Chapter 4
The following morning, Adair and his brothers gathered in Ryker’s Mayfair office. This meeting was not unlike so many others before it: the Devil’s Den and Killoran’s people remained at the heart of their conversations.
Hands clasped behind him, Adair stood at the floor-length window of Ryker’s office while his brothers discussed the state of the scorched Hell and Sin and the impending arrival of a Killoran into their fold. Adair stared out at the Mayfair streets.
For all the sameness of listening to Ryker, Calum, and Niall discuss Broderick Killoran, a suffocating vise squeezed about Adair’s chest in being in this place. The fancy servants and the lords and ladies passing by the Mayfair townhouse served as a reminder of all he’d spent his life hating, and now because Killoran had burned his home down, he’d be forced to dwell among the elite. Bloody Killoran. Sharp loathing coursed through him, and he fed that fury and abhorrence, for it kept him from giving in to the madness of calling this place home—even if it was a temporary one.
So, this is what Helena felt when we sent her away to live with the Duke of Wilkinson. At the time, it had seemed the right decision to keep her safe from Diggory . . . and it had proven the right one, as she’d ultimately found happiness here. But Helena had been born to this existence. Adair would rather gut himself with Broderick Killoran’s dullest blade than ever remain here.
“. . . Adair?”
Calum’s visage reflected back in the crystal panes.
Adair’s mind raced as he sought to put order to what had just been discussed. “I wanted you all to look at this,” his brother elucidated.
Neck heating at having been caught off guard, he turned. Ryker sat behind his desk like the king of this new empire, with Adair, Niall, and Calum awaiting guidance, as always. His brothers studied the sheets of vellum in their hands. Ryker stared expectantly, with one of those sheets extended toward him. Abandoning his place at the window, he strode over and collected that sheet. “What is . . . ?” His words trailed off as he scanned the perfunctory list.
HELL AND SIN
HOTELS
STEAM-POWERED BOATS, SHIPS, AND RAILS
PHILANTHROPY
“What in blazes is this?” Adair breathed, looking up from the page marked sloppily in his brother’s hand.
Ryker folded his hands before him and rested them on the desk. “The future.”
The future?
“Given the fire and our plans of rebuilding, Penelope and I discussed at length the future.” The future. Not the future of the club. “Mayhap some good can come from the blaze,” Ryker continued. “We’ve never thought of a life beyond or outside the Hell and Sin.”
Adair recoiled as his brother’s meaning hit him. “You want us to forget the club.” Was his brother addled? “After everything we’ve dedicated and invested in it, you’d throw it away for”—he looked down at the page—“hotels?” He cringed. And furthermore, what did a single one of them know of anything other than gaming? Those skills they’d learned on the streets. They were the only ones they had.
“It wouldn’t be throwing it away,” Calum said somberly, bringing Adair’s head up again. “Mayhap from the ash of the Hell and Sin, something new can be born.”
Adair studied his sheet as his brother’s words rooted around his mind, and then a dawning understanding slipped in. Ships and rails. Philanthropy. Hotels. Staggered, he glanced around at his siblings of the streets. “You’ve already spoken.” Of course. Niall had taken to traveling with his wife, Diana; Calum and Eve had taken up work on behalf of the Salvation Foundling Hospital. A discourse that had occurred between husband and wife, not the men who’d built one of the greatest clubs in the whole of England. Adair slammed the damning scrap of their betrayal down on Ryker’s desk.
They didn’t even have the good grace to deny it or look away.
“We cannot raise our families in the streets of St. Giles,” Ryker said in his gravelly tones. No. Calum’s wife, now expecting their first child, had moved them out of the club . . . just as Ryker had months earlier. It was a practical move that Adair, even though he had no wife or child of his own, understood and respected. “We spent our lives seeking to escape, and we did.”
Adair flexed his jaw. “You’re a bloody fool if ya think we’re ever truly free of those streets.” He gave his head a disgusted shake. “You’re no different from Broderick Killoran and his lust for a connection to the nobility.”
