To Catch A Rogue (London Steampunk: The Blue Blood Conspiracy Book 4)

by Bec McMaster

  Instantly, his hand curled around the knife beneath his pillow, but other than that, he didn't move. Just lay there, flat on his stomach, listening intently. Gemma and the others hadn't had need of him that night, so he'd returned to the diplomat's house and was trying to catch up on the sleep he'd missed during the day.

  Soft footsteps whispered over the parquetry floors and his muscles tensed.

  Any second now....

  "Charlie?" Lark whispered.

  His eyes blinked open.

  What the hell was she doing in here?

  "Jesus Christ," he said, letting go of the knife and rolling onto his hip. "Are you trying to give me a heart seizure? We're in Russia! It's the middle of the night! I thought you were an assassin...."

  His tirade paused as he took in her ravaged expression. "What's wrong?"

  Lark bit her lip. "I can't sleep. Can I...?"

  She gestured to the covers of his bed.

  Apparently it was let's torture Charlie night. He almost groaned.

  But there was something achingly vulnerable in her eyes. She'd never have let him see it if she wasn't desperately in need of company. Lark always kept her emotions in check. Sometimes she was like a bloody vault, but he'd known her for so long, it was as though only he held the code to get in.

  Charlie dragged the edge of the covers up and gestured for her to join him.

  You can do this.

  He wore his nightshirt—small restraint that was against the opportunistic surge of blood through his groin—and she was wearing her nightgown. He tried not to notice how thin it was, and how the moonlight spilled through the crack in the curtains. They'd done this a thousand times in the past, whispering secrets in each other's ears, or staging pillow fights. Lark had a mean elbow on her, and he'd scored more than one black eye from their playful tussles.

  But that was then.

  This was now.

  She was no longer just his friend.

  And as she snuggled into the mattress beside him, barely two inches between them, he realized things could never be the way they used to be ever again.

  And it was torture, because he himself had set the terms between them. Nothing further would happen between them, unless she met him in the middle.

  "We used to do this as children," Lark admitted, dragging the covers up to her chin.

  He turned his head to look at her. "We're not children anymore."

  Her dark eyes were shadows in the night. No. They weren't. He could read it in her expression, and the soft set of her lips.

  "How are you feeling?" She'd practically fled to her room when they returned, missing dinner. He'd paused outside her bedchambers on the way to his own, his hand poised to knock, but for some reason he'd hesitated.

  "Fine."

  Far from it, said her tone.

  "Can't sleep?"

  "My feet are cold," she whispered.

  It was much more than that. But he flashed her a smile, trying to lure one from her as he sought to gauge what she was thinking. "If you so much as inch those little icicles anywhere near me, it will be war."

  Lark smiled, and his heart gave a furious squeeze at the sight of it. "As I recall, I always used to win."

  "Perhaps I always used to let you."

  "Let me?" she snorted, rolling onto her side, her eyes glittering dangerously.

  "Let you," he repeated. "Now, are you going to tell me what's wrong? Or are we going to spend half the night arguing about who won?"

  Lark wet her lips.

  The humor in her eyes died.

  And he desperately wanted to bring it back, because this was the closest she'd let him be in years, but this wasn't about him. Something was hurting her. And curse him for a besotted idiot, but he'd do anything to make it better.

  "Who do I have to kill?" he whispered.

  "No one."

  "I daresay I don't like my chances, but I'll even take on Obsidian if he somehow hurt you. It would be a dramatic death. You can weep over my grave. Or... you could just tell me the truth. Not as much fun, of course, but I'll bear the sacrifice."

  "Obsidian and I spoke earlier. He told me he doesn't have the marque du sang of the Grigoriev family," she said in a very small voice.

  Resting on his side, Charlie reached out and toyed with a strand of her unbound hair. "I think he hopes he's a Grigoriev, more than he believes it. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to forget all trace of myself. My family."

  "I can," she whispered.

  He frowned at her. He'd barely heard the words. "But you had Tin Man. And us. And—"

  "Charlie." She captured his hand in hers, twining her fingers through his. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.

