by Bec McMaster
There, she wanted to crow. Take that, you arrogant ass.
"Maybe you can teach me how to beg," she whispered, and let her gaze shift lower, to where his erection trained against his trousers. "Perhaps I'd let you. Would you like to see me on my knees, Malloryn? Wearing nothing but my diamonds?"
Adele rolled upright, tugging her gown into place.
Inch by inch, he'd put himself back together, though she doubted he'd been truly undone. Her words seemed to stir some devil within him, however.
"Perhaps we can discuss this inside in more detail?" A muscle flexed in his cheek as the footman opened the door. "Tonight."
She smothered a small, victorious smile. "I shall be all aquiver."
Malloryn stared at her for a second longer, then disembarked.
"Oh, and Adele?" He paused in the middle of the carriage doorway, reaching inside his waistcoat pocket for something. "This ends. Right now."
With that, he handed her a photograph of her kissing Devoncourt.
Chapter 4
"You look particularly pleased with yourself," said a sultry woman's voice behind him.
Malloryn turned away from the window of the Company of Rogues' safe house, where he'd been idly tapping on the sill and pondering the events that had occurred in the carriage. He hadn't meant to take it so far, so swiftly, but Adele roused his temper—and his competitive instincts.
And, if he was being particularly honest with himself, his lust.
Lie back and think of England, indeed.
How on earth did she get to him so easily?
They'd spent months living in the same house, seeing each other only from a distance, and yet he could always sense her. Adele's perfume lingered in empty rooms, and everywhere he looked she was causing some sort of disruption. Even if it was just to shuffle the books in his private library, a place he'd asked her not to enter. She would move things deliberately, and at first he'd assumed it was to plague him, but now he had to wonder if she'd been looking for something.
"Should I not be?" he asked, glancing at Gemma's face. The beautiful spy was the one in charge of the Company of Rogues in his absence. "Nobody's tried to kill the queen in the past four months, London appears almost peaceful, and the Company of Rogues has been blessed with not one, but three recent marriages, with another soon to come." He feigned surprise. "In fact, it seems you and Obsidian are the only ones ruining the Rogues' almost perfect score."
"It's not cricket, Malloryn. Obsidian and I will marry when we are ready. It's not as though I have any sort of reputation to ruin, nor do either of us intend upon children." Gemma rolled her eyes and poured both of them a brandy. "And since when are you a proponent of marriage? I thought there was a universal ban upon Rogues frolicking with other Rogues?"
"Since when do the lot of you listen to me?" He accepted the brandy. "I stopped making edicts when it became clear every single Rogue was doing his or her best to flout them."
He'd formed the Company of Rogues over seven months ago in order to discover the mysterious mastermind behind a spate of attacks in London.
They were the best of the best in their respective fields, but following his rules was not one of their talents.
"Speaking of marriage," Gemma drawled, "Byrnes tells me you received the photograph."
Ah, there it was. He'd wondered how long she could bite her tongue.
"Yes."
"The entire encounter may have been innocent, Malloryn. She did slap him."
"I don't tend to believe in coincidences when it comes to any of Balfour's agents."
Gemma gave him a steady look. "Byrnes said you'd take care of it. Does this mean you're planning a little light interrogation? Cuffs and all?"
"It's not as though I can lock my wife in a dungeon and demand answers. There are other means to get the truth." His eyes narrowed. "What else would you recommend?"
"No, no. Cuffs and caresses it is. It's just... seduction's not your usual style."
"Not as far as you're aware, no." Not his usual style, but not completely outside his realm of experience. Malloryn preferred to keep his assignations simple. Or he had, in the past. It had been months since he'd been with a woman. Before his marriage, in fact, though his recent spate of chastity had little to do with Adele. "I told her it's time to begin thinking of an heir. She won't think anything of it."
"And how goes your endeavor?"
Only Gemma could get away with such personal questions.
