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A soft mumbling ...

And then he saw it ... No. Notit. The person responsible for the earlier noise, the person who’d been scouring Malcom’s territory.

“Where. Are. You?”

He froze, his entire body stiffening as he unsheathed his dagger.

With Giles’s warning, Malcom had anticipated any manner of people to greet him: a ruthless street tough. A desperate member of some gang, seeking something to assuage his liege.

What he’d not expected in any of his musings on the way here was to find a diminutive girl in skirts, crawling around the sewer floor. Fishing her hand through the murky water. And talking to herself.

“Whereareyou? Whereareyou? Whereareyou?”

Mad.

That explained it. Her words all rolled together, falling over one another.

Even so, those besieged by insanity proved the most precarious, the ones to most closely watch for their unpredictability.

Malcom pointed the tip of the blade at the girl. “Rise,” he commanded in quiet tones that immediately froze her on her hands and knees. “Now,” he ordered when she made no move to comply.

For a moment, he suspected in addition to mad, the girl might be hard of hearing. But then she removed her hands from the water and slowly straightened.

“Palms in the air.” He infused steel into that directive. “Turn.”

The girl hesitated; it was, however, the slight stiffening of her shoulders that indicated two truths about the interloper to his world: one, her hearing was fully intact, and two, she’d a pride that bespoke her stubbornness.

“Now,” he repeated, and as she faced him, Malcom ticked a third item onto his list of discoveries. The girl was, in fact, no girl at all. But rather ... a woman. Five feet nothing, and generously rounded, she possessed a set of wide hips and a generous bosom that pressed against the dampened fabric of her cloak. With that, he had his fourth piece of discovery. “You’re a whore, then,” he said flatly. Of course. It hadn’t been the first or even the fiftieth time he’d come upon women plying their trade away from the eyes of society—polite or impolite. Here in the tunnels underground, anything went, and it was enough to lure even the finest-born deviants down.

“Wh-what?” she croaked.

Except the only whores who descended to these pits were ones in hiding ... or ones searching out something ... or someone. “Who are you meeting?” he demanded, keeping his dagger trained on her.

“Who am Imeeting? What manner of question is that?” His head spun as the minx prattled on, asking a slew of questions he couldn’t keep up with. “A meeting? What type of formal meeting do you think occurs down here?”

With that last query and the clipped tonality more similar to his own speech pattern than the usual gritty ones reserved for the coal-roughened Cockneys of the souls who dwelled here, she proved herself different from nearly all in the streets of East London. If she was a whore, she’d have to be a fine one at that.

“I don’t—” Her words ended on a squeak as he stalked over and, tucking the blade between his teeth, swept his hands over her frame, searching her for a weapon. “Wh-what in hell do you think you’re doing?” she stammered, slapping at his fingers.

And Malcom noted a whole sea of new details, ones vastly more interesting and dangerously distracting: the lush curve of her hips. The flare of her waist. Despite himself, despite the fact that she was a stranger and undoubtedly dangerous for it, his fingers reflexively slowed their search, lingering, exploring. Still methodical despite the wave of lust that wound through him, he pressed his hands along the front of her coarse wool.

“You blackguard!” The lady’s sharp gasp split the quiet, followed by the crack of flesh striking flesh as the minx dealt him a shockingly impressive backhand that barely missed knocking his knife loose and whipped Malcom’s head back.

A heavy silence fell, punctuated by the uneven patter of the water’s drip.

Sheathing his weapon, Malcom rubbed at his wounded flesh.

Hell.“You struck me,” he said, disbelief pulling the obvious from his lips. No one had dared put a hand on him in fifteen years. It was a date committed to memory—the near-death beating Malcom had doled out that day to the older, bigger, and stupider fellow.

With the exception of the bright-crimson circles that splotched her cheeks, a common mark of the sewer’s cold, the woman went a sickly shade of white. “I—I did hit you.” He braced for blubbering tears as she begged forgiveness. “In fairness, you c-certainly had it coming.”

God, she was brave. Malcom curved his lips up in a slow, cold smile. Either way, no one struck him. Certainly not a strange slip of a woman invading tunnels that belonged only to him.

“You should not have done that.”

Chapter 5

THE LONDONER