That Killer Smile

by Juliet Lyons

  The ax flashes white in the light of the fire, and I’m transported to a snowy landscape. Groans and screams fill the air. Then I see it, sinking into the frozen crystals of the snow—blood, a sea of it turning everything crimson, and in my heart I know it’s because of me.

  When I open my eyes, Ronin is lying next to me on the bed, his head propped up on his hand. He strokes my belly, his eyes as vulnerable and raw as when we were making love. My body is still buzzing from climax, my breathing ragged. Though it can only be seconds since I fell into unconsciousness, it feels like a hundred years.

  I meet his soft, blue eyes, remembering the way he felt behind that curtain—ax in hand.

  The frenzy of emotions coursing through his veins as he tore into the room match what I felt on that fateful night—when I grabbed a poker from the fireplace and took a human life.

  Without pause, I shift onto my side, gazing at him, ready to begin the tale I never wanted to tell.

  I mirror his position, resting my head on my hand. Without breaking eye contact, I say, “The man I murdered was named Leonard Wallis, and he was my husband for seven years.”

  Chapter 13

  Cat

  Ronin’s face remains impassive. He stops stroking my belly, resting a warm hand on my hip instead. “Go on.”

  I’m silent for a few seconds, realizing he knew full well that by allowing me to see his essence, I would open up to him. The last time he bit me, I hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse.

  “Ancient perk,” he says, reading the confusion on my face. “I chose to let you see it.”

  I nod. Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll be angry, but right now, the words are bubbling up inside of me, desperate for release. “Asshole,” I say, for old time’s sake more than anything.

  His lips quirk into a smile. He reaches up to my face, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “Tell me,” he says.

  I take a deep breath. “I never wanted to marry Leonard Wallis, but I didn’t have much of a choice. My fiancé died in an accident at the docks, and my father decided I would still have to move out. They only had two rooms, and I was one of six children.”

  Ronin’s jaw clenches. “The blond boy you loved in your essence—he was your fiancé?”

  A stab of pain twists in my gut. “Yes. Jonjo was the love of my life. I never got over him.”

  I watch as his brows knit tighter, a tiny pulse hammering in one corner of his chiseled jaw. “He must have been a worthy man to win your heart.”

  I smile, swallowing the painful lump in my throat. “Jonjo was a good person. He drove me crazy a lot of the time, but mostly, when we were together, I felt like I could do anything. Like I wasn’t just a poor girl from the East End who would die in poverty. Jonjo brought magic into my life, and when he died, a light went out inside me. In truth, I’m not sure it ever came back on.”

  Ronin grasps my chin between his index finger and thumb, forcing me to meet his gaze. “Oh, it’s on. You can count on it, mo chridhe.”

  We’re silent for a moment, the only noises an engine idling on the street outside and the distant wail of a siren. Leaning over me, he reaches down and yanks the sheet from the bottom of the bed, draping it across our naked bodies.

  I arch a brow. “What’s the matter? Can you not bear the sight of me naked a moment longer?”

  He chuckles. “I want to listen without my lad down there getting excited.” He lifts the sheet, nodding toward his straining erection. I fight the urge to stroke it.

  “Point taken,” I say, the familiar ache building once again at my core, my nipples tightening. “Though you’re not the only one with self-control issues.”

  He grins as he drops the sheet back into place, and for a heart-wrenching second, the easy smile on his lips and the playful glint in his blue eyes remind me of Jonjo.

  I drag my gaze away. “Leonard Wallis was a blacksmith,” I continue. “The day of Jonjo’s funeral, he asked my father for my hand in marriage. I’d never noticed him before. I mean, I knew who he was, of course, but I’d never given him a second thought. He was just a middle-aged man who lived on the next street.”

  The day Wallis proposed, I’d gone home as broken as a smashed china plate. I thought life couldn’t get any worse—and then I found him sitting opposite my father in our tiny parlor, his eyes dark in the grim light of the room as he twisted a cap in grimy hands.

