A golden eyelid twitched. “I could throw you out on your arse.” He’d do it. Whatever loyalty existed between her brother and him be damned. She saw it in the hardness of his eyes.
Reggie held his stare. “And lose a window into your son’s life?” She shook her head. “You won’t do that.” Uninvited she slid onto the nearest seat, and the reed chair creaked under her weight. Only, seated before this stranger, with her brother looking on, she wavered.
It’s not your fault . . . None of it. It never was . . .
For so long she’d felt dirty and ashamed, less for those sins that had seen her ruined.
Despite all the suffering he wrought, you emerged triumphant. You pulled yourself from his clutches—
The echo of Broderick’s assurances gave her the strength to share the history behind her meeting with the marquess’s enemy. When she’d finished her telling, Quint stood, faintly trembling, his cheeks whitewashed. “He could have made me his whore,” she said matter-of-factly. “But that’s not who he was. He wasn’t and isn’t a man who preyed on those weaker. He protected them. He gave them homes and security.” She paused. “And he did the same for Stephen.” Withdrawing that crumpled scrap, she pushed it across the desk.
He made no move to touch the note, and then with stiff, reluctant movements, he reached for it.
The marquess skimmed the brief contents and then tossed it aside. “You expect I’d believe—”
“You can’t see past your own hatred that which is directly before you.”
“Regina,” her brother warned.
She gripped the edge of the marquess’s desk. “Walsh tried to sell me to Diggory.” Her skin crawled. “Diggory loved the nobility, and Walsh convinced him that because of both my speech and decorum that I was in fact a lady born. Broderick saved me.” Her heart swelled with her love for him. “He insisted I was his and put himself between me and that monster.” Reggie turned her palms up, willing him to see. “That is what he does. He saves people. The children he still hires for his clubs, the whores with not even pride left to their names, soldiers without eyes—they are all given a new start.”
Reggie searched the stoic stranger across from her. Striving to discover a hint of any of what he was feeling. Despair twisted a person in so many ways that oftentimes they couldn’t find their way out. She’d witnessed it in the Dials. At London Bridge, she’d very nearly been that person herself.
“Get out.”
Her heart sank. There was no reasoning with him. Broderick, Stephen, they’d both been correct. Gripping the arms of her chair, she pushed herself up.
“Quint,” the marquess clipped out.
Her brother hesitated and then made a hasty exit.
“Sit,” Lord Maddock ordered. Finally rising, he moved out from behind his chair.
She swallowed. He was enormous. Nearly five inches taller than her own height and broadly muscled, he was more mountain than man. That physique carried no trace of the waiflike boy who’d been like a brother to her.
Pausing at the sideboard, the marquess leveled her with a piercing stare.
Mistrustful. Fearless. Gold flecks danced in those deep brown depths.
They were Stephen’s eyes.
Reggie was the first to look away.
Reaching for the nearest bottle, Lord Maddock proceeded to fill his glass. “You are his whore,” he noted conversationally.
She stiffened.
“Oh, come.” He paused midpour, glancing over. “What other reason would you have for rushing here in a futile bid to save his life?”
A futile bid . . .
Except he’d not thrown her out as he’d first threatened, and she took heart in that.
“I’m not his whore,” she said quietly. “I’m no man’s whore.”
He snorted. “By your own admission, you sought to sell yourself to him.”
“Because of his honor, he wouldn’t allow it,” she shot back, not missing a beat.
That gave him pause. And then . . . “Why pay you when he could tup you without recompense?”
He sought a rise out of her. He was a man so twisted by his own hatred that he’d lost all decency, but her brother gave him his loyalty, and there was surely a reason for it.
“Are you afraid?”
The marquess froze, his glass touching his lips, and over that crystal rim, his eyes bored into her.
“Do you know”—she slowly put forward—“I think you are. You’ve been searching for your son”—a detail shared by Broderick—“and now you’ve learned of his existence. You make no attempt to meet him. To see for yourself.” Reggie stood and squared off with this man who’d terrorized Broderick with his threatening missives. “Because you are no longer the father you were when he was taken from you.”
“Enough,” he whispered.
“And you worry you won’t know how to be with this child you so loved.”
“I said, enough,” he thundered, hurling his snifter.
Reggie curled into herself as it slammed into the wall over his desk in an explosion of crystal and liquid. Errant shards hit her shoulder and stuck to the fabric of her wool cloak.
Heart racing, she fought for calm, not allowing him to see he’d rattled her. She dusted those flecks of glass from her person. “You know I’m right.”
They locked in a silent, never-ending battle, both refusing to yield the moment.
In the end, the echo of footsteps in the corridor and the return of her brother broke the impasse.
Quint opened the door, his gaze quickly taking in the mess littering his employer’s office. He swiftly righted himself. “He’s arrived.” That cryptic announcement revealed nothing.
A tall man ambled into the room.
Hatred singed through her veins.
Walsh.
“Oi’ve come to colle—” That cocky pronouncement faded as his gaze landed on Reggie. “Wot’s she doin’ ’ere?”
Reggie curled her lips up in a slow, icy smile learned from the Killorans, one she’d been wholly unable to master until this hated figure stepped before her. “Walsh,” she said as if greeting an old friend. “I see you’ve found friendship with His Lordship.”
“Wot’s she doing here?” Walsh repeated, lurching forward. That uneven sway to his gait and slurred speech a mark of his usual drunken state.
“What do you think I’m doing?” she taunted, answering for the marquess. Walsh’s eyes flashed with fear, and she preyed upon that. Reggie waved that aged scrap. “Tsk, tsk. Lesson one, never put one’s sins down in writing.”
Walsh paled. “Oi didn’t write that.”
Reggie smirked. “You don’t even know what ‘that’ is.” She took a step forward. “Or mayhap you do? Mayhap you remember precisely what you put down here.” Reggie stopped several paces from him; the stench of cheap spirits and unwashed bodies poured off his body, stinging her nostrils.
And this is the man the marquess would hang his trust in.
“She’s a liar,” Walsh cried, his voice quavering. “Never wrote any note. Can’t write.”
“No, of course not, you illiterate fool,” Reggie taunted. “But then, Lucy always could.” If possible, the drunkard’s skin went all the more white. “Lucy, who with her fine speech served as a nursemaid.”
The marquess’s eyes formed pinprick slits on the haggard drunk.
“Lies,” Walsh hissed, lunging for her.
Reggie easily stepped out of his reach, and he collided with a rose-inlaid table, upending the mahogany piece. Energy pumping through her, she put more distance between herself and the monster with murder in his eyes. “This is the man who wronged you”—she directed that warning to Lord Maddock, her gaze never wavering from Walsh—“and with whom you’d tie yourself in a partnership, condemning another to his death, while the one who murdered your wife and stole your son lives high on the coin you feed him.”
“You lying bitch,” Walsh cried out, reaching into the waistband of his tattered trousers.
Reggie froze, and time stood still as the fire’s glow glinted off the head of his pistol.
The door burst open to her brother’s shouts of fury.
Stephen!
Their simultaneous cries rolled as one.
“No!”
“No!” He hurtled himself at Reggie, just as the sharp report of that gun thundered around the room.