by Bec McMaster
Lynch’s scream of rage echoed in the tunnel and Rosalind barreled through the door, slamming it behind her. There was a key on a hook beside the door and she thrust it into the lock and twisted it, staring through the thin window slit as Lynch thundered toward her.
“Damn you, come on!” The lock snicked and Rosalind staggered away from the door as he hit it.
The hinges screamed in protest, dust shaking off the stone walls. Rosalind met his eyes and saw nothing human there. Not the man she knew. Not the man she cared for. Here was her own secret fear, staring at her with cold, hungry eyes.
His fists wrapped around the bars and he wrenched. The iron screamed, bending like Indian rubber. Rosalind turned and ran up a flight of stairs.
Behind her, an enormous crash echoed.
Faster, her lungs screaming for air. She threw a glance over her shoulder and saw something move in the shadows behind her.
A door appeared in the wall. Rosalind crashed through it, slamming it shut behind her and locking it before she turned and collapsed against something in the dark. Her fumbling fingers found a smuggler’s lantern and a packet of matches. Striking one, she lit the lantern’s wick with shaking fingers.
Something hit the door. Rosalind jumped. A table stood in the center of the room, with benches around the sides. She hurried behind it, though the table would be small help.
Crates of iron balls gleamed in the flickering light, with little clock faces strapped to them. Rosalind ran her fingers over one, feeling the thin seam that ran around the middle. There had to be dozens here. Enough to drive a whole horde of blue blood’s mad. Just what were the mechs planning?
Another jolt shuddered the door. Rosalind spun, her gaze raking the room for anything to help her. Metal tools hung on the wall, signs of a mech’s trade. She grabbed a file and clenched it in her fist, hunting for something sharper. A rack of bottles lined the far wall, the glass gleaming as she lifted the lantern and brought it closer. Taking out the cork, she sniffed at the colorless liquid. The same sickly sweet scent she’d recognized in the cell made her jam the cork back in.
A deafening silence fell, making her heartbeat thunder in her ears.
Then a fist came through the door.
Rosalind screamed, dropping the lantern on the bench and spinning to face him. Her gaze fell on a pile of goods on a small table near the door. A dart gun with the bright blue feathers of a hemlock dart.
Lynch groped for the key, turning it in its lock. Then his hand withdrew, the knuckles bloody. Slowly, so slowly, the handle turned.
Rosalind pressed herself back into the bench. Nowhere to run. Nothing to fight him with. If only she could get to the dart gun.
The door slowly opened. Darkness entered, materializing into a man she barely recognized. His black hair gleamed in the lantern light, the flame flickering off his obsidian eyes. Stark light carved out the refined features of his face and broad shoulders.
“Lynch?” she whispered.
He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling. Slowly he shut the door. Then locked it. For a moment his head bowed, as if some part of him still fought for control. Then he started toward her.
Each step was mesmerizing, his power and grace so dangerous it stole her breath.
Rosalind swallowed. No point running or fighting. Either would only rouse his hungers. “Would you like…another button?” she whispered, lifting her hands to the tiny buttons that curved up her bodice. Her fingers jerked and the top button tore, pinging away to the floor. The lavender cotton was almost ruined anyway.
Lynch stilled, his gloved hand sliding over the end of the table as if in thought. Rosalind tore another button free, discarding it with haste.
Then another.
“Do you remember the observatory?” she asked, tugging the tiny buttons free desperately.
His gaze dipped, running heatedly over the exposed skin of her décolletage.
“That’s it,” she whispered, taking a sidelong step around the table. Closer to the door—and the dart gun.
He didn’t like that. Rosalind stilled as the muscles in his thighs bunched. Reaching up, she slowly shook out the last few pins in her hair, letting it tumble down over her shoulder in bright, coppery coils. Lantern light made it gleam richly against her pale skin and the hungry look in his gaze hardened.
“You’re mine,” he said coldly.
Then he was on her. Rosalind barely had time to suck in a sharp breath as his hand sank into her hair and wrenched her head back. She caught a fistful of his shirt and bit back a scream as his mouth slashed down over hers.
