“You won’t see any stars,” Lazarus said. “Not with the smoke and fog.”

“I’m not here for stargazing.” When he’d been on the lam, after his escape from Dunmoor, he hadn’t been able to appreciate being outside. But here he was now. With London spread all around him—Bethnal Green and Whitechapel to the east, Smithfield Market and St. Paul’s Cathedral to the south. And off to the west, in the posh neighborhoods of Mayfair and St. James’s, that’s where he’d find Rockley.

Eva was out there, too. Heading toward her other life in Brompton as a … a what? She said they all had jobs to keep Nemesis afloat, so what did she do? Was she some gent’s fancy piece? She couldn’t be a factory girl like the ones Jack knew. A shopgirl? Maybe she was one of those “modern” women who worked as a clerk and could use a fancy typing machine. None of it seemed right, though.

He could ask Lazarus, but it wouldn’t do to have the old soldier know how much she interested him. He’d give none of these Nemesis lot anything that could be used as a weapon. They were the sort who hoarded knowledge and used it against people. Maybe Rockley. Certainly Jack. Ruthless bastards.

And he’d delivered himself to them. Right on a fucking platter.

“It’s colder than a Frenchwoman’s cunt out here,” Lazarus grumbled. “Time to go back inside. You’ll be no good to us if you catch the pleurisy and die.”

“I never get sick,” Jack said.

“And tonight won’t be the first time, not while I’m on watch.” The older man nodded toward the door. “Down you go.”

“Or what?” Jack rumbled.

“Or I summon the coppers and you don’t get to look at this fine night sky ever again.”

Anger churned in Jack like bad gin. If he could, he’d sleep on this roof, no matter how blasted cold it was. But it was clear from the set of Lazarus’s jaw that he’d make good on his threat if Jack didn’t do as he was told.

Cursing foully, Jack ducked through the door and trundled down the staircase. Each step back toward his little room felt like more weights being added to his invisible shackles. He’d broken out of prison, yet he still wasn’t free.

A voice whispered in his mind, Have I ever been?


CHAPTER FIVE

“You shouldn’t be alone with him,” said Simon.

Eva glanced over at him as the hansom cab rattled toward her lodgings. That they’d been able to find any cab at this hour—and a sober driver—had been something of a miracle. She’d been fully prepared to make the long trek on foot. But in that inimitable way of his, Simon had simply walked out onto the corner, and a hansom had rolled up, asking their direction.

Things came so easily to a man like Simon. Cabs included. He had everything—birth, wealth, position, aristocratic blond good looks that made women instinctively pat their hair and widen their eyes like fawns eagerly awaiting a wolf. Of all the Nemesis operatives, Simon seemed the least likely to involve himself in their work. Why should he? He’d never been on the wrong end of justice before. He served as Nemesis’s de facto leader, but he never made unilateral decisions. Everything was discussed among the operatives.

Simon’s time in the army had shown him hard lessons. And, like a few other men of his class, he had a strong belief in morals and ethics. Not so strong that he wouldn’t make use of a man like Jack Dalton, however.

“We’ve utilized men such as him before,” she pointed out.

“They were easily manipulated. Too afraid of the consequences of defying us to be a threat. But him…” Simon exhaled roughly. “He’s got nothing to lose.”

“Except vengeance.” She and the others of Nemesis had counted on Dalton’s need for revenge as a key element of their plan. What none of them had anticipated, she especially, was the depth of his feeling. It was far more than the animal desire for retaliation.

The pain in Dalton’s eyes when he spoke of his sister dying … beyond loss, there was self-recrimination. Somehow, Dalton held himself responsible for Edith’s death. Having read the file, Eva knew that Dalton had had nothing to do with Rockley’s going to the brothel where Edith had worked. Dalton hadn’t been anywhere near Rockley that night—his bodyguards received one day off a week, and that day had been Dalton’s. Somehow, Dalton had learned of Edith’s death that same night, and had unsuccessfully tried to avenge her in the early hours of the morning. Yet he still felt culpable. Eva had seen it in the glaze of rage and anguish in his dark eyes.

Killing Rockley wouldn’t bring Edith Dalton back from the dead, but to her brother, it had to mean some measure of absolution. A man would do almost anything to achieve forgiveness.

“He’s going to be trickier to handle than the others,” Simon insisted. “Remember Fetcham? He was a bruiser, too, but when it came right down to it, he fell in line. Dalton’s far more dangerous.”

“I can handle him,” said Eva. “Thumbs to the eyes, a knee to the groin. He might be big and strong as a bull, but every man has vulnerable places.”

Passing lamplight glanced off the pristine planes of Simon’s face as he frowned his displeasure. He verged on being too handsome, if such a thing were possible, almost uncomfortable to look upon. To her, however, he was merely Simon, her colleague, the architecture of his face admirable but not stirring.

Not like Dalton. He wasn’t handsome, not in the known sense of it, anyway. Yet she couldn’t banish his face from her mind, its rough contours and hard lines. If Simon was a mathematically perfect temple, its columns placed precisely, the proportions expertly rendered, Dalton was a granite mountain, all crags and peril, alluring because it was hazardous. Both drew the eye, but for very different reasons.

“It’s not Dalton’s size or strength that has me concerned,” said Simon.

“A little credit, if you please.” Eva fixed him with a wry look. “I’m hardly the sort to be led astray by a suggestive remark or carnal glance.”

“No, you aren’t.”

