Chapter 21
They’d come full circle.
It was another meeting between two embittered, long-fighting gangs whose history of hatred for one another went back to their tender years. For all intents and purposes, the tense silence hovering in the air may as well have been a re-creation of the meeting four weeks earlier—when Cleopatra had first entered his life.
And nothing had been the same since.
Nor do I want to go back to the bitter, angry person I’d been.
Cleopatra had changed him. Adair, who’d been wary of all, wanted her in his life, as his partner. He, who’d thought himself so very content with his purposeful existence.
He slid his gaze around Broderick Killoran’s office: pistols brandished and bodies tense, his family still remained as jaded as they’d always been. Blinded by their hatred and resentment, they would hold Cleopatra responsible for the crimes of her father.
I have to make this right . . . There has to be a mistake . . .
He froze. “It doesn’t make sense, Ryker,” Adair said from the corner of his mouth, in barely audible tones. With her emphatic defense, Cleopatra had surely realized as much. It had been why she’d sent him here.
Calum, with his long-heightened sense of hearing, gave him a dark, silencing look.
Ignoring it, Adair moved closer to Ryker.
One of the burly guards behind Killoran’s desk alternated his pistol between them. “Not another step,” the man barked.
In reply, Niall brought his pistol up, leveling it at the guard nearest him.
“Think about it,” Adair whispered, unfazed by the weapon pointed at his chest. “Killoran would have to be a bloody fool to not at the very least wait until the terms of the truce were met.” Cleopatra’s marriage. “Why would he act now?” he continued through flat lips.
Ryker flexed his jaw. “I don’t know,” he said grudgingly. “Perhaps it’s a mark of his arrogance.”
Adair shook his head. “He values his power and prestige above all. He’d not jeopardize that by harming either our club or family—”
“He’s already harmed our club,” Ryker put in.
“—before Cleopatra marries.”
His brother frowned.
“You know I’m right,” Adair pressed.
“You two over there. Quiet,” the taller guard in the corner of the room barked.
The door opened, and Killoran swept inside. “Black,” he called out. “Thorne, Dabney, Marksman. Always a pleasure.” He moved the way a king might at court, among his lesser subjects. Not breaking stride, he lifted his right hand up. His three guards, without hesitation, sheathed their weapons and filed to the corner of the room.
Adair followed their practiced movements better suited to soldiers and found a grudging respect for that complete control of his men and their routine.
Cleopatra’s brother perched his hip on the corner of his desk. “Black. I trust all is well with my sister?”
It was the first question put to them . . . not about their arrangement or business or any of the thousand other contentions between them . . . but his sister, Cleopatra.
Ryker grinned a coldly dark grin, devoid of humor and full of threat.
Adair took a step forward. “Cleopatra is fine,” he said quietly.
Killoran swung his focus over to him, his keen gaze saying he’d seen more than Adair intended with that assurance. Straightening, Cleopatra’s brother strolled to the sideboard and poured himself a tall snifter of brandy. “You had better hope she is, Thorne.” He paused, setting the decanter down. “For if she’s not,” he went on when he’d turned back, “I’ll off you all.” He followed that threat with a toast.
“Another threat,” Niall snarled, taking a lunging step forward. “After what you’ve done, Oi expect nothing more from the likes of you and your people.”
One of Killoran’s men matched his steps, but the head proprietor lifted another hand, gesturing his guard back into place.
“Oh?” Killoran grinned over the rim of his glass. “And what am I have rumored to have done—”
Ryker tossed the leather folio into the center of the room. It landed with a soft thwack on the Aubusson carpet.
His earlier bravado flagged, and Killoran hesitated.
“We know everything,” his brother growled. “We found your man lurking at the club. Next time, you’d be wise not to leave a Diggory calling card.”
Adair studied Cleopatra’s brother closely. One could always tell much about a person’s guilt by their reaction . . . or nonreaction . . . to a heated charge. Confusion darkened the rival proprietor’s eyes. He glanced over to Adair and quickly concealed that show. “Rather cryptic of you,” Cleopatra’s brother drawled. “I wouldn’t have taken you or your brothers as ones given to theatrics.” Glass in hand, Broderick strolled over and retrieved the folder. Returning to his desk, he offered his back to the assembled guests.
It was just another telltale indication of the other man’s origins—ones that Cleopatra had revealed. The rustle of page after page being turned crowded out the silence of the room. Killoran’s shoulders went taut, and his upper arm muscles strained the fabric of his jacket.
“Brewster was discovered inside the club.”
“I see that,” Killoran said evenly as he closed up the folder and turned it over.
“He’s going to Newgate,” Niall called out. “For arson and attempted murder, Killoran.”
The color bled from his face.
“And we’re having you investigated for plotting the fire,” Calum murmured, his calming soberness a marked juxtaposition of Niall’s hardheadedness.