  He'd only ever asked her about her mother once.

  She died, Lark had told him in the type of voice that shut down any further questions.

  "Can you keep a secret?" The words tumbled from her lips in a rush.

  "Are you trying to insult me? Who spent a week locked in his room when someone added an invisible dye Honoria had been testing to Blade's shaving cream? Even though I wasn't even in the bloody house when it mysteriously happened?"

  She didn't even counter with all the times she'd taken the blame for things he'd done, which told him this was deadly serious.

  "There's... there's something I need to show you."

  She sat up, the covers spilling into her lap, and the first thing he noticed was the shadow of her nipples beneath the fine lawn of her nightgown.

  But you are not going to look at that.

  Because she clearly needed his support right now, not to have him leering at her.

  He tore his gaze to hers. "What?"

  Lark started to undo the buttons on her nightgown.

  Holy blood and ashes. Charlie tensed. Good intentions started going out the window. Be her friend. She needs a friend right now. But she was unbuttoning her nightgown all the way down, and suddenly he didn't know what the hell her intentions were.

  "I thought this was a bad idea?" he asked hoarsely.

  Lark bent her head forward, exposing her bare nape. Suddenly there wasn't enough moonlight in the world.

  "Tin Man would roll over in his grave if he knew I was showing you this," Lark whispered. "But I'm so tired of being the only one who knows this secret. I'm so tired of being alone."

  "Hey." He rubbed her upper arm.

  Lark drew her hair forward, over her shoulder. The heavy mass looked like a spill of black ink in the night, though in the sunlight it was a contradiction of browns and golds and even coppery strands. He'd spent years dreaming of running his fingers through it and—

  Charlie forced himself to clear his throat. "What am I meant to be looking at?"

  She let her nightgown fall halfway down her back and arms, holding the front of it to her breasts. That distracted him, but then he caught a glimpse of what was painted across her back.

  All his sexual impulses fled, leaving only the sudden pounding of his heart. Reaching out, he turned her to the glint of moonlight so he could see better.

  Her back was covered in an enormous sprawl of a tattoo. He'd known something was there. How could he not, growing up with her as he had?

  But Lark had always kept her back covered.

  Indeed, she'd been strangely protective of glimpses of her skin, always wearing dark shirts when the pair of them went swimming. Or yelling at him and grabbing her shirt to cover herself whenever he abruptly burst into her rooms as a child. He'd stopped doing that after she refused to speak to him for two weeks over it.

  The only time he'd ever caught a glimpse of her tattoo had been when the rain stuck her shirt to her skin, or when he'd been trying to save her life in the courtyard of the Ivory Tower, as blood gushed from her pierced lungs.

  Both times, he'd been too distracted to ask her about it.

  And she'd been careful to keep her back faced away from him in the baths.

  Reaching out, Charlie ran his fingertips across the ripple of c
olor as his eyes slowly made out the images he was seeing. A Firebird rose from a flaring sun; thorny chains circled an ornate cross behind it, and heavy Cyrillic letters splayed in an arch above it all.

  He'd seen these images before.

  Painted on Obsidian's arms.

  Blood and ashes. Charlie's blood ran cold even as he found himself shaking his head. "Lark." He could barely breathe the word. "What are you.... How?"

  She had the marque du sang of the Grigoriev House on her back.

  She glanced back over her bare shoulder, her dark lashes shuttering her eyes. "My name was Irina Konstantinovna Grigorieva."

  He'd seen the file on Obsidian, and the family tree of the last members of the Grigoriev House.

  Dmitri. Nikolai. Yekaterina. Irina. Evgeni.

  They were Konstantin Grigoriev's children.

  His breath caught. "Holy shit. You're Russian?"

  Not only that, she was of the Blood.

  Nobody at the Warren spoke of Lark's past. She'd arrived in Tin Man's arms when she was a young girl, and the mute man had never breathed a word of it.