Niall took a step closer, and Adair braced for the fight the hot-tempered sibling had always been eager to give. He stiffened as the other man laid a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t believe that.” Niall’s mastery of his Cockney, when Adair was wholly unable to control a single bloody thing in this instance, grated on his last nerve. “This is for the good of all of us.”
A battle waged inside, born of panic and uncertainty. “And so, we each take on different endeavors and begin from the ground up?” His mouth went dry at the horrifying prospect: the blood, sweat, fears, and silent tears he’d cried through the hell his existence had once been.
Calum rolled his shoulders. “We’ve done it before, Adair. We did it before when we had nothing but stolen coin to our name.” He caught his stare and gave a little nod. “We can certainly do it now with the fortune and connections we’ve built.”
To hide the tremble in his hands, Adair again picked up that hated page. He briefly closed his eyes as he was transported back long ago to the boy he’d been, returning from delivering goods for his father to find his family’s business destroyed and his parents and sister lost to the flames. Just like that, the past came flooding in. The acrid sting of smoke burned his nostrils. Nooooo . . . Papa . . . Mama . . . His own desperate cries churned around his mind. He fought the need to clamp his hands over his ears in a bid to dull the distant sounds of his own misery.
“I will see to the Hell and Sin Club, then,” he said at last, when he trusted himself to speak through the damned, unwanted emotion there.
“Is that what you want?” Ryker asked cautiously.
Adair chuckled. “Does it truly matter what I want?”
“It is a new beginning.” Calum motioned between them. “For all of us. If we wish the club to remain as it is or build it again, the options are both there.”
“Leave it as it is?” Adair was unable to keep the incredulity from his question. The clink of coins being thrown on the table and the laughter of their patrons on crowded nights pealed around his mind, familiar and fresh as the first night they’d opened their doors to the lords of London. “You would do that?” he challenged.
“Calum is only laying forth all the options,” Niall supplied for the silent trio before Adair.
“This,” Adair hissed, “is not an option. That club is everything of who we are.” Without it . . . who were they? Nay . . . who was Adair? He was the scared, cowering orphan in the streets wading through the uncertainty of an even more uncertain existence. “What of all the men and women dependent upon us?” Children, too. “All people like us, born to St. Giles and the Dials who’d finally found security. We’d just yank that away?”
“There’s more good we can do, the more ventures we have,” Calum said quietly. “Expanding our business—and taking on philanthropic pursuits, as we should have done long ago—only allows us the power to help others.”
Damn Calum for always being the calm, logical one of their group. And damn him for being correct.
Adair dusted a hand over his face, searching his mind for reasons to counter a plan he’d not truly had a say in.
“It is settled, then?” There was a question there as Ryker settled back in his chair. “The restoration of the hell falls to you.”
That was it. Just like that, after a lifetime of honoring a hierarchy where Ryker ruled inside the Hell and Sin, they’d all turn the decisions and responsibilities over to Adair. “It falls to me?” he asked slowly.
“We are partial owners in all endeavors and investments,” Ryker said, explaining the plan he’d hatched, “but with each of us overseeing one joint venture.”
It was a clever scheme. What his brothers spoke of was a way they might diversify their ownings and investments. It would cut them free of that dependency they’d had for so long on the nobility. If executed with the same success as they had with the Hell and Sin, they’d grow in ways they never could have with only the club to their names.
“This is the future,” Calum quietly urged, misinterpreting the reason for Adair’s silence.
And through the panic and despair at beginning again, Adair found something vital—purpose. He nodded slowly.
Ryker laid his hand out, palm down. Adair eyed it a moment and then, dropping the list back on his brother’s desk, covered his hand. Calum and Niall stacked theirs atop his, sealing the empire-building they’d agreed to undertake.
An unexpected excitement stirred in the embers of resentment. By the earnings he’d amassed in his days as a thief, Adair had found himself behind the other stakeholders. They’d all had an equal contribution to decisions, but Ryker had always had the final word . . . and that had gone for everything—from the location in St. Giles to the gargoyles that lined the steps of the Hell and Sin.
