“Adam is in the orchard, seeking his Eve,” he proffered, gesturing toward a copse of trees, as if he directed her to pluck an apple, rather than the original sin. “Let’s see…Daniel is bound in his den in anticipation of devouring, if you are feeling the role of lioness tonight.” He pointed at a dark shadow in a glass enclosure covered by ivy.
“There’s Goliath, the barbarian who might be tamed by the right gentle hand. Or David, if you prefer someone…younger. More eager.”
Prudence stopped, suddenly seized by indecision and a not little fear of lightning, even on such a clear and cloudless night. “I’m sorry but are all of the—er—stags given religious names?” she queried. “Seems rather blasphemous, doesn’t it?”
He gave her a mockingly chiding look. “Go to a church if you want to judge, Madam, we’re all here to commit a cardinal sin, maybe several.”
A decent point, that. She nodded and mumbled an apology, suddenly feeling very itchy and out of her element.
With a jovial wink that told her all was forgiven, he bowed. “If you’re feeling indecisive, I encourage you to take a turn around the garden, let it dazzle your senses, and see what entices your…vigor.”
That seemed like an excellent idea. She’d come here for a thing. An experience. Why the devil hadn’t it occurred to her that what she was coming here for…was a person?
A man.
A man of her own choosing.
How very novel. She’d only ever thought to be chosen. Women were always waiting, hoping to be picked or plucked by the right man. Selected like a trinket in a shop, to be taken home and trotted out at expensive gatherings.
Tonight, she was the shopper. She would pick the man she wanted and pay him to do what she desired.
But who? Did she want David or Goliath, Adam or Daniel?
A hero or a heretic.
A saint or a sinner…
Venturing deeper into the fairy garden, she allowed her senses to take it all in. The gentle breeze ruffling at the ribbons and drapes of chiffon and silk along the path. The slight sound of running water in the distance. A giggle from that dark corner. A groan from that Bedouin tent over there.
She refused to look too far into the dark, and so she kept her eyes often skyward, up to the stars.
Which was why she never saw the dark shadow crouched behind a hedgerow by the fountain.
Chapter 2
Chief Inspector Carlton Morley stalked his latest villain from the putrid slag pots of industrial East London all the way to Mayfair. Three young men had been slaughtered, and no one had connected their murders until today.
Until him.
The victims had been from several different boroughs of London and none of them had known each other, but their deaths were identical. No one had noticed the connection until the files had made their way to his desk, because detective inspectors from differing stations rarely had cause to collaborate with each other.
But they all answered to him.
The cases had been closed. Deemed unsolvable or without enough evidence to proceed through lawful means.
But Morley had other means at his disposal… and there were many forms of law and justice. The Queen’s Justice. The law of the land. Divine justice. The laws of nature.
And the justice of the streets. The laws of which were unwritten but universally heeded.
The laws of the land were necessary to uphold, and he’d devoted his entire career to doing so.
But the laws of the streets afforded him the means to mete out justice where the system had failed.
And they’d failed these murdered men. Strapping, handsome lads, well-liked by their families and communities, all employed among the working class. And yet none of them seemed to be struggling to get by. Each of them lived above their station, kept family members fed and comfortable in clean and respectable dwellings on pittance a day.
The question was how?
The answer had led him here.
Miss Henrietta’s School for Cultured Young Ladies, of all the unimaginable places.
And since he’d obtained the information that’d led him here by means not strictly legal, he couldn’t very well walk through the front door, let alone obtain a warrant.
So, he’d taken to the dark, as he’d done with alarming frequency these days, disguising himself every now and again with a simple black mask he’d had lying around from one of the Duchess of Trenwyth’s multitude of endless charity functions.
His view to the garden was impeded by impenetrable hedges or stockades of ivy around wrought iron, if not a full stone wall on the west side. He ultimately decided to circumvent the locked gate by scaling a nearby wych elm. He balanced out on a limb until he feared it would no longer hold his weight, and vaulted over the gate, expertly avoiding impalement on the iron spikes.
Morley landed in silence among the shadows and kept to them as he stalked along the circumference of the property. He waited and watched, his entire body attuned to danger, to a possible threat. A villain or a murderer.
A couple strode nearby, and he melded with the dark as a tall and elegantly handsome man bent to whisper something scandalous into the ear of a woman ten years his senior and two stone his heft.
She tutted, flirted, and then her companion swept her into his embrace, pressing her against the column of a gazebo. He kissed her passionately before he grappled with the latch of a small outbuilding and shoved her inside.
What the devil?
A tree branch snapped around the corner of a hedge. Morley drew his knife, took two readying breaths, and burst from around the corner, dropping into a fighting stance.
Only from this angle could he have seen the gagged and blindfolded woman beneath the tree, holding its lower branches for purchase as a man brutally thrust into her from behind.
Something in the muffled sounds she made froze him in place. They were yips and mewls of encouragement. Unmistakable in their ardor.
Bemused, Morley sheathed his knife and blinked rather doggedly at the fornicating couple until the man noticed him and made an impatient gesture for him to go.
His hips never lost their rhythm.
The woman was enjoying herself, but the gentleman checked his watch as though… he kept track of the time?
Morley backed away, turning to the garden and seeing it for what it truly was.
If someone had told him he’d already died and gone to Elysium, he might have believed them. For this resembled something of a pagan paradise. Friction and fornication hinted at everywhere, if not flagrantly happening.
No one exactly fucked in the open, but neither was a gazebo, a sheer tent, a hedge maze or a copse of carefully placed trees considered a proper place for a romp.
Even the air was sweeter here, whispering of lilacs and gardenias rather than the singular smells of the city. The garden sparkled like the very stars might visit to watch the debauchery. It was a dream crafted by honey-hued lighting and fluttering fabrics.
Of all the bastardly bacchanalian bullshit.
Morley retreated to a borderline pornographic fountain and crouched behind a hedgerow, grateful that the sound of the water covered the thinly veiled noises of carnal revelry.
A small mercy that, because his body was beginning to forget how exhausted he was and respond to the wickedness of the atmosphere.
It was how they got you, these places. Inundated one with sex and fantasy until instinct took over and a man forgot who he was. Became a needful, terrible creature, one led around by his cock rather than his reason, until he found his pocketbook emptied by his own weaknesses.