Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards 2)

She saw Augie’s acquiescence, chased like a rabbit by relief. Of course he was relieved. She was about to clean up his mess. Like always.

He exhaled. “All right.”

“But Augie?” Her brother lifted his gaze and she paused, her heart pounding. “If I do this . . .” Suspicion crossed his face, but he did not speak. “If I save your hide . . . then you shall do something for me.”

His brow furrowed. “What do you want?”

“Not what I want, August. What you shall happily provide.”

“Go on, then.”

Now or never.

Take it.

You told the Beast that you didn’t lose, either.

Make it so.

“You will tell Father you don’t want the business.” Augie’s eyes went wide as Nora let out a low whistle that Hattie ignored, frustration and determination and triumph coursing through her all at once. “You’ll tell him to give it to me.”

It seemed today was the beginning of the Year of Hattie, after all.

Chapter Seven

The next afternoon, as the sun sank into the western sky, Whit stood in the small, silent infirmary deep in the Covent Garden Rookery, keeping watch over the boy who had been ferried here after the attack on the shipment.

The room, filled with golden light, was fastidiously clean, in sharp comparison to the world beyond—a world where filth reigned—and it should have given Whit a modicum of peace.

It didn’t.

He’d gone immediately to the Rookery after leaving 72 Shelton Street—come to check on the riders who had been with him the night before. Come to check on this boy, Jamie, who’d been on the ground when Whit had been knocked out, the street beneath him black with blood. Even as he’d lost consciousness, Whit had raged. No one hurt the Bareknuckle Bastards’ men and lived.

Whit’s heart pounded with the memory even as the door to the room opened and closed, the young, bespectacled doctor wiping his hands with a clean cloth as he entered and approached. “I’ve sedated him,” the doctor said. “He shan’t wake for hours. You needn’t hover.”

Whit needed to hover. He protected his own.

The Bareknuckle Bastards reigned in the twisting labyrinth of Covent Garden, beyond the taverns and theaters made safe for the London toffs, where nothing was safe for outsiders. But Whit had come up through the Rookery alongside his half brother and the girl they called their sister—learning to fight like dogs for whatever scraps they could find. Fighting had become second nature, and they’d clawed themselves higher, starting a business and pulling the Rookery with them—hiring the men and women of the neighborhood for work in their myriad businesses: swinging pies in their taverns, tracking wagers in fight rings, butchering beef and tanning hides, and running the cargo that came in off the ships twice a month.

If they hadn’t secured the loyalty of the Garden as children, the money would have done it. The Bastards’ Rookery was known throughout London as a place that provided honest work for good wage and safe conditions, and from a trio who had built themselves from the dirt of the Garden’s streets.

Here, the Bastards were kings. Recognized and revered beyond the monarch himself; and why not? The other side of London might as well be the other side of the world for those who grew up in the Rookery.

But even a king couldn’t keep death at bay.

The unconscious young man—barely a heartbeat from boyhood—had taken a bullet for them. For it, he lay in a blindingly white room against blindingly white sheets, in the hands of fate, because Whit had been too late to protect him.

Always too late.

He shoved a hand in his pocket, his fingers rubbing over the warm metal of one watch, then the other. “Will he live?”

The doctor looked over from the table in the corner of the room, where he mixed a tonic. “Perhaps.”

Whit growled low in his throat, his hand fisting at his side . . . itching for a face. For a life. He’d been so close to it the night before—if he’d woken to the enemy, he might have had his retribution.

But he’d woken to the woman instead. Hattie, eager to play at a brothel while his men fought at the hands of a surgeon. And then she’d refused to give him a name.

He watched the sleeping form, the bed somehow making Jamie smaller and slighter than he was when he was hale, when he laughed with his brothers-in-arms and winked at pretty girls as they tripped past.

Hattie would give Whit the name of the man she protected—the one who’d stolen from him—the one who threatened what was his. The one who was working with the real enemy—and who would lead Beast to him once he suffered the full force of Beast’s wrath.

He’d rampage for Jamie and for all those under his protection here in the Garden, where scarcity threatened not a quarter of a mile from some of the richest homes in Britain. He’d rampage for the seven others who had come before him. For the three who had left this room and gone straight to the ground.

Another growl.

“I understand that you do not like it, Beast, but it is the truth. Medicine is imperfect. But it is the cleanest a wound can be,” the doctor added. “The bullet entered and exited; we stemmed the bleeding. It’s packed and protected.” He shrugged. “He could live.” He came closer. Extended the glass in his hand to Whit. “Drink.”

Whit shook his head.

“You’ve been awake for more than a day, and Mary tells me you haven’t had food or drink since you arrived.”

“I don’t need your wife watching me.”

The doctor cut him a look. “As you’ve been standing sentry in this room for twelve hours, she had little choice.” He extended the drink again. “Drink—for the cracking head you won’t admit you have.”

Whit took the drink, ignoring the throbbing ache at the back of his skull as he knocked it back, before swearing roundly at the taste of the rotten swill. “What in hell is that?”

The doctor took the glass and went back to his desk. “Does it matter?”

It didn’t. The doctor was unorthodox, rarely using a common cure when he could mix a paste or boil a draught of something disgusting, and he had an obsession with cleanliness that Covent Garden had never seen. Whit and Devil had lured him away from a small northern village two years earlier, after he’d reportedly saved a young marchioness from a gunshot wound on the Great North Road with a curious combination of tinctures and tonics.

A man with a skill for defeating bullets was worth his weight in gold, as far as Whit was concerned—and the doctor had proven him right, saving more than he’d lost since arriving in the Rookery.

Today, he might save another.

Whit turned back to Jamie. Watched him in the silence of the afternoon.

“I’ll send someone to fetch you when he wakes,” the doctor said. “The moment he wakes.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

A pause. “Then I shall send someone to fetch you when he doesn’t.”

Whit grunted, logic telling him that there was nothing to be done. That fate would come, and this boy would live or die by it.

“I fucking hate this place.” Whit couldn’t stay still anymore. He went to the end of the room, to the exterior wall of the building, built by the best masons the Bastards’ money could buy. Without hesitation, he put his fist into it.