Eva’s heart contracted, feeling the sharp loss of the girl’s dream and her desire to do good.
“It wasn’t your mistake,” Jack said. “Never say that. This Nemesis lot brought me on board because I’ve got information on Rockley that no one else has.” Fortunately, he made no mention of Nemesis blackmailing him into cooperating. “More than that, I’ve got my own reason for wanting to ruin that bas—that scoundrel. He harmed someone important to me. More than harmed her. He stole her life. Killed my sister with his own hands.”
Miss Jones gasped. “Did you go to the police?”
He smiled bitterly. “The police don’t bother when the victim’s a whore. And Rockley had ’em all in his pocket. They’d never touch a bloke with so much power.”
“What did you do?” the young woman asked.
“Tried to get my own justice. It didn’t work, not the first time, but that don’t mean I won’t stop trying. See, Miss Jones,” he continued, his dark eyes serious, “men like Rockley think they can do whatever they want. Hurt whoever they want. Girls like you and Edith. That’s why we can’t stop going after him.”
Miss Jones’s forehead pleated with concern. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully.
“His threats now are a storm that’s got to be weathered,” Jack went on. “Ultimately, he won’t be able to do you any more harm. You and your family will be safe. Me, and the others here, we’re fighting for you. For Edith, for all the girls Rockley’s harmed. If we don’t bring him down, he’ll just go on, using and throwing away women. Taking their reputations, their lives.”
He shook his head, raw anguish etched into his features. “I couldn’t save Edith, but there are so many other girls I
can
help. That
you
can help. But that’ll only happen if you let us get on with our work.”
Eva, watching all this, felt the hot knife of sorrow in her own chest. She remembered what he’d said last night, about failing to protect his sister. He carried the pain with him always.
Outside in the street a wagon rolled by and two women stopped to converse in brisk, cheerful voices—the noises of everyday life. Within the Nemesis headquarters the fire in the grate popped. Miss Jones stared at Jack, her hands clenching in her lap.
Eva held her breath. So did everyone else in the room.
“All right,” Miss Jones said after a long, long silence. Her shoulders straightened, her back drew up taller, and she lifted her chin. “All right. We’ll go on. We’ll ruin that bastard.” She blushed at her own crudeness, but kept her gaze steady.
Eva didn’t sigh in relief, though she felt like it. Once Nemesis was on a mission, almost nothing kept them from pursuing it to the very end. A villain like Rockley had to pay for his crimes, whether Miss Jones wanted vengeance or no. They wouldn’t have stopped in their quest for justice. But it made their role less difficult when they had their client’s support.
“There’s a lass,” Jack said, patting Miss Jones’s hand.
The girl blushed again. And no wonder. The warm approval in Jack’s gaze was a potent thing.
“You’ve made the right decision, Miss Jones,” Eva said.
The young woman blinked, as if she’d forgotten that Eva, or anyone else besides Jack, was also in the room. His words had held her spellbound.
She rose, and Jack and the other men also stood. Though she still looked pale, a new resolve shone in her face and revealed itself in her upright posture. “I ought to go. Papa will be expecting me soon.”
Eva got to her feet and walked Miss Jones to the door. “We will keep you apprised of any new developments.”
The girl gave a small laugh. “I think it best if I don’t know the details of your methodology.”
Smiling, Eva said, “Probably safer that way.” She opened the door. “Thank you, Miss Jones.”
“It’s I who owe you my thanks.” She looked past Eva to Jack. “You’ve given me a new courage, Mr. Dutton.”
“It was always in you,” he answered. “Just got a little shaken, is all.”
Miss Jones ducked her head, his compliment making her shy. “I’m sorry about your sister.”
“Me, too,” he answered. “But we’ll make it right, you and me.”
The girl gave Jack a tentative smile, then turned and walked down the stairs.
Eva closed the door and leaned against it. She couldn’t take her eyes from Jack. He’d done what she and the other Nemesis operatives hadn’t been able to accomplish—convince Miss Jones to push past her fear. And he’d done so without raising his voice, without frightening or coercing. The strength of his words and conviction alone had done it.
Marco, Simon, and Lazarus looked at him as if he’d just calmed a herd of stampeding horses.