  There was some mention of Tin Man working in the mines somewhere, a suspicion probably earned by the wheeze of his iron lungs. Lark was either a niece or his daughter, though both of them refused to say anything on the topic when it was mentioned, and after a while it wasn't important.

  Nobody knew where Lark truly came from, but that didn't matter anymore. Lark belonged to Tin Man. She was one of Blade's. She was family. That was all anyone needed to know.

  And she'd never once breathed a word of her past.

  Lark tugged her nightgown back into place and drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her shins and resting her chin on top of her knees. "You wanted to know what I was hiding. I was hiding everything. My name is Irina," she repeated, squeezing her eyes shut as if just saying it again overwhelmed her. "My birthday isn't in September. It's in May. You think I'm ten months younger than you, but the truth is, I'm almost two years older. We hid everything. My age, my gender, my birthdate, my name. I was small enough to pull it off, and English wasn't my first language, so it made me seem a little less precocious."

  "You're older than me?"

  She opened her eyes. "Does it matter?"

  "No. I just...." His head spun. "How on earth did you bite your tongue when I spent years lording my age over you as the closing matter in all our arguments?"

  "I had to," she whispered.

  And suddenly reality penetrated. This wasn't the sort of secret one kept for fun. It had real consequences. "Tell me everything."

  "Tin Man's real name was Yuri Saginov," she whispered. "He was a nobleman's fourth son, and became part of the failed revolution that rose against the Blood twenty years ago.

  "They cut out his tongue as punishment, the way they did to all the others within the revolution. Those that weren't in charge, at least. They took one person out of every ten of the revolutionaries, tortured them and cut their tongues out, and then crucified the rest. The Blood wanted them to be a reminder of the price of failure. Afterwards, Yuri was gifted to my father as a serf.

  "He created the Brotherhood of the Silent," she said, her spine bowed, as if she could barely stand to speak of this. "The Blood tried to take their voices to make them powerless, but Tin Man learned how to speak with his hands so they could still communicate. He gave them hope, and rumors started whispering through the Blood that the revolution was rising again."

  "Holy shit," he repeated.

  "He rescued me. I woke one night to find the palace burning," she said softly. "I thought it was the Brotherhood coming for us—they were the bogeyman every little Russian aristocrat believed in—but it was worse. It was Sergey." Her breath shuddered through her. "Katya was nine, and I was almost seven, and Zhenya.... He was just a baby."

  Charlie frowned in confusion before realizing she'd have known her siblings by their diminutives and not their full names.

  "What happened to them?"

  Lark's eyes hardened. "Sergey and his Chernyye Volki."

  "Cherny what?"

  "The Black Wolves. Originally, they were the nameless sons of lower class noblemen Sergey banded together. They protect him and carry out his dirty work. They’re thugs."

  "The same ones we saw at Grigoriev Palace the other day."

  No wonder she'd been so bloody distraught. Even entering the place was a nightmare for her.

  "Yes. They howl," she whispered. "It was the first I knew we were under attack. Fire was flickering in the lower halls. Men wearing wolf head masks were running through the hallways, hunting the servants. I wanted to go to my mama so badly, but I was so frightened.

  "So I climbed out the window. Papa was always lecturing me about climbing trees and the stable roofs, but it was probably the only thing that saved my life. I made my way to my mother's rooms and hid on the balcony outside her doors. I could see shadows inside the room, and hear my mother pleading for mercy...."

  She fell silent, staring right through him as if she could see something else in that moment.

  Charlie edged closer, slipping his hand into hers.

  "They killed Katya first," she whispered. "And then Evgeni. I will never forget the sound my mother made. They wanted to save her for last. They wanted her to know all her children were dead, but they couldn't find me. And as my mother begged for them to kill her too, I saw the man who'd slit their throats take off his mask.

  "It was Sergey. He was my cousin. My parents took him in when his own died, and raised him beneath our roof. They gave him everything and he betrayed them. It took me months to realize he’d arranged for the deaths of my father and my eldest brothers, Dmitri and Nikolai, on the same night. They were attending the opera with Papa when their carriage was attacked. I kept hoping word of them would come.... That it would be safe to return, but when the news reached us...."