Lynch devoured her, slamming her back against the wall. A crate dropped off the bench and those little metal balls rolled everywhere as his tongue thrust, hot and hard, against hers. Rosalind melted against him, her knees giving way as a surge of relief filled her.
“Yes,” she almost sobbed, grabbing a fistful of his hair.
Lynch caught her up beneath the thighs, sliding her onto the bench as he kissed her desperately. She couldn’t draw breath, couldn’t escape him. He was all over her, his huge body wrapping around hers with a possessiveness she couldn’t fight. His teeth sucked her bottom lip between them and he bit her, one hand shackling her right wrist.
But at least he hadn’t drawn blood. Yet.
Rosalind whimpered, wrapping her legs around his hips as she kissed him back with a fierceness born of relief. She couldn’t let him go. Not for a second. If she did, then she might lose him.
The door slammed open and a man burst in, dressed all in black leather.
“No!” she screamed as Lynch tore himself from her arms and leaped toward the stranger. The Nighthawk.
If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought he placed his body between them, an almost protective gesture. But then it couldn’t be true. He wasn’t thinking right now. Only reacting.
Their bodies met, Lynch slamming the Nighthawk against the wall. The man’s eyes widened in shock. “Sir?”
“He’ll kill you!” she yelled.
The stranger’s icy blue eyes flickered to hers, then he shoved an elbow into Lynch’s face that snapped his head up. A grim expression crossed the stranger’s face—utterly ruthless.
Lynch went for his carotid but the man chopped a fist into Lynch’s throat and locked an ankle behind his. They both went down, the Nighthawk fighting desperately.
There was no finesse to Lynch’s movements. He was stripped down to the basics of survival, barely protecting himself, intent only on the kill. Yet his rage and strength were unstoppable.
Rosalind slid off the bench slowly, her eyes on the dart gun. Inching toward it, she flinched as Lynch drove his man face-first onto the ground. His head lifted, tracking her movements. Rosalind swallowed, her fingers closing over the dart gun.
He came at her so quickly she could barely see it. Only years of training saved her life. She shot him from three feet away. He took one more step, his knees going out from under him as the hemlock raced through his veins.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as those black eyes met hers, strangely human in that moment. Betrayed. “So sorry.”
Seventeen
Awareness came slowly.
Lynch fought his way toward it, straining, yearning, hunger gripping him so hard he screamed. Something held him back. Men shouting. The hot coppery scent of blood in the air and then the splash of it against his lips. It was never enough. He wanted it hot and fresh, aching to take it from someone’s throat. To tear and kill, to rip apart flesh like it was paper and drown himself in blood.
He couldn’t find her. No matter how hard he strained, peering past the swirl of faces in the room, she wasn’t there. Fear drove him. Fear and a protective fury he couldn’t fight. His woman. His. And someone was keeping her from him.
A face swam into view, hands gripping his shoulders. “It’s me, sir. Garrett!”
The words were oddly distorted. “Where is she?” he screamed, tearing at the metal cuffs that
kept him pinned on his back.
A hand slid over the man’s shoulder. “He ain’t there anymore, lad,” an older man said gruffly. “Let ’im go.”
“No! Give him more of the hemlock.” Light gilded the man’s coppery hair and all Lynch saw was the color of blood. “We wait him out. He’ll come back.”
Then he was slipping into darkness, his body slackening against the steel that kept him pinned. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn’t catch even a hint of that familiar lemon scent.
* * *
Ten hours since she’d seen him last. Screaming and straining in his manacles…
Rosalind wrapped her arms around her and peered through the gloom. Beside her the soft rasp of Jack’s breath through the air filter itched over her nerves.
“Where is she?” she murmured, shivering against the cold. She felt it so deeply tonight. As if the fright of last night had leeched into her bones. She’d thought Lynch would be fine when they got him back to the guild. But he wasn’t.
