Page 82 of A Treacherous Trade

“You are not.” He shook his head. “Something has changed since your priest died. You are harder, I think. Bolder. Is it because you are now truly alone?”

Was he being cruel on purpose? Or did he think his assessment of my person somehow insightful or charming?

Either way, I itched to slap the mild curiosity off his face.

“I am not alone,” I insisted. “I have…”Dependents. “I have people—more people than I know what to do with, usually.”

Instead of replying, he asked, “What happened to your face?”

I blinked at the abrupt change of subject but answered, “I was attacked in an alley.”

“By whom?” His tone lowered. Darkened.

“I don’t know. I was knocked unconscious.”

“Did he rape you?” His voice had gone so flat that it was dead, and his features were carefully blank.

“What a terrible question!” I said. “What if hehaddone such a thing? I’d be destroyed. And you bring it up as if it’s nothing. How dare you?”

“It is not nothing,” he said, without inflection. “And you’d be distraught, but you are not so easily destroyed.”

It felt like a compliment. But a dark one.

“He wasn’t after me for that,” I admitted, feeling that sense of relief all over again. “He made it seem like it might be, but someone sent him to hurt me. To scare me because I’m looking into the deaths of Jane and Alys.”

“I see.” He put a finger to his chin. “Apparently it didn’t have the desired effect of frightening you away…”

“No. Butthisdid.” I took the letter from my pocket and handed it to him.

His eyes ate up the words in a few deft motions before he delivered his verdict: “The Ripper is watching you.”

I sighed. “Evidently. And I’ve angered him by pretending to be a prostitute for one night to get in good with the others. Only for information, you understand. I did none of the… the work.”

Nodding, he carefully folded the letter and handed it back to me. “He wants to fuck you.”

I almost dropped it. “What iswrongwith you today? You’re being especially vulgar and dreadful.”

He lifted his shoulder. “I am a vulgar and dreadful man. A fact of which you are well aware and enjoy castigating me for on a regular basis.”

“Not everything is about sex,” I huffed.

“It is for him.” He thrust his chin toward the letter. “It’s why he does the despicable things he does.”

“How would you know?”

His expression shifted in miniscule increments from brutal to bleak. “I’ve known some people that would give your Ripper nightmares. I know what drives them.”

The Hammer never spoke of his past. Of his Russian father and his Italian mother, both of whom were Jews. Of the reasons he’d fled to this country, and the blood that seemed to follow him everywhere.

“How ghastly,” I murmured.

“It was. Itis.”

I wanted to ask more, and also, I did not.

“You’re wrong, you know,” I ventured, deviating from an even thinner patina of ice. “The Ripper—if this truly is him—he doesn’t want to… to have relations with me. He wants to keep me pure. He makes that exceedingly obvious. He kills women who are loose with their favors.”

“He killed women whosoldtheir favors,” the Hammer corrected me. “There is a very distinct difference. And he likes to assume you are saving your purity for him.”