Chapter 1
Paris – Spring, 1890
The Moulin Rouge was a swirl of sound and color, light and laughter. On the stage at the front of the grand theater, a dozen young women kicked up their skirts, showing their stockings and more to the ribald crowd of men and women that made up their audience. The music was loud, alcohol flowed freely, and barely-controlled chaos reigned.
It was the perfect environment for Solange Lafarge to commit a murder.
Solange moved carefully around the outer edges of the cabaret hall, keeping to the shadows and doing her best to blend in with the wallpaper. Compared to the majority of the patrons, she was dressed modestly, wearing dull colors and a bodice that buttoned all the way up to a high collar. She’d almost chosen to dress as vibrantly as any of the chorus girls and whores that moved through the crowd, teasing and entertaining men, enticing them into spending money for a few minutes alone, or picking the pockets of gentlemen who were too inebriated to notice and too rich to care if they lost a few francs. In the end, she’d decided that her dark skin would be too much of a draw and that modesty was best.
She slipped a hand carefully into one of the pockets of her skirt, closing her fingers around the handle of the small pistol she kept there. It was loaded, but not cocked. She was ready to use it, but wouldn’t until she had her target firmly in sight. He’d arrived half an hour ago, heading straight to the box where her other target—a man who deserved far worse than a quick death—always sat. The two of them sat there, high above the noise and heat of the floor, engaged in an intense discussion.
Solange narrowed her eyes at her target, Lord Louis Bramwell, Earl of Sinclair. She tightened her grip on her pistol, wanting to draw it from her pocket, aim, and get the dirty work over with. Everything about the man filled her with rage, from his too-handsome face to his broad shoulders and athletic build to the finely-tailored suit he wore. That suit was paid for by the sweat and blood of her family, of her people. She remembered the first time she’d laid eyes on him, three years before in Côte d'Ivoire, the moment she’d made the connection between Lord Sinclair and the man who had ruined her life. She’d vowed then that she would use him to exact her revenge on the man who had destroyed her life before it began.
“Do you plan to stare the man to death?”
Solange flinched and sucked in a breath as a middle-aged woman dressed all in black stepped up behind her, speaking in French. “Madame Boucher, you startled me,” she said, drawing her hand out of her pocket and clamping it over her heart.
Madame Boucher grunted and looked Solange up and down. “You’ll never be able to do what you need to do if you stand there, looking guilty as sin.”
Solange pressed her lips together, feeling that guilt in her gut and resenting the fact that she felt guilty at all. “I can do what I have to do,” she said, wishing it didn’t feel as though she were convincing herself.
It was Damien McGovern and Lord Gregory’s fault that she felt guilty about the one thing she’d believed with absolute certainty for three years. Everything she’d done since arriving in Paris—every clandestine mission into the city while her mistress, Lady Roselyn Briarwood, enjoyed the company of her cousins, every bribe and blackmail she’d been forced to pay, and every moment of danger she’d put herself into—had been cast into question, and all because Damien McGovern had told her she was better than murder. No one had ever told her she was better than anything before.
She shifted in place, fighting the well of nerves that rose through her. “You are certain he is Lafarge’s son?” she asked Madame Boucher, hating the uneasiness that roiled through her gut.
“What, him?” Madame Boucher nodded up to the box where Lord Sinclair argued with a silver-haired gentleman, Monsieur Lafarge. She laughed. “I’m certain of it.”
“But how do you know?” Solange asked. “He is an Englishman. His surname is Bramwell, not Lafarge. He is an earl.”
Madame Boucher shrugged. “The name he has and the rank he inherited are a matter of legality. We all know the truth. His mother was Lafarge’s mistress, and Lord Sinclair was born on the wrong side of the bed.”
Solange nodded, forcing herself to accept the explanation. She knew it was true. Why else would Lord Sinclair leave his comfortable home in England to travel to Côte d'Ivoire, spend months under Lafarge’s roof, and leave wealthier than when he’d arrived?
“Quick,” Madame Boucher whispered to her. “While the music is still loud. You can make your way up to the balcony and shoot him from that box nearby.” She pointed to an empty box only a few feet away from the one where Lord Sinclair and Monsieur Lafarge sat. “Though if it were me, I’d save time and shoot both of them.”
“No.” Solange shook her head. “I want Lafarge to suffer. I want him to know what it feels like to lose a son, just as my father—” She snapped her mouth shut over her words, not wanting to reveal more. “I want him to grieve first, to lose everything. Then he can die.”
Madame Boucher laughed. “Such a bloodthirsty little savage.”
The comment rankled Solange’s nerves, as did the way Madame Boucher clapped her back before stepping away to go about her business at the cabaret. If there was one thing Solange despised more than anything else, it was being called a savage, simply because she was African. Her father was a leader and a wealthy man. She was raised in a grand house with servants, given the finest education money could buy, and trained in music, dancing, and art. She was every bit as refined and accomplished as the aristocratic ladies she had spent the last few years with. But they didn’t see that. They saw a dark-skinned savage.
She clung tight to that anger, moving out of the shadows and making her way to the nearest door that would lead her to the stairs up to the balcony level. She would have her revenge. She would avenge her family in the process. And then she would try to assemble some sort of life from the ashes.
Determination filled her, but it was dashed to pieces in an instant by a cheery voice just on the other side of the doorway. Before she could duck into a corner or run away from the door, none other than Lady Roselyn came bursting into the cabaret hall, followed by two of the younger McGovern cousins, twins Heather and Sage McGovern.
“Of course Asher will never approve when he hears that we’ve abandoned touring old churches to come here,” Roselyn was in the middle of saying over her shoulder to the twins. “But personally, I think he is cruel to insist we miss out on a spectacle like this, and—oh! Solange. Is that you? What are you doing here?”
Solange’s jaw dropped and panic tightened her throat, but she managed to say, “Lord Addlebury insisted I keep an eye on you.”
It was a lie, but Roselyn blushed and looked like a child who had been caught stealing cake from the kitchen all the same. “Oh, Asher,” she said. “He does like to fuss. But we’ve only come here to see what all the hubbub about this new dance, the can-can, is all about and—oh dear heavens!”
Roselyn burst into laughter as she turned to gape at the stage full of flashing skirts and stockinged legs kicking. Solange let out a breath, glad that she was no longer the center of attention, but dreading what might happen next. Miss Heather and Miss Sage had their arms looped so tightly together that they might have been conjoined twins. Their eyes were huge as they took in the spectacle.