  The first thing I noticed was his fingernails, dirt and soot embedded beneath them like black half-moons. His hands were large and fleshy, two sewer lids with fat sausages for fingers. I was hurting so badly I could only compare him to Jonjo. The latter had the delicate hands of a pianist: clean and white—kind. His mother had always been fastidious about personal hygiene: cleanliness is next to godliness. How would those hands stay fresh in death, buried beneath the earth in the pauper’s cemetery?

  Taking a deep breath, I tell Ronin what I told Peter: how I arrived home from Jonjo’s funeral to find Wallis drinking ale with my father, how I was given the ultimatum of an unhappy marriage or the workhouse.

  Ronin softly brushes my cheek with the back of his hand, shaking his head. “I wish I’d known you back then.”

  Without thinking, I reach up and take his hand in mine, threading my fingers through his. “I hurried down to the river, near the spot at the docks where Jonjo died. Standing there, I considered a third option—death. But I wasn’t brave enough. I just sat on the docks with my legs crossed, watching the ships until the gray sky turned black and even the mud larks sauntered off home. Eventually, I got up and went back to Hackney. I called at Jonjo’s house, hoping his mother might take me in, but although she was sympathetic, she was no help. When I mentioned Leonard’s name, her eyes lit up. ‘You’ll never starve married to him,’ she said. I stared around her tiny parlor, even smaller than ours—at the half-dozen hungry children hanging from her apron, their pinched faces gaunt with malnutrition; at a blackened cooking pot suspended over the hearth that would always be lacking—and for the first time, I considered it. Hunger, true hunger, gnaws at you like a rabid dog, eating you up from the inside out.

  “‘He’s never married,’ Jonjo’s mother told me. ‘He probably just wants you to keep house for him. Never been one for the ladies, as far as I know, so I don’t think you need be concerned about that.’

  “Until she mentioned women, I hadn’t even considered that side of the marriage. I was plunged into fresh horror. I wasn’t a virgin, but Jonjo and I had always been restrained. We’d only made love once, when we were tipsy on a half-bottle of gin he found down at the docks. I’m eternally grateful to the person who dropped that bottle of gin. Without it, I would have gone to Leonard Wallis a virgin. As it stood, I always had at least one good memory of being intimate with someone I truly loved.”

  Ronin shifts closer to me on the bed, our knees touching. “Please tell me Jonjo’s mother was right. That he only wanted you to clean for him.”

  I squeeze his hand, staring at the pale, tapered fingers woven through mine. When I’d told Peter about Leonard, I felt sick to my stomach, the vile scent of melted iron flooding my brain. Here with Ronin, the memories are less vivid, like I’m staring at a faded photograph of the past. The irony that Ronin is the most lethal creature in London isn’t lost on me.

  “Oh, there was cleaning, all right,” I say with a grim smile. “I married him two weeks later at the local church. I don’t remember much about the day, only that I wore an ivory dress yellowed with age. To this day, I have no idea who it belonged to. It was dark by the time we got back to his house on Walnut Lane. Being a blacksmith, he was better off than my family. The house was spread over three floors and immaculately tidy, filled with shiny wooden furniture and drapes at the windows. I felt sick to my stomach. It wasn’t the home of a man needing a wife to play house.” I pause as Ronin’s grip on my hand tightens. “He didn’t touch me though. He showed me upstai
rs to a tiny room with a sloping roof and told me that’s where I would sleep. I almost kissed his boots with relief.”

  I sense the tension leave Ronin’s body as he exhales slowly.

  “But that first night didn’t pass smoothly. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I heard the door creak open. My whole body went rigid, my heartbeat thudding in my ears. I lay there petrified beneath the scratchy wool blanket, waiting for the mattress to sag beneath his weight, expecting any moment to feel his grubby hands on my skin. But he only stood there, staring down at me. Then he turned and closed the door, his footsteps echoing down the narrow flight of stairs.”

  Ronin shakes his head. “Thanks be to God,” he murmurs.

  “The beatings started a few months later.”

  Ronin curses. His eyes close briefly, his fingers clenched so tightly around mine my hand goes numb.