“Commendably done,” she said. “And you’ve a new admirer. She looked at you as if you rode in on a white charger, holding a lance and shield.”
Jack gave an unchivalrous snort. “A knight in rusty armor.”
She wondered if he’d ever see himself as anything more than that.
“That was well done,” Simon allowed. He picked up the discarded newspaper. “But whether or not Miss Jones agreed to continue with the case is irrelevant. We’re still at an impasse with Rockley now that Gilling’s dead; security is even tighter than before and the police are on the lookout for Dalton. So long as Rockley knows Dalton’s out there, we won’t be able to make any progress.”
Jack crossed his arms over his chest. “What was your plan for me when the job against Rockley was finished? Throw me back into Dunmoor?”
“God, no,” she answered, appalled. Although Nemesis hadn’t precisely been forthcoming about their intentions. The way they’d been treating him, he’d expect them to toss him aside like so much rubbish. “We were going to counterfeit your death and give you a new identity.”
Jack appeared to consider this idea. She’d tipped Nemesis’s hand, but there was no choice for it. He needed to know.
“We’re going to lose Rockley,” he said. “He’ll bury himself so deep, we’ll never be able to get anything out of him. Unless…”
“Unless?” Marco prompted.
“We fake my death now,” said Jack.
* * *
He didn’t think they’d cheer at the idea. Turned out, he was right. Grim silence met his announcement. Eva, in particular, looked troubled.
It oughtn’t annoy him. She was part of Nemesis, and he was just a pawn in their game. Made sense that she’d fret over the notion. He saw it in her eyes. Once Jack was “dead,” they’d have no more leverage over him. He’d have his liberty, and that was something they didn’t want. He wouldn’t be their leashed dog anymore. From the beginning, he’d made it clear that if he could find a way free of them, he’d take full advantage. Of course she wouldn’t like that.
Still, it riled him to see her uneasy about taking off his collar. For all the hunger he and Eva felt for one another, they didn’t share trust.
“Makes sense,” Simon mused. “If Rockley believes Dalton’s dead, he’ll think the threat against him is gone. The police will back off, and he’ll loosen security, giving us an opportunity to get our hands on the evidence.”
Though Marco and Lazarus nodded, Eva continued to frown. “There must be another way,” she said, “or some different strategy we can use.”
“If you’ve got a suggestion, love,” Jack said bitingly, “don’t keep it to yourself. We’d all like to hear how to keep me on a tether.”
“I…” She glanced away. “I don’t.”
“Settles that, don’t it?” He planted his hands on his hips. “It’s time to kill me.”
* * *
He never forgot the smell. Long after he’d left the narrow, grimy streets of the East End, when he’d kept a fine little flat in St. Luke’s, and even when he’d been in prison, where the air smelled of lye and porridge, he’d never quite gotten the scent of Bethnal Green from his memory.
As he and Eva stole through the twisting lanes, darkness hanging over the alleys like a sulk, he was drowning in smell, in memories. Coal smoke, mud, fried fish, human filth, and here and there, the sweet stench of opium.
He knew all of it. And bugger him if it didn’t force a small blade of sorrow between his ribs. It hadn’t changed here. Five years away, and the poor of London still lived like animals, hopelessness a dark slime that coated the uneven streets and ran down the crumbling walls.
This was the place that had been his home, the place that made him. The streets were more his parent than his ma and nameless father had ever been.
He didn’t feel a sense of homecoming, skulking through the lanes and alleys of his old neighborhood. He felt only a cold, distant sense of anger, that anyone should be forced to live ten in a room, with the only water coming from a filthy old pump, and babies crying all night because their bellies were empty.
In a drab wool cloak, Eva kept silent beside him. Weak light from a gin palace spilled across her face. He looked for signs of disgust or shock in her expression.
There were none. He remembered that she’d been raised by missionaries, and had probably spent too many hours in places like Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. She already knew how low people could sink.
Still, her gaze was wary. That showed she was smart.
Two men stumbled out of the gin palace. Jack put out an arm to shield her from the drunkards as the men threw wild punches at each other. Too busy beating each other to notice Jack and Eva, the drunks took their fight down into the gutter. But the brawlers blocked the way.