“You’re making a mistake.” To Killoran’s credit, he responded dismissively to threats against himself. He set the folder down on the edge of his desk. “Brewster had no part in anything.”
“Then you—”
“If I wanted to destroy your club, Black, it would have been in ashes long before now,” Cleopatra’s brother impatiently cut in, his words an echo of her protestations.
In the first crack of his remarkable composure, Killoran dusted a hand over his face. “Outside.”
His guards hesitated, then filed from the room. When they’d gone, he leveled his stare on Ryker. “I give you my word that Brewster is not responsible.”
“He took the blame for it,” Niall retorted.
Stepping past his brother, Adair hung on to the unspoken admission his brother was too blinded by hatred to hear. Words that suggested Killoran knew. “Who is responsible, then?”
Killoran’s features screwed up in a pained mask.
“Who is the owner of the dagger?” Adair prodded, and Niall removed the blade in question from his boot, brandishing it for Killoran’s inspection. “Who—” He stared unblinking at the glittering tear-shaped stones. His heart beat to a slow halt, then picked up a frantic rhythm.
“Adair?”
Ignoring the worry in Calum’s voice, he stalked over to his brother and grabbed the dagger. He turned it over, inspecting the familiar symbol upon that hilt. His stomach dipped. The blade was a replication done in different stones of Cleopatra’s. “Whose is this?” he demanded, hoarsely, not truly wanting an answer. For it could only be someone who mattered to Cleopatra.
After she . . . was gone, I took over caring for me and my family . . .
And you’ve been taking care of them ever since.
He briefly closed his eyes. And she’d of course known as soon as she’d read the file. Her quaking fingers and ashen skin had revealed as much. “Whose is it?” he asked thickly.
Killoran gave his head a slight shake, a pleading one.
The door flew open, and a golden-haired child stumbled inside. Unmindful of the pistols turned on him, he tripped over himself in his haste to reach Killoran. “Oi did something bad,” he rasped, falling into him.
Killoran caught the boy as he collapsed against him. “Stephen—”
Stephen. Cleopatra’s youngest sibling, a brother of nine.
“Not now,” he said quietly, with more tenderness than Adair had believed him capable of.
“Y-you d-don’t understand,” the boy cried as Killoran all but dragged him to the door. “Oi set a fire at the Hell and Sin.” Cleopatra’s brother stopped in his tracks.
That admission sucked the life from the room.
Stephen yanked his arm from his brother’s. “And Cleopatra is inside.”
Silence met that pronouncement, and then the room exploded in an incoherent cacophony of noise and sound. Adair stood numb; the boy’s frantic admission plunged him into hell. With jerky movements, he rushed over and grabbed the soot-stained child by the shoulders, bringing him up on his tiptoes.
Stephen squeaked.
“Where is she?”
“An office above the mews.”
“Calum’s office,” Ryker said quietly.
Adair quickly released Cleopatra’s brother and dragged shaking fingers through his hair. Turning on his heel, he staggered away and then raced from the room.
Cleopatra.
“Adair, wait.”
He ignored Calum’s shouts and raced through the corridors, past confused guards, and out into the busy gaming hell.
A sob caught in his throat. How damned important it had all seemed. He and his brothers had carried on as though nothing mattered more in the whole bloody world than the rivalry between their club and the Devil’s Den. What had any of it mattered? He shoved past the guards at the front and spilled out into the street.
Quickly locating the street lad holding his horse, he bolted over and ripped the reins from his hands. With calls for another promised purse trailing behind, he kicked his mount into a hard gallop.
She’d known.
She’d known it was her youngest brother, and knowing her as Adair did, she’d intended to stop the boy from doing any more damage.
None of it matters, Cleopatra. None of it . . . It could all burn.
All of it could be replaced, rebuilt, and restored . . . but not her—the only person who mattered. The only woman he loved or would ever love.
Time continued in a peculiar pace where it alternated between rolling together in rapidly passing moments and dragging at a never-ending pace. With every cobblestone that brought him closer to his club, the burning sting of smoke grew, until it permeated the air, thick as death. It was the same demon that had destroyed his parents and sister and then crippled his club.
His pulse pounding loud in his ears, he urged Hercules on. The mount whinnied nervously, but the loyal creature galloped ahead.
Adair brought him to a stop three buildings away. Hercules pawed and scratched at the air before settling his feet upon the earth. Adair jumped down, dimly registering one of the builders coming forward to gather the reins.
Oh, God.
Panic clogging his brain, Adair did a circle, scanning the crowds of people lining the streets of St. Giles for just one. One bespectacled spitfire whose life had come to mean more than his own. “Cleopatra,” he shouted hoarsely, the conflagration that ravaged the entire front facade of the club muffling that plea. Good God, where is she . . . ?