  “During the day, I cleaned the house. Before me, he’d paid a local woman to do it, hence why it was so neat in the beginning. But with my arrival, the arrangement was over. In the evenings, he’d have me read to him—he was illiterate, but I’d been taught by the Frenchwoman my mother sometimes darned socks for. I loved reading, so I didn’t mind. I’d read a chapter or two and he’d order me to bed. About half an hour later, I’d hear the front door open and close. If I looked out of the tiny window above my bed, I’d see him—massive shoulders hunched, coat on, cap pulled low on his head—striding purposefully up the street. It was a long time before I found out where he went. A few hours later, he’d return, reeking of alcohol. He’d climb the rickety stairs to my room and watch me—exactly as he did that first night.

  “Then one night, after the typical routine, he came into my room and dragged me from the bed by my hair. I could smell the gin on his breath, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew something else had darkened his mood, made him angry. I was screaming at him, but my yells only spurred him on. He slapped me hard across the cheek, sending me hurtling into the rough plaster of the wall. All the while he cursed me, calling me a bitch and a whore. I had no idea what could have made him so mad. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted him to stop hurting me.”

  I pause to draw breath, suddenly aware that hot, salty tears are coursing down my cheeks and dripping off my chin. Ronin, his handsome features contorted in rage and sorrow, drops my hand, swiping the moisture from my face with his thumb. He closes the gap between our bodies, cradling my head in the nook between his chest and chin. “He deserved what you did to him, Catherine,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Every blow.”

  “I don’t regret what I did to him,” I whisper, pulling away before I lose my train of thought in his hot, musky embrace. “I regret what I did to me.”

  “Guilt,” Ronin says, wiping fresh tears away. “The most useless emotion in the universe.”

  “Probably.” I take a breath. “After that, the beatings became more frequent. It was always the same, always in the dead of night when he came back from wherever he’d been. The following day, it was always as if it never happened. Though he never apologized—never alluded to the violence in any way—he would leave me extra fruit for my lunch, compliment me on my hair or my dress. If it wasn’t for the cuts and bruises, I might have thought I dreamed it.

  “As you can imagine, after a year of marriage, I loathed him. I couldn’t sleep at night for fear of what he would do to me when he came home, so I napped during the day when he was out at work. Despite having more food to eat, I grew thinner. My hair fell out in clumps, dark circles ringed my eyes. When I looked in the mirror, I no longer recognized myself. I was being ravaged from the inside out by fear and anxiety. I tried asking my parents for help, but, of course, they were useless.

  “‘Just be grateful you have a full belly,’ my mother said. ‘What use is affection between a man and a woman when you’re both starving? It only turns you against each other in the end.’

  “I had no one. Then, one night, as I was sitting up in my room listening to him rattling about downstairs as he prepared to go out, I decided to follow him. By then anger and bitterness were beginning to take a firm grip on me, seeping into my thoughts like poison. If I was going to wither away and die at his hands, I at least wanted to understand why.

  “I waited until I heard the door slam, and then I quickly laced my boots and grabbed one of his long cloaks from the hall, slipping out of the house after him like a ghost. It must have been shortly after midnight and the streets were quiet, a few candles flickering in the downstairs windows of the houses as I passed. Mist drifted in from the Thames, salty and cloying, and I clung to the shadows of the doorways as I followed the thud of his boots through the near-empty streets.

  “When he got to the end of Broadway, he took a left onto Gallows Lane. Here the path was narrow, windows jutting out onto the street, a stale odor of urine assaulting my nostrils. There were more people around in this part of town—men standing in groups and drinking gin, hollow-eyed children crouched in the gutter, hugging themselves for warmth. For a minute, I considered turning home. If anyone noticed me following him, spoke to me at all, he’d turn around and see me. But no one seemed to care about the thin woman in the oversized cloak. I passed by as if I were invisible.