Agreement reached, Ryker stalked over to his sideboard. He lined up four glasses, and dragging a crystal decanter of brandy back and forth over that horizontal line of snifters, he poured drinks. “There still remains the matter of the Killorans.”
Adair glanced over at the longcase clock. “They are not to be trusted,” he insisted, taking the drink Niall carried over to him. He clenched his jaw as the bespectacled, spritelike warrior sprang behind his mind’s eye. “And certainly not Cleopatra Killoran.”
“I don’t disagree on either score,” Ryker confirmed, cradling his drink.
“You didn’t believe their earlier claims of innocence?” Adair pressed, setting his drink down next to that list.
“I don’t know either way,” his brother said. “And in the absence of evidence, I choose cautiousness.”
Some tension went out of Adair’s shoulders. For all the changes that had faced them since the club had burned down, and all that had been tossed at him yesterday with the Killorans and now the proposed changes over their roles and dealings, there was a familiarity to this side of Ryker. It brought reassurance that for all that had been altered, the street remained alive and strong. “What are you thinking?”
“We’ll honor our vow until they give us reason not to, and the moment they do . . .” Ryker downed his drink and set the empty glass down beside Adair’s.
Calum cracked his knuckles. “Then we’ll destroy their name and, with it, Killoran’s hopes for the only thing he craves.” Respectability.
Niall gave an approving nod. “And our debt to them for saving Diana is paid.”
Adair opened his mouth to speak, but Calum held up a silencing finger and nodded toward the front of the room.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Enter,” Ryker boomed.
The tall, graying guard, West, who’d been made head butler, shoved the door open. “They’re ’ere, my lord . . . Black, sir. Just arrived. Sitting out in the carriage they are.”
Adair’s brother nodded. “I’ll be there shortly.” After the servant rushed off, Ryker turned back. “While you’re here, I’d ask you to watch her closely.”
Before this instance, living in this temporary residence, Adair had felt like an interloper in an unfamiliar world . . . as unsettled as the former guards, dealers, and serving girls who’d taken up work and residence within Ryker’s, Niall’s, and Calum’s London residences.
The quick patter of footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. A moment later the door flew open, and Penelope and Diana stormed inside. “She’s here,” Penelope announced with far more of her usual cheer than the circumstances merited.
When Ryker, Calum, and Niall started forward, Niall’s wife, Diana, tossed her arms wide, blocking the entrance. “Wait! I’ll have you remember that no matter what blood runs in her veins and what name is attached to hers, Cleopatra Killoran is no more responsible for her brother’s crimes than I’m responsible for my mother’s,” she said somberly. It had been, after all, Diana’s mother who’d not only sold Ryker and Helena over to Diggory but who’d then tried to orchestrate Helena’s murder.
“This is different,” Niall growled.
“No, Niall, it isn’t.” His wife gave him a sad little smile. “No matter how much you might wish it to be. Those acts carried out by Broderick Killoran against Ryker were his actions. Not his sister’s. Not any of his sisters’.”
“You don’t know that,” Adair said quietly. “You don’t know what she is capable of or what crimes she’s committed. None of us do. And until we do, we’ll treat her with the proper cautiousness.”
Penelope tightened her mouth. “She saved Diana’s life. That is all we know of her thus far. As Diana said, we owe the young lady our kindness.”
Young lady. Adair snorted. A Killoran was no more a lady than he was a fancy gent. No matter how much the young woman’s brother wished it to be. “Come,” Penelope urged. “Let us go greet our guest.”
As his siblings and their spouses filed from the room to greet Killoran’s sister, Adair took up his previous spot at the window. He stared down at the elegant, black-lacquered carriage that no doubt contained Cleopatra Killoran along with whichever sibling would take up residence here.
The garish pink curtain parted ever so slightly, and Adair narrowed his eyes as he shoved open his jacket, deliberately revealing the pistol tucked at his waist.
“A guest,” he muttered.
The day a Killoran was anything but an enemy of the Hell and Sin family was the day the world ceased spinning.