At least there was no recrimination in Simon’s tone. Once, years ago, he’d intimated that he would like to take their relationship beyond the professional. She’d immediately quashed that idea. There had been some wounded feelings right after her refusal, but Simon’s speedy recovery had proven to her that, at most, he’d been mildly curious. Not enthralled. Not even enamored. She hadn’t been hurt by his quick rallying. If anything, it proved what she already knew—she was better off on her own, free of entanglements.

“Just … be wary around Dalton,” Simon pressed. “He’s got a way of looking at you.”

Her heart gave a strange, small leap. “The man’s been in prison for five years. He’d look at a toothless crone the same way.”

This time it was Simon who was wry. “Believe it or not, but even in the depths of a man’s lust, he knows the difference between a beldam and a beauty.”

“How encouraging.”

Simon continued, “Dalton assuredly knows what he sees when he looks at you.”

The woman who’s got his baubles in her hand. Or is it more than that?

It didn’t matter. She was a dedicated operative. Dalton might be different from what she had anticipated, but she had a responsibility to Nemesis’s client and the greater good. He was simply another cog in the larger machine, a machine she was determined to run with the same capable skill she’d shown throughout her years with Nemesis.

The cab rolled to a stop outside the door to her lodgings. It was a perfectly respectable building in a perfectly respectable neighborhood; so respectable, in fact, that no one was awake to note that she wasn’t married to the man riding with her in the hansom. After bidding Simon good night, Eva climbed the front steps, then let herself in.

She walked up the two flights of stairs leading to her rooms. The ground floor was where her landlady, Mrs. Petworth, lived, along with Mrs. Petworth’s daughter. Miss Axford resided on the next story, a soft-spoken girl who worked at a stationer’s shop, as well as the Ratley cousins, both women employed as transcribing clerks at the same firm.

Reaching the door of her rooms, Eva saw light filtering out from beneath the door of the woman who lived across from her. Miss Siles was a writer, and kept appalling hours as she struggled to become the next George Eliot. As Eva fitted her key into the lock of her door, she heard the creak of the floor in Miss Siles’s rooms. Pacing. Again. She paced far more than she actually wrote. Thankfully, she was also much too absorbed in her creative process to notice that the woman who lived across the hall was coming home at three-thirty in the morning. Hardly the hours a respectable tutor kept.

Mrs. Petworth often reminded Eva that she rented only to decent women of good repute.

A smile touched Eva’s lips as she wondered what Dalton might think of that policy. He’d likely have something to say about her reputation, and it wouldn’t be good.

She stepped inside her rooms and shut the door behind her, then turned the lamp on low. Soft light filled the snug but comfortable space, illuminating the table at which she conducted her lessons, the armchair by the fireplace and the books gathered around the chair’s feet, and the painted folding screen which concealed her bed. Watercolors painted by her students hung upon the walls. What they lacked in skill they made up for in enthusiasm.

She gave a quick but thorough scan of the chambers, checking for indications that anyone had been there. Everything was just as she’d left it earlier. Not even the single hair she’d left on her bed had been disturbed. Searches almost always began with the bed.

She tried to picture Dalton in her rooms. He’d seem as out of place as an ironclad in a duck pond.

Papers and lesson plans were scattered upon her table, and as she gathered them up, she considered then rejected the idea of making herself a cup of tea. Far too late for that. What she really needed was to take her own advice to Dalton and get some sleep. It had been a phenomenally long day. She’d been awake for over twenty-one hours. At the least, she didn’t have any students scheduled for tomorrow. Checking her calendar, she noted that her next appointment was for the day following next. The Hallow children. Both girls were making decent progress with their French, but they couldn’t retain historical dates for love or money.

Mr. Hallow didn’t care if his daughters knew the date of the Treaty of Windsor. He only wanted them to speak French passably, to paint with a fair degree of skill, and to have enough general knowledge to successfully converse at the dinner table. In short, he wanted them to be like the daughters of the aristocracy, even though Mr. Hallow was a grocer who owned two shops. Like most everyone in London, he had aspirations. For himself. For his children.

Eva stacked her papers up into neat piles. She needed to keep everything tidy. Her students all came to her rooms for their lessons. Her clients didn’t have enough money to have governesses, nor to send their daughters away to school. Eva was there to give the girls a bit of polish—and, unbeknownst to their parents, some actual useful skills, such as mathematics, geography, and history.

None of her students nor their parents knew the truth about Eva. Even Eva’s own parents believed she was just a tutor, and nothing more.

As a gentleman, Simon had no need of work, per se, but he managed his investments and estates with none of his aristocratic friends or colleagues aware of his other work. Marco continued to serve as a consultant to the government in matters of foreign policy. Lazarus had a military pension, but would take occasional construction jobs. And no one at the accountancy firm where Harriet clerked had the vaguest inkling that she did anything other than sort through financial records.

Eva rather liked having dual selves. A secret belonging only to a select few. And while Simon, Marco, and the others knew she taught, none of them had ever been inside her rooms, nor seen her at work. The only person who knew everything about the two Evas was Eva herself.

Satisfied everything was in order, she checked the locks on her door one last time, then began to undress. Undoing the hooks running along the front of her bodice was a relief. She did the same with her corset cover and corset. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since she’d dressed in the predawn darkness, preparing for her journey out to Yorkshire. Now her clothes felt limp and stale.

What must it be like to have a maid, dressing and undressing you? All of her garments fastened in the front. Wealth was never a possibility when tutoring the children of shopkeepers. She might have made more as a governess, or teaching at a day or boarding school—but that meant her time wouldn’t be her own, time she needed for Nemesis.