  “The deeper we went through the streets, the worse the standard of living became. We entered Hawthorn’s Ditch, a notorious den of vice renowned for prostitution. I knew of the place—a few of the girls I’d grown up with had ended up there—and I began to wonder if that was his secret: prostitutes. When he got to the infamous brothel, I expected him to stop, rap his knuckles on the door, but he didn’t. He carried on a little farther up the street before ducking into a dark alley. My legs were jelly as I crept after him. Peering around the corner, I saw him, a sliver of moonlight slicing across his face like a blade. He was engrossed in conversation with two other men, caps low over their faces. Money was exchanged. Then I noticed two wooden cages at their feet. When they picked them up, I realized there were two cockerels inside.”

  Ronin frowns. “What were they for? Cockfighting?”

  I nod. “They disappeared into a backyard and closed the gate. I crept after them. The wall was high, but there was a gap between the gate and the post. I peered through to see the cockerels had been taken out of their cages. Leonard and another man were attaching what looked like tiny razor blades to their legs with twine. Cockfighting had been outlawed by then, so I knew that what was happening was illegal. Suddenly, the secrecy, the sneaking out late at night all made sense.”

  Ronin’s forehead furrows deeper, his copper brows low over his dazzling blue eyes. He wraps his arm tight around my waist. “So he was running some sort of illegal gambling ring?”

  “Yes, and whenever he lost money, he’d take it out on me.”

  “What happened after you found out?” he asks, his voice grave.

  “I snuck home, but I didn’t go to bed. I sat at the kitchen table and laid a plan. I would confront him with what I saw and blackmail him into submission. I hoped that fear of being arrested, fear for his reputation in the community, would be something I could use to my advantage. I was scared of further beatings, of course, terrified he might even kill me, but my life was no longer my own anyway. I figured if it went badly wrong, at least I’d see Jonjo again. Leonard returned home an hour later, and I told him exactly what I’d seen. I said I would go to the bobbies, that he’d lose his business if he ever laid a finger on me again.”

  “Good,” Ronin says. “What was his reaction?”

  “Oh, he went berserk, smashing china, screaming, calling me every name under the sun. Somehow, I stayed calm. Knowing his weakness made me powerful, as if he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I remember him sitting opposite me, his head in his filthy hands—beaten. For the first time in my life, I felt strong. I never wanted him or any man to ever get the better of me again. Not for as long as I lived.”

  “This explains a lot,” Ronin murmurs.

>   Flashing him a brief smile, I continue. “The years passed. He still went out the same as he always did, but the beatings stopped completely. We lived utterly separate lives. I cleaned the house during the day, saw my brothers and sisters, visited with Jonjo’s mother. The evenings I spent alone in my room reading. Although I wasn’t happy, I was surviving. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

  “He started borrowing money to fund his gambling addiction. Soon, he was going out every night, not coming home until morning. His business crumbled and rumors began to circulate about the amount of time he spent up at Hawthorn’s Ditch. They hadn’t come from me, but people started to talk. After not touching me for years, he came home one night and gave me the beating of my life, dislocating my jaw and breaking my nose. He only stopped because a neighbor heard and threatened to call the bobbies.”

  Ronin tenses, the pupils of his eyes flashing red, the muscles in his arms and shoulders corded like rope. “I would have torn him apart over a slow-burning flame. That bastard.”

  Reaching up, I smooth a copper strand of hair from his forehead. “It gets worse, I’m afraid. The beatings started regularly again. Worse than before. With no money and no one willing to give him a loan, he was forced to stay home. But it wasn’t just the physical assaults. Up until then, he’d never shown any interest in me sexually—I guessed he’d always visited the brothel for that side of things, but with no money, he turned his attention to me.” I grip Ronin’s shoulders as he closes his eyes, his whole body vibrating beneath my fingertips. “This was a long time ago, Ronin. In a way, it’s as if it happened to a different person.”

  He opens his eyes. They are still red, pulsing with rage. “He raped you?”

  I suck in a breath, remembering the night he cornered me in my bedroom and forced me facedown on the bed. Something had snapped in me after that, though it wasn’t just the physical violation that pushed me over the edge. It was the fact that he’d tarnished the most magical moment of my life, stolen my happiest memory of Jonjo and pissed all over it.