“Mrs. Bunton said you don’t want us,” Anne said, looking down, her lower lip quivering.
“She was drinking gin,” Elizabeth added.
Mrs. Bunton was finished.
That explained the bloody snoring. Apparently, the woman had found her way into his liquor stores. And she had upset his daughters. There would be a reckoning for her daring.
“Is it true, Papa?” Anna asked softly. “Ma didn’t want us neither.”
He held open his arms. “Come.”
He did not need to offer the invitation twice. They threw themselves against him with more force than he had been anticipating from girls of their stature. Jasper nearly toppled off the bed as he awkwardly patted their backs.
“Of course I want you,” he reassured them, his voice gruff against a sudden rush of emotion he had not believed himself capable of feeling. “You are my family. A part of me. Suttons.”
Once, that name had not meant a damned bean.
But Jasper and his siblings had changed that. They had scrambled and clawed their way to the top of the East End.
“You won’t try to sell us?” Anne asked.
“Or make us go pickpocketing?” Elizabeth queried.
Both their voices were muffled against his banyan.
He swallowed against a knot of outrage. “Never. Who threatened you thus?”
“Ma,” they said as one.
The witch. Thank Christ she had abandoned them instead. Apparently, she had decided the girls were not worth the trouble of feeding any longer. When they had first arrived, they had been scrawny as a pack of starved alley pups. If he ever discovered where that bird had flown to, he was going to see that she paid for what she had done to his daughters. For keeping them from him for six damned years.
“You are with me now. You aren’t going to be hurt,” he promised.
Not over his dead, bleeding corpse.
“Forever?” one of the girls asked. With their faces still hidden, he could not be certain which of the two had spoken.
For as long as he drew breath into his lungs. But that was not the answer to give children, and he knew it.
“Forever,” he vowed.
The girls tipped their heads back at the same time and glanced up at him.
“Why were you yelling, Papa? In your sleep?”
“Did you ‘ave a terrible dream about a dog too?”
Unbidden, the memories that lingered, just below the surface of every waking moment, rose. He exhaled slowly, trying to maintain his calm and keep the old rage from overtaking him.
“It was a dream about a different kind of dog,” he said.
“Which kind?” chirped Elizabeth.
He patted her back. “Not the kind you shall ever need worry about. Now, the two of you ought to get some more rest, and I’ll be needing to have a word with Mrs. Bunton.”
And that word… Well, it sure as fuck would not be kind.
Octavia had become a prisoner in her sister’s home.