Jack shoved them aside with his boot heel. They rolled away, still throwing punches.
Someone inside the gin palace laughed, a high, shrill sound.
“Keep moving,” Jack said in a low voice.
Eva hurried on, with Jack right next to her.
“I’ve studied maps of the area,” she said. “I’ve even been here before. But I have no idea where we are.”
“Don’t worry. I do.” He turned down a snaking alley. “The maps you’ve seen, they’ll never show you the real lay of the land. Streets are alive down here. Always twisting, never where you think they’re going to be.”
She stepped over a puddle of some unknown liquid. “So if they keep changing, how do you know where to go?”
“Got the same animal blood in my veins,” he answered.
They continued walking, passing three women who sat upon a stoop. A gang of almost a dozen children of all ages stood and played in the street. The clock might’ve chimed after midnight, but that didn’t mean young babes were snug and safe in their cradles. Three kids wearing only ragged shirts dragged sticks through the muck caking the road. When an infant started to cry, a small, thin girl scooped him up into her arms, trying to soothe him.
They all stopped and stared as Jack and Eva passed. Half the children ran after them, their hands outstretched. He made sure to keep an eye on the pack he carried. Little hands made the best pickpockets.
“Penny, sir? Spare a penny, miss?”
Jack reached into his pockets. There were two coins in there, and he had to save them for later.
“Here.” Eva pressed coins into the children’s open palms. The money disappeared right away. “That’s all I have, so none of you follow and ask for more.”
Like startled pigeons, the kids ran off, their bare feet slapping through the mud.
Eva watched them disappear into the darkness. “Hard to believe that we have homes lit by electricity, surgeries can be performed without the patient aware of a single cut of the scalpel, and so many other modern wonders, yet these children live as if it were the twelfth century.”
“Time don’t mean anything here,” he said. “Not politics or science or anything else. Only keeping alive from one day to the next. That’s the only measure.”
“It’s a goddamn sodding abomination,” she said with sudden, quick heat. “It’s a wonder anyone here survives childhood.”
“A goodly number don’t.” He kept to the shadowed side of the lane. Though it’d been years since he’d last walked down the streets of Bethnal Green, he was still known in these parts. His tracks needed to stay covered. “Them that do find a way to keep living, somehow.”
“Like you,” she murmured. “Not merely bare subsistence, but rising above it.”
He used to think so. Think that he’d dragged himself up from the gutter into a swell life. Clean, healthy, properly fed. Women in his bed when he wanted them. A job that put money in his pocket. What else did he need?
Something more than that, he realized. Something that made a difference past his own needs.
Bloody hell, these Nemesis blighters are getting inside my brain.
Not just Nemesis, but Eva. His body ached with wanting her. Yet it went beyond basic lust. Her drive, her backbone and daring. He’d thought someone could only feel greed for things—wealth, a fine carriage of one’s own—but that wasn’t so. You could be greedy for a person, too.
Right now, he needed his thoughts sharp. Trouble was cheap and abundant in this part of the city, especially for a wanted man.
“Down here.” He nodded toward a set of stairs that led toward a basement at the foot of a building. The blackness was even thicker at the bottom of the steps, making the door there barely visible.
Eva stayed close behind him as he went down the stairs and rapped the side of his fist against the door.
It creaked open, revealing a skeleton of an old man. His face looked even more skull-like as he lifted a low-burning lamp.
“One bed or two?” the old man demanded as he stepped aside to let Jack and Eva enter. “We’re almost all full up for the night. An extra bed’ll cost you.”
Jack dipped his head to keep from banging it on the low beams inside the long room. Shapes lined up in rows on the floor. Coughing punctuated the silence, and the mutterings of drunkards sleeping off their latest trip to the bottom of a bottle. Someone hushed a fussing baby.
He glanced at Eva beside him. Her mouth pressed into a tight line as she took in the dim, stale room and the two dozen people using it as their home until daylight. In all her visits to the slums as a missionary, she probably hadn’t seen places like this one.
Beds
was a nice way of saying a mound of moldy straw and a thin, tattered blanket crawling with lice.
“No bed,” Jack said. “I want to know where the fight is tonight.”
The old man eyed him suspiciously. “Don’t reckon what you’re talking about.”