He looked into Lucy’s eyes. He saw everything he’d ever wanted there. Hope. Trust. Desire. Compassion.

Love, if he let himself call it that.

He couldn’t call it that.

She would hate him if she knew that he’d come to steal everything. If she knew that she shouldn’t look at him with that amount of trust. If she knew that Durrant was exactly the kind of enemy who would destroy her and Julia.

She’d asked him earlier whether he would take a wife and children on the run with him. He’d meant it when he had said that he wouldn’t put himself in that position.

But when she looked at him like that, he was tempted to keep her. Or, if he couldn’t do that, tempted to tell her the truth. He owed it to her. He’d never met anyone else who was willing to share her deepest secrets without prying his out of him first.

He couldn’t let himself be tempted. He and his siblings had agreed to leave. He couldn’t ruin it all at the eleventh hour by telling Lucy that they were criminals.

But somehow he knew he would regret it forever if he lied to her now.

He took a breath. Then another. And then, in a voice that sounded tortured even to his ears, he said, “I haven’t been entirely truthful about my family.”

Her hope didn’t dim. She grinned instead. “I would imagine that’s an understatement. Go on.”

He had no idea where to start. He owed her something — something that would explain to her later why he’d done what he was about to do.

“You don’t have a flask of whisky hidden under your skirts, do you?” he asked.

Her grin turned saucy. “You’re welcome to look, but you won’t find whisky.”

Laughing hurt, but he did it anyway. “Later, if you’ll still have me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Stop thinking you’ll scare me away,” she said, her frustration slipping through. “Take it from someone who just revealed her biggest secret — you may feel better for it.”

“Discussing feelings ain’t exactly popular in the East End,” he said, dropping into his old accent to test the waters.

Her eye twitched. He suspected that she barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes again. “The ton doesn’t encourage honesty either. Stop prevaricating. Perhaps you can start by telling me one thing that’s true?”

One truth. Something he hadn’t told her — something he’d buried deep enough to protect it from being accidentally unearthed.

“When I was twelve, my father died,” he started.

“I know that,” Lucy said.

“Do you want to hear the rest?” he asked drily.

She made a show of putting her hands over her mouth.

He took one of them away — but he didn’t let go. Somehow, it soothed him to hold on to her fingers, even though they both wore gloves. “When I was twelve, my father died,” he began again. “But before he died, he’d filled my head with all sorts of nonsense — how we were descended from earls and kings. How we were destined for greatness. He’d poured all his money into sending me to school. The headmaster was unfailing in his efforts to make me a gentleman. He didn’t hesitate to beat my accent out of me.”

Lucy frowned. “That’s horrible.”

“I would’ve said ‘orrible, not horrible,” he said, with a mirthless smile. “But if you think that’s horrible, you won’t want to hear the rest.”

She turned her hand in his so that she was holding his fingers — so that she could squeeze them reassuringly. “Let it out, Max.”

He took a breath. He hadn’t thought of school in years. There’d been other, bigger disasters in the years that followed. The occasional birching in the headmaster’s office was nothing compared to Durrant.

Durrant. Every monster paled in comparison to him.

But he had to say everything as dispassionately as possible or he wouldn’t be able to finish. “School ended after Papa died. Workhouses don’t care much for educating poor orphans — or at least mine didn’t. We’re better suited for picking rags or sweeping chimneys.”

“You were in a workhouse? Was there no family to take you in?”

“One of my mother’s cousins took Cressida and….” He cut himself off before mentioning Atticus, taking a breath. It wasn’t hard to pretend that some emotion had overcome him, rather than that he’d almost said Atticus’s name. The memory of their cousin Margaret collecting Cressida and Atticus still haunted him. “She wanted a daughter, she said. She wanted a child she could raise, not a ‘half-grown whelp who might cause trouble.’”

It was a direct quote. It was also the worst rejection on top of a series of rejections he’d suffered in the week after his father’s death — all the fancy houses who wouldn’t listen when he showed up at their servants’ entrances begging for their bills to be paid. The creditors who wouldn’t give him or his siblings even a few days to mourn in private. The men who’d come to clear out their rented lodgings, taking all the furniture and trinkets that had belonged to their dead parents.

He could only salvage five buttons, cut from his father’s favorite coat before they buried him in it and given to each sibling as a memento of what they’d lost. By the time their cousin Margaret had arrived in London, the children were huddled in an empty set of rooms, subsisting on food their neighbors couldn’t afford to keep providing.

“She abandoned you?” Lucy asked sharply.

Max shrugged. “At least she took Cress. I couldn’t have kept Cressida alive in the workhouse.”

Not to mention Atticus, who was only two when their father had died. It was his birth that had killed their mother. He’d been sickly at first — it was a miracle he’d lived to adulthood.

Max needed to remember that. He couldn’t get sucked into the sympathetic horror that Lucy was giving him. Her sympathy would likely disappear as soon as she learned the rest.

“She should have taken you,” Lucy said. “What an awful woman.”

Max snorted. “Easy for you to say. You could take in a hundred orphans without having to worry about feeding and clothing them.”

“That may be,” she said, with a bit of a flush. “You do like to point out that my life was easier than yours.”

He’d said it without even thinking of how it would sound to her. He squeezed her hand. “I don’t hate you for being rich.”

The look she gave him said this, of all things, was one statement she didn’t believe. “We can discuss that another time. And anyway, you’ll hate me less when you have money too. What happened after your cousin took Cressida?”

“The usual story. I went to the workhouse. It was…grim.”

He couldn’t tell her the worst of it — that he and Titus had been separated from Antonia almost immediately. He was able to sneak messages to her initially, but within a month she’d been sent out to work as a servant in someone’s house. She had only been ten, but working was supposed to be better than staying at the workhouse.

From the little Antonia had told him after their reunion, he guessed it had been much worse.

“How long were you there?” Lucy asked.

“Only a few months. I would have starved to death if I’d stayed there.”

It hadn’t helped that he’d spent those first months giving half his meals to Titus. Titus had never complained or asked questions. But he’d followed Max around like a wraith, not willing to let Max out of his sight for an instant.

Images flooded him — scraps of memories he’d tried so hard to exorcise. The same soup, day after day, and if he got a bit of meat he tipped it into Titus’s bowl. Titus scratching, always scratching, as the lice crawled in their bedclothes. Max had held onto his father’s button in the dark and prayed as hard as he could that someone would come to rescue them.

But Max wasn’t a lost heir. All the dreams his father had told him were fairy tales, nothing more. No one came. No one cared.

Eventually, he’d realized that he would have to save himself.

Lucy stroked his hand in silent sympathy. He looked down at her fingers. Her kid glove was pristine. Under it, her skin would be perfect — never exposed to wash basins full of lye, never required to haul coal up and down stairs.

He didn’t resent her for that. If anything, he was suddenly ashamed of himself. She’d never suffered physically as he had. But she’d lost her parents as well. She’d had the courage to tell him about Julia. She still lived, every day, with the consequences of old choices and others’ mistakes.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” he asked. “The rest of it isn’t much more pleasant.”

He almost hoped that she would drop it — but he knew better than to expect that his hopes would be answered. She looked at him, entirely sympathetic, but entirely unwavering. “I want to know everything. No matter how dark you think it is.”