Though they didn't speak of it, he thought of her as the little sister he'd never had. Gemma had seen him at his worst, and despite her penchant for gossip, she'd kept the state of his recent issues from the other Rogues.
"I'm uncertain. Adele's a cunning adversary when she wants to be. And even I need more than a few hours to break her down."
"I shall be all aquiver."
He didn't know what to make of that statement. One moment Adele was playing the coy virgin, and the next she was challenging him.
The taste of her bare throat lingered, even now. He didn't know how the hell he was going to get through the next couple of hours. He'd forced himself to take his leave once he saw her safely home, but his cock hadn't seemed to understand.
Intolerable.
The bloody woman drove him insane.
"And if she's not involved in this plot? What then? Adele might have expectations in regards to your sudden change of heart."
She'd better not. "I'll deal with such a matter if it arises."
Gemma cut him a chastising look. "I just find it difficult to believe your wife is a spy owned by Lord Balfour. He did try to have her killed on your wedding day."
"And if I wanted to plant an operative in my enemy's house without having him doubt her, the first thing I'd do is stage an incident to make her appear a target. If Balfour truly wanted Adele dead, I'd have found her lying in the middle of her bed with her throat slit. Instead, his assassin kidnapped her and led you a merry chase, where we just happened to rescue her in time. Convenient, in my opinion."
"She saved your life in the Ivory Tower."
"All the better to worm her way into my trust."
"Well, for someone who's supposedly an enemy agent in your bed, she doesn't appear to have made much progress getting in there."
Malloryn peered down his nose at her. "Have you been examining my sheets every morning?"
Gemma shot him a sweet smile. "I don't have to. I know what a man looks like when he's only had his hand for company for several months."
My God. "We are not ever discussing the contents of my bed." It came out as a faint growl.
"Why not? It might do you some good to get a little action. You've been so tense even Byrnes is tiptoeing around you, and Obsidian—of all people—said you need a good f—"
"Gemma."
She was outright grinning at him. "Prude. It might do you good. Ease a little bit of that pressure. You've been wound tighter than a corkscrew ever since you married her."
"My tension has nothing to do with Adele and everything to do with Balfour."
"Of course." Her drawl contained entire syllables of sarcasm. "It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact your very beautiful wife gets your back up in a way no woman ever has."
"Because I want to throttle her?"
"Because you very clearly want to do more than throttle her, and it drives you crazy. Because you can't control her. Because she challenges you. Because the second you get your hands on her I will place good coin on the fact the results are going to be... explosive."
"If I get wind of even a single bet placed on the outcome of this situation—"
"You won't," she promised. "Get wind of it, that is."
This was what he got for putting together a group of spies. Malloryn pinched the bridge of his nose. There'd been a flurry of wagers about whether he'd even get Adele to the altar or not.
"Don't you have something more important to attend to?" he growled. "Rather than interrogating me about my wife?"
Gemma wet her lips and produced an envelope. "Actually, I was trying to ease my way into this conversation. A letter arrived for you several hours ago."
He stared at it.
The abrupt change in subject was somewhat jarring, which meant Gemma was nervous.
Even before he reached for the letter, an odd sense of foreboding filled him. Gemma had been trained as a child assassin. It was rare to ever see a sign of nerves about her.
He turned the envelope over. "You did an excellent job of replacing the seal. This almost looks untouched."
"That's because it is."
Malloryn looked up, all of his senses coming to high alert. He had few qualms about the state of any personal correspondence that came into this house. If Byrnes wasn't somehow listening in to his conversations, then Gemma was probably rifling through his mail.
His butler, Herbert, made sure to intercept anything of note he wanted to keep private.
"Herbert found it sitting on your desk. None of the other Rogues placed it there, and there's no sign of a break-in. It simply appeared, and we have no idea how it got there."
Flipping one of his knives out of his sleeve, he slid it beneath the seal and plucked the letter out.
Dearest Auvry,
Did you miss me?
It's time to bring this game to an end.
There was no signature.