Phippen rushed over. “. . . it’s spread to all floors, Mr. Thorne. The fire brigade’s been unable to . . .”
Half-mad, Adair stared at the other man’s mouth as it moved, unable to put together those words. For one endless moment, he was plunged back into the hell of his past. The scorching heat of the flames destroying his family’s bakery, consuming his parents and sister. A tortured moan spilled from his lips as he was reduced to the boy he’d been: helpless, frozen in fear and horror.
“. . . no one inside will have ever survived that . . .”
The world whirred back to the present. He gave his head a hard shake. She is in there. Adair took several lurching steps toward the burning buildings. He’d not lose her as he’d lost his family.
Two pairs of strong arms immediately dragged him back.
“Let me go, ya rotted bastards,” he thundered, wrestling against their hold.
“Ya cannot go in there,” Ryker’s graveled voice shouted into his ear.
His brothers had arrived.
“If she’s in there, she didn’t—”
Adair wrenched free and, whipping around, punched his brother in the chin; the force of that blow sent his brother’s head whipping back.
“Don’t you say it,” he rasped. “She is not dead.” He’d know it. For if she’d been killed by those flames, his heart would have died along with her. He shoved his way through the throng of builders and onlookers, past the fire brigade—
When a shout went up.
Several strangers pointed.
Adair followed the frantic gesturing to the small figure at the top of the burning hell.
“Cleopatra,” he breathed.
Flames licked at the corners of the building, slowly eating away the edges of the roof. Adair tossed his jacket off and, breaking through the crowd, raced to the bakery, as of yet untouched by the conflagration. Blood roared through his veins, fueling him. She’d not perish as his parents had. Not even God himself could take her from him.
She is alive. She is alive. It was a litany inside his mind that drove his every step, until he’d reached the top of bakery. Dragging himself out the window, the thick heat dampened his skin. He cursed, wishing for the first time in the whole of his life that he wore gloves. Swiftly dusting his palms along the sides of his pants, he pulled himself up and onto the rooftop. As soon as his feet found purchase, he went racing. Adair leapt the three feet and came down hard on the next roof. He was up again and running, his heart knocking around his rib cage and his breath coming hard and fast.
Adair skidded to a stop. “Cleopatra,” he thundered over the din of the blaze.
Searching the grounds below, she pitched forward slightly.
His heart jumped into his throat.
Cleopatra shot her arms out, steadying herself, and then searched about—ultimately finding him. At the sight of her—cheeks covered in ash, her garments singed, and her brown hair hanging haphazardly about her small shoulders—relief coursed through him.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Come to me.” Holding his arms open, Adair urged her on.
Cleopatra limped around the perimeter of the building, stopping only when she was directly across from him. “The f-fire has weakened the roof,” she cried, her voice cracking and rough from the smoke.
As if the blaze sought to demonstrate her point, the far-left corner crumpled, and crimson flames jumped high to consume the remnants.
Cleopatra closed her eyes.
“Don’t you dare go weak on me now, Cleopatra Killoran,” he thundered. Her ghosts were his. He’d not allow either of them to be defeated by fire.
Her throat moved. “I can’t,” she shouted into the noise.
“You can do—”
Cleopatra angled her body, displaying her leg.
His muscles knotted. No.
The large angry-red burn at the juncture where her ankle met her foot would make any movements difficult. Christ.
A tear slid down her cheek, and that single expression of her grief and regret ravaged him worse than the fire raging below.
Cursing, Adair charged forward and jumped over the three-foot space dividing them, to Cleopatra’s protestations. He caught himself, landing on his haunches, and then straightened. Cleopatra stumbled forward and launched herself into his arms. “You foolish, foolish, man. Why would you do that?” she cried, grabbing his face between her hands. “Why?”
He gathered her soot-stained digits, raising her knuckles to his mouth one at a time. “Do you trust me?” Not awaiting an answer, he scooped her into his arms and, sucking in a fortifying breath, raced forward.
He gasped as his heels collided with the satisfying feel of purchase. The weight of her in his arms sent him pitching forward, and he came down hard on his knees. Adair swiftly rolled onto his back, so Cleopatra lay sprawled over him.
He tightened his hold on Cleopatra, absorbing the slight, reassuring feel of her against him. Alive. She is alive.
“You c-came,” she whispered, her voice ragged against his ear.
Had she truly believed he wouldn’t? That he wouldn’t scale whatever building, regardless of height, to have her in his arms?
“Adair!” The frantic shouting from below brought him to.
“Come.” He stood, sweeping her into his arms. “This is truly the last roof either of us will ever climb,” he vowed.
At his back, the roof of the Hell and Sin dissolved, swallowing the building in a fiery conflagration, and with the only dream he’d allowed himself from the earliest years of his life gone, and the only hope he had for the future in his arms, he made for the edge and the path to safety.