A brothel. He grimaced. He’d broken into a brothel of all places whilst searching for a killer. He must have taken a very wrong direction, or he’d stumbled upon another humungous clue.
Either way, he couldn’t exactly begin an interrogation at—he looked at his watch—half one in the morning. Tucking the watch away, he scrubbed at his face with both hands before adjusting the mask over his eyes.
God’s blood but he was tired.
He’d been waylaid on his way here by a contingent of the High Street Gang, who’d taken one look at his darkly elegant attire and decided he was an easy mark.
He’d kicked nine shades of shit out of four men and had left them tied to the corner for the next copper on his beat to find.
With a note, of course, as was courteous.
He’d broken up a domestic brawl that’d spilled out onto the streets, and gave a boy on the cusp of manhood a pence to sleep beneath a different roof than his ham-fisted father.
A man on Wapping High Street had mistaken a charwoman for a nightwalker and had been about to force his attentions upon her when Morley had picked up a palm-sized stone, and made a spinning slingshot of his cravat. The rock to the temple had felled the attacker, and Morley didn’t stay to check if he was even alive. He’d shrugged off the woman’s cries of gratitude and had been on his way.
He was no hero. These were just things he did, sweeping up small crimes while he chased nightmares through the night.
Back when he’d attempted to sleep, he’d been tortured by them. Eventually, those nightmares had seeped into the daylight, following him from the dark until they filled every corner of every room. Shades and specters. The ghosts of those he’d killed, of those who’d endeavored to kill him. Of the souls he’d failed to save and the monsters who’d escaped justice.
For decades they’d haunted him, tormented him endlessly each time he dared close his eyes. Until he’d done something about it.
He became the thing from which nightmares ran.
He rid the night of monsters, so he could continue to be the man he was during the day without sinking into a miasma of slow and indelible madness. He was both the system of justice and the shadow of it.
Because the shadow could do what the system could not.
Because he still had a dead-eye, sharp fists, and even sharper blades.
Because he’d sold his soul to a demon for justice years ago, and every subsequent sin merely deepened the fathomless pit into which he’d been thrown.
Every time he’d thought he’d hit the bottom, he realized he was still falling.
That the depths could always be deeper. That the night could always be darker. That the world could always be colder.
That honor didn’t seem to mean much anymore, and he continued to fight a war that might have always been lost and for a cause that was nothing more than an illusion.
He’d been fighting for so long. For so many endless years, and for what? These days, every victory felt as though it made as much difference as a teardrop to the Thames.
And still he hunted, because what else could he do? Collect a wage until the inevitable forages of time and regret came for him as they did for everyone else?
A snap of a whip and a snarl came from the glasshouse covered in ivy. Morley squinted over at it, watching the shadows take shape, illuminated by one dim lantern inside.
If he wasn’t mistaken, a woman rode a man, but not his hips…Morley squinted…his face. Her pleasure sounds filtered through the fountain to him, hot and demanding.
They reverberated down his spine and landed in his loins.
God, it had been too long since he—
Another astonished sound broke his intent concentration, this one behind him. From his crouching position, he turned his neck to watch a woman’s windmilling arms fail to balance her before she crashed down upon him like a felled tree, toppling them both to the grass.
Morley swam in a sea of skirts and petticoats, taking a slap to the jaw for his troubles, though he was fairly certain she hadn’t meant to strike him.
The woman draped across his lap writhed and wriggled, apparently as surprised as he. He attempted to gather her up as one might a child, one arm behind her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, but she didn’t seem capable of holding still enough for him to manage.
“Upon my word,” she exclaimed from behind mountains of silk. “I’m frightfully sorry! Are you hurt?”
Morley opened his mouth to assure her he was unharmed, but she didn’t wait for a reply.
Her next sentence was spoken in one breath. “I’m forever ungainly, clumsy, my sisters call me, and in a place such as this it’s rather impossible not to look everywhere at once and I was honestly attempting to look nowhere at all and you’re rather dark—” She finally crested her skirts and wrestled them beneath her arms to look at him. She took a breath to amend… “No, not dark. Dazzling.”
Morley blinked down at her, suddenly wishing he’d ever thought to steal a moment from crime reports and newspapers to crack the spine on a book of verse.
Because the woman in his arms was a poem, and he hadn’t the words to describe her.
His hold of her became suddenly very careful. Delicate, like one would hold a teacup in a lady’s parlor rather than the tin mugs at the Yard.
“Oh,” she said breathlessly, as if discovering clarity. “It’s you. You’re who I’ve come looking for.”
Even through his building confusion, some strange part of him was as glad she’d—quite literally—stumbled upon him as she seemed to be.
He shook his head, trying to dislodge the sensation.
As Morley always did when out about his nocturnal business, he adopted a bit of his childhood cockney accent. “Do I know you?”
The lanterns painted the shadows of her ridiculously long eyelashes across cheeks that could have been chiseled from the whitest of Roman marble. Those lashes fringed wide, dark eyes two sizes too large for her delicate features. The effect intensified her dramatic expression as she seemed to take him in with identical wonder.
“Yes, you’ll do rather nicely, I think,” she breathed, apropos of nothing. Her voice, alternately husky and sweet, seemed incongruous with this place. There was temptation in it, but no sin. Innocence, but also desire.
She leaned forward on his lap, and he became very aware that he held her like a man held his bride when crossing the threshold.
The thought terrified him, and yet he couldn’t seem to let her go.
“Which one are you?” she asked as though to herself as she conducted a thorough examination of his features. “I can’t think of any biblical hero you’d resemble…and none with a mask, besides. I like a bit of mystery.”
He cocked his head at that. Biblical? This was all lunacy. He neither knew this woman nor did he want to. If she was a prostitute, she was a bloody good one, but he was no customer. He should lift her to her feet and send her on her way. He’d work to do and—
The soft scrape of her fingers against his shadow beard froze him in place. She watched her own hand with a dazed, almost unfocused gaze as she discovered the line of his jaw with a featherlight touch before cupping it in her small palm.
The tender curiosity demonstrated in the motion unstitched something hard within him.
“No…” she whispered. “No, you’re no hero.”