There didn't have to be.
He knew the handwriting as well as he knew his own, and a chill ran down his spine.
After four tense months, Lord Balfour had finally resurfaced.
"Balfour is back," Malloryn said as he seated himself at the head of the oval table that housed the rest of the Company of Rogues. Ten pairs of eyes looked back at him attentively.
Gemma ruled the team in Malloryn's absence, along with her lover, Obsidian, a dhampir assassin she'd lured from Balfour's side; Liam Kincaid and his wife, Ava, who were a contradiction of brawn and brains; Byrnes and his verwulfen wife, Ingrid, could hunt anything—including vampires; Charlie Todd could pluck the eyes from a man's sockets without him noticing, though his fiancée, Lark, might almost be better than him; Herbert, the butler who'd once been his personal assassin, fussed as he tried to pour tea for the ladies; and there at the end was Jack Fairchild, munitions expert and Malloryn's secret weapon against Balfour.
Most of them had been handpicked by himself; an elite team of blue bloods, verwulfen, and mechs who were at the top of their respective fields. Spies, thieves, bounty hunters, mechanical geniuses, and two Nighthawks who'd spent years tracking criminals and hunting murderers.
Lark was the only Rogue Malloryn hadn't personally vetted, but considering the fact she'd played a large role in rescuing him from Balfour's clutches in Russia, he'd welcomed her to the Company.
Besides, she and Charlie made a dynamic team. He wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"It's about bloody time," Byrnes said, his eyes lighting up. "As much as I enjoyed the break after Russia, I'm tried of looking over my shoulder and second-guessing every clue I find. Is it Balfour? Or am I just seeing things?"
"The question is," Ingrid growled, "where is he?"
"More importantly, how did he get in?" Kincaid had turned into an overprotective bear of late, since his wife's delicate condition had become common knowledge among the group.
"It won't have been Balfour," Gemma argued. "He'll have sent one of his agents."
"Excellent." Byrnes grimaced. "Jelena or Dido?"
Malloryn had known it was coming and managed to control his flinch at the mention of Jelena's name.
It was the dreams he couldn't control.
"Dido," Obsidian muttered. "If it were Jelena, she wouldn't have been able to restrict herself to just leaving a letter. She'd have left a body."
"Preferably Malloryn's," Byrnes noted.
Gemma glanced at him as if to gauge his reaction, but Malloryn ignored her. She alone knew how deep his scars following Russia went.
Charlie leaned back in his chair. "Lark and I think we found the point of entry. There's a faint chisel mark under the latch in the attic window. Couldn't have been there long. This morning, I'd imagine."
Malloryn arched a brow. "Herbert?"
The butler looked chagrined as he added blood to Ava's tea and replaced the small flask in its ice bath. "You have my abject apologies, Your Grace. I noticed nothing amiss."
And if one of his best assassins hadn't noticed an intruder, then no one would have.
"Hardly your fault." Malloryn drummed his fingers on the table. "So... it seems Balfour wants me to know he's back, which means he has plans afoot. He'll have been here in London for weeks—possibly longer—no doubt. And he won't have made this move unless he was fully prepared to restart the game. He'll be miles ahead of us at this stage."
"We destroyed his London base and the dhampir who were working for him here," Gemma mused. "But that doesn't mean he doesn't have allies remaining in London."
"We just don't know who," Ingrid said.
"Yet." This from Byrnes.
"We know his targets, however," Malloryn said. "Myself, the Duchess of Casavian, Lord Barrons, and the queen. We'll start there."
"You're last," Obsidian said, glancing up from his thoughts. "He wants you to see London burn, so he'll go after one of the others first."
"And the Ivory Tower's impenetrable," Gemma added, "which means the queen should be safe."
"Technically, it's not.... He penetrated it the last time he was in London," Charlie replied, heat flushing up the back of his neck as he glanced at Gemma.
