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“I’ll send word tomorrow that it’s safe for her to return.”

The pop and hiss of the coal grate filled the next drop of silence. Then, Jasper looked at her from across the sofa. “Are you going to tell me?”

The light from the gas wall brackets and the glow from the coal fire cast his face in changing shades of golden yellow.

Leo had put off telling him about her visit to Striker’s Wharf, the things Eddie Bloom had told her, and what she’d found in the steamer trunk that had inspired her to go there in the first place. What could Jasper do to resolve or change any of it?

“I’m not sure it matters.” She turned her gaze toward the coal grate.

He shifted on the sofa to face her. “You wanted to tell me something earlier, and it was important. It still is.”

She bit her bottom lip, hesitant. However, even if nothing could be done, she didn’t want to be alone with the things she had learned.

“I found the letters Aunt Flora sent to my mother. Something was happening with my father, something dangerous. Flora never wrote anything specific, but she was afraid for us.”

“Your mother knew what your father was doing?” Jasper guessed. “That he was working for the Carters?”

“Something more, I think.” Leo turned toward him. “You said he was an accountant for them. That would have given him access to sensitive information regarding their income and expenses. What if he discovered something while doing their books?”

Jasper bobbed his head as if to say it was a possibility.

“The Inspector thought it most likely that your father was targeted for that reason. Something having to do with his accounting work for them. But he went through all your father’s papers and ledgers before giving them back to Claude, and he never found anything untoward specifically, nothing about the Carters. ”

It was a reminder that Jasper had always known the truth of who had killed Leo’s family and had been playacting ignorance while the Inspector worked tirelessly to discover answers to the tragedy. Leo hardened her spine and faced forward.

“Five months before the attack on my family,” she began, ignoring the break in the tenuous peace between them, “my father began to receive five pounds a month. He recorded the addition in his personal ledger, marking them only with the initials br.”

There was little chance the Inspector had not seen that pattern. And there was no avoiding it any longer: She would have to go through his file on the murders, even if it made her ill and gave her nightmares.

“You think someone was paying your father to pass along information about the Carters’ false accounts?”

She nodded and closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. “I need to go through my father’s things again. I might be able to find someone with those initials, or some business perhaps, listed somewhere. And then, of course, I’ll have to look through the Inspector’s private file.”

When Jasper stayed silent, she wondered what he might be thinking. She took a guess. “Or, as I said before, maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” Jasper asked quietly.

“Does it truly matter how my father betrayed the East Rips? The fact is, he did. And they killed him for it. My mother and brother and sister too. None of that will change by learning the details.”

In fact, discovering them could revive the danger her aunt had mentioned in her letters.

Eddie Bloom had made it clear that Leo was to let sleeping dogs lie and not stir up old troubles.

She considered keeping her visit to Striker’s Wharf a secret.

But in the end, Jasper would likely learn of it, and she’d rather it be from her.

“Don’t get angry, but I went to Striker’s Wharf.”

He set his jaw. “When?”

“Last night.”

The glow of the burning coals seemed to leap from the grate and ignite his pupils. “By yourself?”

Leo sighed. “Please don’t chastise me again.”

“Why did you go there?” But then, comprehension darkened his already fulminating glare. “I see. You went after you found the steamer trunk.”

“It was impulsive, I admit,” she said.

“ Impulsive ?” Jasper thundered. He shot off the sofa and paced away, running a hand through his golden hair, the strands already mussed. “How many times must I tell you before you understand: Eddie Bloom is a criminal. He is dangerous.”

Leo braced herself against his anger and got to her feet, hitching her chin in defiance. “I agree. But I believe he tried to help me.”

He slowly came back toward her. “Help you how?”

“He wouldn’t let me finish my questions,” she answered. “We were being observed, he claimed, and so he…showed me the door, so to speak.”

“Observed by whom?” Jasper bellowed.

“He didn’t explicitly say, but he indicated that my presence there could be noted by those who see me as a…” She took a jagged breath. “As a loose thread.”

He swore under his breath, and a muscle ticked along his clenched jaw.

“Is Mr. Bloom correct?” she asked. “Am I a loose thread?”