“She’ll be here,” Jack said, his voice smooth and melodious. His throat was the one part of him that hadn’t been damaged by Balfour and his steady drip of acid. His lungs were another matter, hence the air filter in the mask. The thick coal-choked air of London was too rich for him, sending him into paroxysms of coughing without it. Sometimes she wondered if he wouldn’t be better off in the country, or somewhere along the Mediterranean, where the air was clear and warm. Maybe Italy, where there were no blue bloods and the church ruled supreme. He’d like that.
Rosalind dragged her pocket watch out of the tight waistcoat that cinched her curves and examined it. The back was a clear bubble of glass, revealing the winding brass cogs and gears within it, while the face was sheeted in pearl. A flicker of gaslight caught the pearl and turned it into a rainbow shimmer.
“Ten,” she muttered. As if to spite her, a bell rang nearby, over the rooftop spires of an old half-burned church. Once, twice, thrice… It droned on, cutting through the thick fog.
“I should have gone with Ingrid,” she murmured.
Jack shot her a look, his monocular eyeglass gleaming eerily in the low gaslight. “We only just got you back. I’m not letting you out again, not with those bleeders out there.” His voice roughened. “I’m not letting you near them ever again.”
She had nothing to say to that. If he found out the truth—the reason for the blood on her skirts when she’d fled back to the house and the shaking that she couldn’t quite stop in her hands—he’d have gone after Lynch with a pitchfork. As it was, she’d had to make up some story about being accosted on her way home by an anonymous blue blood.
It was the first lie she’d ever told her older brother. Growing up in the grim streets had hardened them both to the world and made them cling to each other. They couldn’t trust the world. Only each other. He’d had her back and she his for years, until that fateful day when she’d dipped a pocket and Balfour had seen her.
He’d recognized her as his own, one of the three children her mother had taken from him when she’d broken her thrall contract and fled from him. Rosalind had never truly known why her mother did that, though she could perhaps guess. By that stage, she’d been long dead and both Rosalind and Jack had done what needed to be done to survive. Jack knew her down to the very last inch of her soul.
“I’m fine,” she told him. “It was nothing that I couldn’t handle.”
“Wasn’t it?” He opened the small, copper air filter in the middle of his leather half mask and cupped his fingers around the hole, breathing into them to warm them. “You’ve been distracted of late.”
“I’m worried about Jeremy.”
“Are you?” The dipping baritone of his voice drew her gaze.
“What do you mean? Of course I’m worried about him.”
Slowly Jack lifted a gloved hand, his index finger sweeping a strand of her hair out of the way. His finger brushed against her neck tentatively. “You have a bite mark on the back of your neck. The kind a man gives his lover.”
She couldn’t breathe. Lynch. In the bathing room. He’d bitten her there, suckling the skin until she bruised and she’d forgotten all about it. Rosalind ducked away from his hand, tugging the collar of her coat higher. “Don’t.”
“You’re troubled,” Jack said quietly. “The last time I saw you like this was when you were sent to spy on Nathaniel.”
Rosalind turned away, staring out over the narrow alley. The brick was pitted and scarred and sheathed in thick coal dust, but she didn’t see any of it. Instead, Nate’s face swam into her mind.
Head of the humanist movement in London, he’d been an irrepressible fool who’d argued in the streets for human rights and had then dared take his arguments to the Ivory Tower. Organizing an interview with him, she’d had him wrapped around her finger before he’d even finished stammering a greeting. A ripe plum for the plucking. A week later, they’d been wed and she was Mrs. Nathaniel Hucker, the snake in his bed, reporting everything she heard back to Balfour.
A dreamer, yes. Naive. Blind. Yes. And the very best of men. Four months for him to melt her heart and make her start questioning everything Balfour had ever told her. She’d kept her doubts secret from Balfour, but not from Jack. Slowly the tides turned. She reported back to Balfour but only enough to ease his suspicions. And as she’d started listening to what Nate preached about human rights, she’d started to believe.
The conflict of loyalty had torn her in two. She’d fallen hopelessly in love with her husband, but by that time, Balfour had owned her body and soul for eight years. She’d killed for him. Spied for him. His little falcon. She’d have done anything for him.
Except kill Nathaniel.
