Stone tossed in his thoughts. “And there’s too great a risk that I’d prove . . . let’s just say, too much of an immigrant for the fella’s comfort.”
“I wish that weren’t as true as it is,” Vera said.
His mouth tightened. “As do I.”
Fletcher stood. “We’ll leave you and Brog to sort out how you mean to make this call and do your digging.” He dipped his head. “A pleasure meeting you, Miss Sorokina.”
She rose at the same time Stone did.
He also nodded in her direction. “Hope your efforts are successful.”
“Thank you.”
While Brogan saw his friends to the door, Vera took long, deep breaths, trying to release some of her tension. Only a couple of hours earlier she’d tossed Brogan firmly from the shop, and now she needed to plan a risk-filled mission to uncover information, one that required they trust each other. At the moment, that felt impossible. Everything felt impossible.
When he returned to the room, he had his hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, watching her with a look of wary uncertainty. “If you’d rather, I’m certain we can find someone else to go with you to the embassy. Móirín would, I’d wager. And she speaks a spot of Russian. That might prove handy.”
She shook her head. “I’d rather not have anyone else know about my papa’s entanglements.”
“Then it seems you’re stuck with me.”
“Seems that way.”
He lingered in the sitting room doorway, hovering with palpable awkwardness. “I know you’re enduring this out of love for your da and the people you feel responsible for. I’m sorry that it’ll be a misery for you.”
Heaven help her, he looked sincere. But how could she believe him?
“Why did you lie to me about your name?” she asked.
“Would you’ve hired me if I hadn’t?”
She held her hand up to stop him. “This won’t be pegged on me. I ain’t the one who lied.”
“Fair.” He stepped into the room but watched her with clear discomfort. “I needed the job. But you sell stories I wrote in m’own name right there in the shop. I wasn’t expecting that. I feared it’d make things complicated. Ganor O’Donnell’s a name I used in Ireland. It popped in m’ mind, and I tossed it out.”
“Why’d you use a false name in Ireland?” She’d been told truths about his life there that he wasn’t aware she knew. How honest would he be about that?
“I’m not able to tell you all the history of that, lass. It ain’t my place to.”
“I am so weary of secrets, Brogan Donnelly. I need a moment’s honesty from you.”
He came closer, not in a threatening way, but quiet and considerate. “I’ll tell you the bits of it that’re mine to tell, like you did with your da’s history.”
She nodded.
He motioned her to the settee. She sat at one end. He took a seat on the opposite side. “Móirín and I grew up in County Offaly, the countryside of Ireland. The Hunger came when I was eight, and Móirín was nine, and our parents starved to death, like millions of our countrymen. Móirín and I made the harrowing walk to Dublin, a week’s journey. We lived on the streets for a time until we could begin scraping together money. I took up running messages for people—I was fast and agile, and I could read, which not many Irish children can do. Móirín took up as a crossing sweep.
“In time, we’d money enough to be off the street. Then enough to eat regularly and replace our ragged clothes. By the time we were approaching adulthood, we had a humble flat in the Liberties. She worked at the Guinness factory, like most people did in our neighborhood. I was working as a courier and messenger still, but also writing columns for local papers. Life wasn’t easy, and that corner of Dublin was rough to say the least. ’Twas a fight to survive, often literally.”
Unbidden to her thoughts came the memory of sitting in this very room, brushing her fingers over his scars, and, later, tending his bleeding knuckles in the shop the day he’d rescued Licorice. She’d been utterly fascinated by the touch of his rough but gentle hands.
“A short few years back, someone started making trouble for m’sister,” Brogan continued. “She’s a fetching thing, though she would disagree. Her fiery personality adds something to her striking looks. Men have often found her intriguing and alluring, often too much so.”
Vera began to suspect where this was headed.
“I’ll not betray her secrets by telling everything connected to that,” Brogan said, “but suffice it to say, the situation grew more than merely annoying. The confrontations were frequent and increasingly combative. This bloke pushed the boundaries, threatened, endangered, and eventually did physical injury to her. He made clear he didn’t mean to stop.”
Vera listened, heart aching, mind spinning.
“Again, without details, I’ll say only that the man’s dead, not of natural causes, and I’m not sorry he’s gone.” Brogan pushed out a breath. “If that makes you think poorly of me, I’ll have to endure that, but she’s not the only woman he . . . Had there been another way . . .”
“Were you still in Dublin, the blue-bottles would round both of you up for the man’s death?”
“They would,” he said. “The charges are murder and harboring a murderer.”
“And the Peelers don’t care that the man’s death came about as a result of saving your sister from him?” Vera was growing increasingly angry on his and Móirín’s behalf.
He met her eyes. “How often does the law care when women are persecuted by men?”
Every woman who’d lived even a day in Soho knew the answer to that question. “Not often at all.”
He slumped on the settee. “I can’t tell you more than that, Vera—it ain’t m’story to tell in full—but that’s more than I’ve shared with anyone. ’Tis possible you think even less of me now, knowing the axe that hangs over my family, but that’s the truth of it.”
“You realize I could hand you over to people who could force you back to Dublin.”
“I know it,” he said quietly. “You may have no faith in me, but I have faith in you.”
Despite herself, that declaration touched her. It shouldn’t have. She wished it didn’t. But it did.
“You’ll help me sort out a means of helping my papa?” she asked.
His smile was soft and a little uncertain. “I’ll do anything I can for you, Vera Sorokina. You need only say the word.”