Balfour's men had planted a mind-controlling device in her brain, and activated it when she was within reach of the queen. With her skillset, she'd been within inches of assassinating the queen when Obsidian, Byrnes, and Ingrid managed to stop her.
She'd also come very close to killing Malloryn himself.
"We cannot afford to presume the Ivory Tower is safe, but we're prepared to counter the neural stimulating device now," Malloryn said softly as Gemma flinched. Concern went both ways. She had her nightmares; he had his. "But Gemma's correct. The least-protected targets are Lord Barrons and the Duchess of Casavian.
"Which is why Byrnes and Ingrid will be setting up a team of Nighthawks near Barrons's household. Get a team in place to protect the household and then return. I'll need both of you shortly." Malloryn tossed the letter onto the table, and it slid to a halt in front of Charlie. The lad examined it. "While the rest of us are going to start tracking down Balfour."
"The paper's of excellent weight," Charlie said. "Good ink. Fine tip on the nib used to compose it. You'd find this sort of equipment in any blue blood lord's study."
"We always knew he was using several aristocrats to plot his coup. They're the ones who were most disenfranchised by the revolution three years ago. All Balfour needs to do is stir up old resentments, and they'll flock to his cause."
They'd be the ones who were most likely to have access to the Ivory Tower, where the queen resided, too.
"Do you think any of the Sons of Gilead survived your cull?" Gemma asked. "We cut off the head of the snake, so to speak, but there were a lot of noblemen who were involved—or sympathetic—who simply faded into the background once Lord Ulbricht died."
Lord Ulbricht and his cronies had formed the SOG as a means of overthrowing the queen. Unfortunately, Lord Ulbricht met a bad end and the cause disintegrated.
Old resentments, however, died hard.
"Most likely. Byrnes and Ingrid reported dozens of masked blue bloods in attendance at Lord Ulbricht's estate when they went in undercover. I only managed to get my hands on thirteen of them, and none of them were members of any prominence or knew anything important. They were all executed, but the others remain among the general populace."
"So the SOG might rear its head?" Kincaid asked.
"That's one option, yes."
Like a bloody hydra.
He
had more enemies than he knew what to do with.
"There is one last avenue to pursue," Malloryn said. "A recent development."
Both Byrnes and Gemma looked up.
"Devoncourt," Gemma said.
"One of Balfour's ex-Falcons has been sighted masquerading as the long-lost Earl of Devoncourt. We don't know what his intentions are, but I don't believe in coincidence. If he's pretending to be one of the Echelon's lords, then he's doing it for a reason. I want to know what that reason is."
"You want Ingrid and me to kidnap him?" Byrnes asked.
"Falcons are trained to resist interrogation," Gemma said. She should know. "Far better to watch him from a distance. He may lead us to other Falcons, or possibly reveal certain former SOG members. We don't want to reveal our hand too early."
"Precisely." Malloryn pushed back in his chair. "Gemma, I'm putting you in charge of tracking Devoncourt. Discreetly. I will let the queen know the threat is back, and tighten our security at the Ivory Tower."
"And your wife?" Gemma asked.
He ignored the speculative looks on everyone's faces. It was clear they were well aware of Devoncourt's interest in Adele. If he pressed the matter, he'd no doubt find a betting book somewhere in the bloody house.
"I will continue my efforts to learn what part my wife plays in all of this. If—as you say—Adele is innocent, then Devoncourt was sniffing around her for a reason. I want to know why. Adele is either a cunning knife at my throat, or an unwitting pawn in danger."
His tone left little doubt which one he suspected.
"Dismissed."
Chapter 5
"May I have this dance?"
It was Malloryn's voice, though Adele had not expected her husband to be in attendance at Lady Rutherford's masked ball.
Adele stilled, all of her senses narrowing in upon the presence suddenly at her back. Orchestral strings shivered through a waltz in the distance. Feathers and gold sequins flashed past as the masked inhabitants of the ball swept in graceful figures before her.
But the pair of them might as well have been alone.
