Reggie hovered at the edge of the window and, through the crack in the curtains, stared down, fixed on the grounds below.
Ophelia and her husband stepped out with Broderick following close behind, a reluctance in his step. He suddenly stopped and looked up toward her window.
Reggie jumped back.
“You fool,” she whispered, hating herself for having dared to believe that he would be hers. It was fate mocking her for having carried that dream of love in her heart still, all these years later. Only losing him to another would have been easier had she not had a taste of what had almost been.
She forced herself away from that window and back to the work sprawled out upon her bed. This other dream would have to be enough.
To keep from dissolving into a pathetic, blubbering mess, Reggie turned her attentions to her design plans.
Her door burst open, and she glanced up.
Stephen lingered there.
“You can come in,” she encouraged, and he pushed the door closed with the heel of his boot.
He dragged himself up onto the bed. “Do you think he’s going to marry her?” he asked without preamble.
The universe was determined to torture her. Or mayhap it was just this eleven-year-old boy who wavered between loyal young brother and surly nemesis. Except . . . she searched for a hint of malice and found none.
“I . . . hope he does,” she brought herself to say.
“You do?” He wrinkled his little brow. “I thought you loved him.”
Everyone knew.
She sighed, and setting down the page in her hand, she attended him. “I do,” she said simply.
“And yet you want him to marry someone else?” She may as well have just sprung a second head for the look he gave her.
“I want him to be happy, and . . . not hang.” Her voice cracked, and she coughed into her hand. “I don’t want him to hang, and so when you love somebody, you put their happiness before even your own,” she explained, willing him to see.
“My damn father,” he gritted. Stephen’s gaze fell to the papers around them, and curiosity lit his eyes. “Is that for your new club?” he asked, scooting over until his shoulder brushed her arm.
“It is for my music hall,” she said, welcoming that diversion. Fetching the plans she’d worked on with Broderick’s suggestions in mind, she offered them up to the boy.
He hesitated and then accepted the book. Silently, he flipped through the pages. “This ain’t a gaming hell.”
He’d the outraged tones of one who’d been duped. Her lips twitched, and she quickly hid that smile. “No.” It never had been.
“Wot’s a tightrope dancer?” he asked, curiosity in his voice.
“Here.” Reggie abandoned her sheet music and collected another folio. “Let me show you.” Fanning the pages, she found the dog-eared one a quarter of the way through the leather volume. She turned it out.
He stared at the rendering and then lifted quizzical eyes to hers. “They dance in the air.”
She nodded. “On a rope,” she clarified.
“Hmph.” Stephen glanced down at the page once more. “I’d like to see that.”
Reggie smiled. “That is certainly the hope.” Find what makes you different . . . Pantomime. Tightrope dancing. A mix of performers outside of musicians . . . It was an idea Broderick had given her, when he could have so easily allowed her to continue on the path she’d planned, saying nothing. Letting her fail. But he hadn’t. She stretched her legs out and hooked them at the ankle. That was the man Broderick had always been to her. Until the assignment he’d recently forced her into, he’d freely supported her.
They fell into an easy silence, Reggie working and Stephen sifting through her papers.
He coughed.
Reggie marked a note for Martin Phippen.
“I said, ahem.”
She glanced up.
“Broderick thinks it doesn’t matter what he does. Who he marries or what the marquess knows or doesn’t know. He says he’s going to die. Do you believe that?”
Reggie set aside her pencil and then stared down at her charcoal-stained palms. “I don’t know,” she confessed.
He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket and handed it over.
Reggie clasped the aged scrap. “What is this?” She skimmed the contents and then looked up, in shock.
“They’re the ones who took me,” he said quietly as he swung his legs back and forth.
I found ya a nob’s son like ya wanted . . . Ya said one hundred pounds. We wants two . . . It read in a sloppy scrawl better suited to a child just learning his numbers and outlined the sins of all those years ago.
Walsh and Lucy Stokes.
This was who’d taken him. Two of Diggory’s most loyal henchmen. Her heart throbbed with remembered hatred. Walsh, who’d attempted to yank away the protective cover Broderick had offered her within the gang and thrust her into the role of Diggory’s whore.
Heart pounding, Reggie gathered Stephen by the arm. “Where did you find this?”
“Found it in Diggory’s old things.”
“He has to see this,” she breathed.
Stephen lifted one shoulder in a dejected little shrug. “He did. Broderick brought it to him, but the marquess wouldn’t even listen. Turned him out.”
And that fledgling hope came crashing down. Broderick was a man who could talk the Almighty into sinning if he wished.
“Twisted he i-is,” Stephen whispered, and through her own grief, she heard fear, so abhorrent to all this boy was, shaking that last syllable.
Reggie carefully smoothed out the aged yellow note, the fading inked words creased and cracked by an angry fist: Broderick’s? Or Stephen’s? Since she’d discovered the truth of Stephen’s birthright and kidnapping, she and all the Killorans had been so fixed on Broderick’s survival. How much had they, outside their own sadness and fears, truly considered Stephen’s departure? These past days, while Broderick had fought for his own survival, Stephen had been left to contemplate a life with a marquess, called mad, who was a stranger to him.
“I don’t want to go,” Stephen whispered, leaning his slight weight against her.
She folded her arm around him. “I know. I don’t want you to leave, either.” Just as Reggie wanted to remain a part of this family.
“He doesn’t want me.” That admission emerged haltingly from Stephen.
“I don’t believe that,” Reggie said softly.
He hunched his shoulders. “No?” He didn’t allow her a beat with which to respond. “Then why didn’t he come when he learned I was his son?”
Why, indeed? Reggie sighed and offered him the only thing she had—the truth. “I don’t know why, Stephen,” she confessed. “Mayhap he’s allowing you time to make your goodbyes to the world you’ve been living in.” Unlikely. “Or mayhap he’s afraid, too, of beginning again with the boy he’d loved.” A child who was now a stranger. “But you will both find your way together . . . eventually.”
Stephen’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I don’t want to begin again.”
No one ever did. Not truly. “Someday,” she said softly, stroking the top of his head, “I believe you’re going to find happiness with your father. And one day you will have a hard time imagining a life without him in it.”
He sniffled. “You really think that?”
She’d have to be deaf to fail to hear the hope threading that question. “I do,” Reggie assured him. And she prayed for that gift for the boy’s sake.
They shared a small smile.
The door burst open, and they both jumped up, unsheathing their daggers.
Gertrude stumbled inside. “Trouble,” Gertrude rasped, her cheeks flushed from her exertions. Bent over, she borrowed support from her knees and held out an official-looking page. “One of Connor’s men received w-word,” she managed between her great, gasping breaths for air. “Maddock is g-going to act.”
Stephen’s face went ashen. “Tonight?”
A pit formed in Reggie’s belly. “What?” She came forward, retrieving the note from Stephen’s shaking fingers, and scanned the contents.
Gertrude’s face contorted into a paroxysm of grief. “Connor has had the marquess’s townhouse watched.” Her voice caught. “T-two constables were summoned to Maddock’s.”