  She buried her face in her hands, and Charlie wrapped his arms around her, dragging her face against his chest. A blue blood couldn't shed tears, but he felt the angry sobs tear through her.

  "Oh, Lark." He rocked her in his arms, clenching his eyes shut against her pain. "You're safe now. You're with me."

  She looked up, rubbing at her reddened eyes. "I hate him. I hate him so much."

  "How did you escape?"

  "They'd set the palace on fire." Lark took a deep breath. "I had to run. I was crying so badly I could barely see, but I was so angry. I swore then that I would live, and I would kill Sergey one day. I escaped through the maze we used yesterday, and watched the palace burn as Sergey and his men rode away.

  "That was where Yuri found me," she admitted. "He could see the tattoo on my back and knew I was of the Blood. I didn't realize he and my mother had known each other as children. I think he loved her, and he'd come for her the second he saw the flames licking at the manor. But it was too late for Mama.

  "Yuri broke into the palace and carried her out. He tried to see to her wounds, but... she knew she was dying. She wasn't of the Blood. With her last words she begged him to get me out of the country. Away from Sergey, away from the uprising, away from the Brotherhood and the flames. Sergey would have killed me if he found me."

  "So Yuri did," Lark whispered, staring through the wall. "He took me north through Finland. I was so frightened—of him, of everything that had happened—and I couldn't understand him. I couldn't understand what he was trying to say to me with his hands.

  "We knew Sergey was hunting for us. Yuri couldn't speak, and his tongue.... If anyone was looking for us, they'd be able to track us the second they asked after a man with no tongue, so I had to take charge. I said he was my uncle, not right in the head, and Yuri played the part. I spoke a little French, a little English, very little German. Enough to get by.

  "We stayed a couple of months in Denmark. Sometimes I'd cry," she whispered. "Yuri was so kind to me. He would pat my shoulder and rub my back, and he would try to make me understand what he was trying to say.
That was how we came up with the letters." Lark took a deep breath. "I made a board of letters, and Yuri taught me what his silent language meant."

  Holy blood and ashes. Charlie slowly lay back on his pillows, raking both hands through his hair.

  Lark was.... No. Irina was.... She was a Grigoriev. A princess of the Blood. He simply couldn't put the two together.

  "I liked Copenhagen. There was a little girl next door I played with. I almost forgot what it meant to look over my shoulder. We were there for almost three months before I caught a glimpse of one of Sergey's Chernyye Volki in the streets near our house. We had to leave in the middle of the night but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere they couldn't track us. Except for one place.

  "We were in France for the rest of the year. It was staunchly humanist, so no blue blood would dare enter the country for fear of being executed. I cut all my hair off and became Jean, but we couldn't relax. And when the French started talking about war with Russia, we knew it was no longer safe for us.

  "We were afraid they were still hunting for us, so when we landed in London we couldn't let ourselves be seen. We were hiding out in the East End. I'd taken to stealing to try and feed us, and Tin Man was searching for honest work, but nobody wanted to employ a mute.

  "And that was where Blade caught us. We were in Whitechapel territory, and a band of slashers had backed us into a corner. Yuri was trying to protect me and they were taking their time, darting in and cutting him. And Blade saved us." Lark closed her eyes, as if she could see another place, another time. "He took us home to the Warren. It was the first time I'd been warm in months, and he and Tin Man talked well into the night, using me as their interpreter. By the time the sun rose, they'd struck a deal. Tin Man would work for Blade, and in return, we had protection."

  All this time, and Blade had known?

  He hadn't said a word?

  Charlie wanted to punch something. How the hell had Blade let her come back here, knowing who she was? Knowing how dangerous this was?

  "I ain't 'ere for you."

  He hadn't been able to understand how Blade could leave his wife and daughter to journey to Russia, but it all made sense now. Russia was not only dangerous, but Lark's history was a maelstrom of terror.