped past Stephen’s gaping front teeth. “You’ve given up.”
Broderick dropped his elbows onto the step behind them. “I’ve accepted the reality of my situation,” he countered. For there was a difference, and before he swung, he’d leave the boy with that final lesson. “When one lives a life of crime . . . even if it is about surviving, eventually one must face a reckoning for those sins.” When one lived a life of evil, eventually it caught up with a man.
“You’re a coward,” Stephen cried, scrambling to his feet. “I don’t care what you say. You’ve given up. And I was wrong to believe you were strong and powerful. Because you aren’t.” Each word struck like a blade through the flesh. “You’re weak. And a coward, and I wish you’d never taken me in.” And with that damning shout soaring around the foyer, Stephen scrambled around him and then darted up the stairs.
Broderick scrubbed a hand over his face.
Damn this day.
A soft tone pierced through the nighttime still.
He slowly lowered his hands and strained for another faint hint of that sound.
Silence again descended on the household.
Then it came, again. The faintest echo from deep within the house, once familiar but long forgotten—until now. Pulled toward that sound, he followed it. He continued walking, drawing forward, deeper into the foreign home. With every step the sounds grew crisper, clearer, and then they stopped, bringing him to an abrupt halt.
He remained motionless, yearning for that melodic pull, and then it came again. Only clipped in a staccato beat. Intermittent. Deliberate. Those strident sounds compelling in their own right for their dissonance, there was a pattern that, as he thought he’d worked it through, shifted and twisted into another arrangement.
Broderick increased his stride until he reached the end of the hall. The door sat slightly ajar, the faintest glow cast by one of the sconces spilling through the entryway. He angled his head back and forth in a bid to make out the figure seated behind that pianoforte.
Her head bent, wholly engrossed, Reggie paused to scribble something on a sheet laid out before her.
Her eyebrows came together into a line.
In the end he was given away not by a careless floorboard or by a misstep on his part.
Hissss . . .
But rather by his sister’s damned cat.
Reggie’s fingers slid off the keys, and she jumped to her feet.
He winced, grateful for the cover of darkness that hid the guilty color splotching his cheeks at having been caught sneaking. Nay, not sneaking. Watching her. “Miss Spark,” he drawled. They were the first words they’d spoken since she’d opened herself up before him. And it was also the first time he’d ever been without them around this woman.
“Broderick.” She didn’t return that stiff formality but rather nudged her chin up and laid bold command to his name as though she had a right to it. And she had. For so long. How much more he’d preferred those syllables rolling off her lips as an entreaty for his touch.