He met her gaze, his temper still simmering. “After the article that bloody idiot wrote, drawing attention to your past, and now, with you beginning to ask questions, then yes. I worry they won’t like it.”

“They? You mean the Carters?” she asked to clarify.

Jasper gave a barely perceptible nod. “In certain circles, it must be known who was responsible for the Spencer murders. The East Rips won’t like that their past failures are being brought up.”

“Is that why you always hated that the Inspector kept digging into my family’s deaths?” she asked. He’d been disapproving of Gregory Reid’s dogged pursuit of the truth. A sudden thought numbed her. “Tell me you didn’t interfere with his file.”

The folder the Inspector had given to Leo shortly before his death was at least two inches thick, with interview notes, reports, photographs, documented theories, and leads.

Jasper jerked back his head. “You’re asking me if I sabotaged his investigation?”

“You couldn’t have wanted him to solve their murders, not if his answers led him to you and your family.”

He let out a chuff of air as if she’d pummeled him in the stomach. Insult filled his stare, softening it just enough to send a coil of regret through her. She didn’t want to believe he willfully would have done such a thing, knowing how important it was to the Inspector.

She faced the fire and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to think anymore.”

Staring into the low flames in the grate, she sensed him coming up behind her.

He then joined her at her side. Leo glanced over, but he was staring into the fire too.

The glow from it shimmered on the brass buttons of his tweed waistcoat.

Jasper scrubbed his jaw and knit his brow, frustrated.

As he ran the back of a knuckle gently over his swollen bottom lip, her attention was drawn there in unexpected interest. Though, only until he began to speak.

“When we were first here in this house, I didn’t sleep a full night for months. I thought they would come in the middle of the night to finish the job they’d left undone.”

Leo held her breath. They . His family. Even though she now knew the truth, it still boggled her mind that Jasper’s past wasn’t the one she’d always assumed and envisioned. And that it was so closely linked to her own.

“I’d sit in the hallway in the dark, pinching myself to stay awake,” he went on, his gaze fixed on the flickering, red-gold flames.

“I believed they would come, but the only person I ever saw was the Inspector. He found me a few times. He didn’t say anything.

Just clapped me on the shoulder.” He touched the spot lightly, as if it helped him to remember and feel, once again, the affection of the man he’d come to call Father.

“I think he knew what I was doing there, even if he didn’t understand why I was doing it. ”

Her heart swelled at the image of a young Jasper, sitting sentry outside her bedroom door, ready to stand up to the people he’d run away from. What had he been feeling to do such a thing? Shame? Or had he, too, felt wronged by his family?

Tears pricked the backs of her eyes.

Jasper met her watery gaze. “I wasn’t going to let anything happen to you then, and I’m not going to let anything happen to you now.”

The vow shot through her, straight into the center of her chest. A sense of safety wrapped itself around her, but it was nothing new. It had always been there, inherent between them. He would protect her, and she would do the same for him. Even so, the reason why troubled her.

“I don’t want to be your responsibility,” she said. “I don’t want to be your punishment.”

The idea that he might have stayed a part of her life all these years because he felt the need to atone —and not because he wanted to be there—utterly speared her.

Jasper shifted his footing toward her. “You aren’t either of those things to me.”

“Aren’t I? I can’t help but think that if you didn’t feel guilty, you wouldn’t still be here.” She’d been tamping down that thought for months. Only now did she recognize how much it pained her.

He reached for her hand. Leo held her breath as he brought it to his chest. “Guilt isn’t keeping me here.”

His grip was strong, his palm coarse and warm, and at the steady beating of his heart, a shiver raced through her.

It wasn’t the brittle shaking she’d been plagued with earlier.

This shiver was electric and hot, and it pulsed through her with a sweet ache.

Slowly, Jasper lifted her hand to his mouth.

That charged shiver raced to every part of her body.

Holding her stare, he brushed his lips against the ridge of her knuckles.

“I can only imagine what you think of me now.” His voice had turned hoarse and, to her ears, vulnerable. “But I care for you. That is why I’m here, Leo.”

Her head went light at the sudden prancing of her heart. All thoughts swirled away except for the one that radiated through her mind: He cared. For her .