“Who?” Jack asked simply.
Tears burned in Rosalind’s eyes. She shook her head and kept her gaze turned irrevocably away. What would he think if he knew what secret thoughts her heart kept producing? Nathaniel had been human but Lynch was not. Lynch was the very creature that Jack most feared.
“Lynch?” he asked, a hint of anger warming his voice. “Did he do this to you? Did he force you into his bed?”
“For God’s sake Jack, do you think any man—blue blood or not—could ever force me to do something I didn’t want to do?”
His gaze sharpened and she realized her mistake. “So you wanted him to bed you?”
Scraping a hand over her face, she looked for Ingrid. “He can help me find Jeremy. I need to lure him close, to—”
“To seduce a blue blood? You could let him actually touch you? To lay his blood-soaked hands on you?”
“He’s not like that.”
Jack fell silent. “This is exactly like Nathaniel.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I loved my husband. This is nothing like that, but I can’t deny…Lynch is… He’s nothing like the rest of the blue bloods. He tries to fight it.”
“Don’t forget what he is.”
“I know better than anyone what he is.”
“And what the hell does that mean?” Jack grabbed her arm.
“Nothing.” She pressed her lips together. This morning she’d stopped by the guild to see if he was recovering, but he still couldn’t recognize anyone. Garrett had refused to let her see him, stating that all Lynch wanted was her.
It scared her. She’d thought at the time that the worst thing he could do to her would be to drink her blood and drain her dry, but she’d been wrong. Instead, the demon inside him had claimed her as his own.
Mine, he’d snarled.
Imagine his fury when he discovered how she’d played him. Imagine…his hurt. Rosalind swallowed hard. She felt like she’d trapped herself in her own sticky spider web of lies and the weight of it was crushing her. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was too good for that.
Jack watched her, no doubt drawing his own conclusions. “You shouldn’t go back there. He’s making you stray from your course.”
“Is it the right thing to do?” she whispered, thinking of the
silent Cyclops army sitting in the dark in Undertown.
Jack stiffened. “Don’t doubt it. We made this pact eight years ago, after Nathaniel was murdered. Anything to bring them down—to destroy them.”
“Is it worth Jeremy’s life?” she snapped, turning on him. “Is it? Because if that is what is has cost me, then I cannot do this.”
“Are you certain it’s only Jeremy you’re worried about?”
She groaned under her breath. The truth. If she continued as she was, one day she would have to go up against Lynch. Was it worth it? Could she truly strike him down for her cause?
No. The answer was a sickly whisper in her mind. A betrayal of everything she had stood for over the last eight years. But how could she avoid him? He stood between her and the Echelon and she knew that his sense of duty and honor would force him to move against her.
“I’ll deal with it.” How?
“See that you do,” Jack said. “Don’t forget where your loyalties lie. With your family, with your own people—with the humans who live in this wretched city and look to us for the only cursed hope they have.”
“I know where my damned loyalties lie,” she snapped.
“Devil take it, I can hear you two all the way to Limey,” someone cursed. Ingrid materialized out of the fog, dragging a young lad with a missing eye and three iron fingers.
The tightness in Rosalind’s chest eased. She stepped forward as Ingrid shoved the lad to his knees in front of her. “Found ’im in the Pits, betting on the blood sport,” Ingrid said. “Couldn’t take him there so I had to wait till he’d blown his quid.”
Rosalind knelt down, resting her elbows on her knees. “Hello, Harry.”
The mech grimaced, dragging himself up into a sitting position. Blood dripped from a slash in his forehead. Ingrid hadn’t been gentle, then.
The youth was of an age with Jeremy and the pair had always gotten along smashingly well, even if Harry’d looked to Mordecai for leadership, rather than herself. His lips thinned as he scanned Jack’s menacing form behind her. “Don’t know nothin’.”
“Yes, you do.” Rosalind smiled, then held up a finger to stall his protests. “Let’s not pretend that you won’t tell us everything you know. The question is, whether you will do it now and be sent on your way unharmed, or whether Ingrid must break every bone in your body first.”
