He bit back a groan of frustration and closed his eyes for a moment. “You’ll be needing to explain before I take one step out of this damned room.”
“There’s a cull outside who’s been put to bed with a mattock,” Wolf elaborated, his voice grim. “And tucked up with a spade.”
Floating hell.
A dead man? It never boded well when Old Mr. Grim paid a call, and especially not when it happened directly outside their establishment. Not only was there the chance that a rival or an outright criminal had found his way to one of their guards, but it was also deuced bad for business. Difficult indeed to persuade the nobs it was safe to gamble away all their coin within when there was a corpse lying in the streets.
He cursed again. “One of ours?”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Wolf called back. “But we’ll all be needing to take a look before Jasper calls for the charleys. Just to be sure.”
“Aye,” he responded, resignation sliding over him. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
Death was enough to effectively kill his cockstand. But that did not mean he did not greatly regret his inability to finish what he had begun with Lady Emma.
“What is it?” she asked softly, her gaze searching his. “What is amiss?”
The disparity of their lives struck him yet again. How to explain to a gently bred lady that there was a bleeding dead man lying on his back somewhere on the periphery of The Sinner’s Palace grounds? And further, that he’d be required to examine the poor cull to be certain it wasn’t anyone he knew?
“Business,” he managed to bite out, the only explanation he could stomach offering her at the moment when she was stripped bare and vulnerable, about to give her innocence to him. “’Tis a matter of business which requires my attention. You needn’t concern yourself.”
That much was true. Finding dead bodies outside his family’s gaming hell was a business matter. And she most assuredly did not need to fret over it.
“Of course,” she said quietly, disengaging from him and turning away to retrieve her chemise, which he had torn nearly in two.
Floating hell, what a beast he had been.
He scooped his own discarded shirt from the floor. “I’ll see to another chemise for you.”
And another gown for Lily.
Perhaps he could tell his sister it had been soiled in some manner of incident. A spilled glass of claret? An accidental tip of a chamber pot? Anything to avoid admitting to his innocent sister that he had torn the gown from Lady Emma’s body in a raw fit of lust.
“Thank you,” Lady Emma said, keeping her gaze carefully averted and downcast.
He fastened the buttons at his throat, then tucked his shirt tails into his trousers before seeking a coat this time. “I will be back. If you leave the chamber while I am gone, there will be bleeding hell to pay.”
And he meant that. There could be far more concerning dangers roaming beyond the walls of The Sinner’s Palace than lecherous lords. He could not afford anything to happen to her. He needed her far too much.
In more ways than one.
“I will remain here,” she said, her countenance worried. “Will you be in danger?”
Christ.
She was concerned for him. True, it may have been self-serving. Without him, she would be adrift in unfamiliar territory. But he did not think he misread the worry in her face, in her voice.
It humbled him.
Perhaps she had understood more of Wolf’s cryptic words from the hall than he had supposed she would. But there was no danger in dead men. Only the living that were cause for fear. And in his experience, the living didn’t linger where death was to be found, particularly if they were the ones responsible for causing it.
He shook his head. “No danger for me, milady. I’ll return as soon as I’m able.”
She nodded, clasping the badly torn chemise around her luscious form, and watched him go, those luminous blue eyes searing him to his bleeding soul.
* * *
By the time Hart,Wolf, and the addition of a thoroughly concerned Jasper reached the street, all hell had broken loose. Sutton guards were brawling with a familiar group of culls. Hart would recognize the sight—and the smell—of the Bradleys in his damned sleep. A more motley group of insidious cutthroats wasn’t to be found in the East End. And clearly the rivalry between the Suttons and the Bradleys remained in full, bloody force.
“Floating hell,” Jasper cursed at his side, taking in the melee before them.
“Bradleys,” Wolf spat the name of the family they were frequently at war with as if it were a curse. And it may as well have been.
The Bradleys were nothing but trouble. Their most recent cowardly deed had been to unleash rats within The Sinner’s Palace.
“The dead cove must be one of theirs,” Hart observed grimly. “They’ve come looking for blood.”
“And we’ll give them some,” Wolf growled. “Theirs.”
Already, Hugh had landed a sound facer in one of the Bradley’s noses, causing blood to spurt through the air and slash across Hugh’s cheek.
“My dear wife is going to have my bleeding hide,” Jasper said calmly, shrugging out of his coat and laying it on a pile of crates bearing the wine merchant’s stores. “I told her I wouldn’t fight any longer.”
“Starting when?” Wolf asked, unleashing a feral grin reminiscent of his namesake.