E than stretched out on the bed, hands behind his head and smiled.
He'd worked all night to tear a long thin strip from the threadbare sheets he'd been given.
Now that strip was stretched shin-high across the doorway, and all he had to do was wait.
A few more days, a few more turns at making himself the most ungrateful, disagreeable houseguest to ever live, and they'd set him free.
He already had them on the run. At least he hoped he did.
The need to put as much distance between himself and Fam Dyer had become an obsession.
Ethan could not remember a time since he'd gotten his first cockstand that he'd ever been attracted to women.
Since then, he'd been kissed by a number of men, had liaisons with a few.
Never had one haunted his dreams the way this gang leader, this murderer born of the rookeries, had every night.
To be honest, his fascination had started as he watched him with Derek at Missus Greene's.
Now the man had become a sort of craving, the sort of craving one had for something impossible to obtain and far too perilous to desire.
The sound of booted feet thundered up the stairs. Raised voices outside the door added to the din. Ethan sat up and planted his feet on the floor.
"Where's the fucking key? Open the bloody door now!"
Ethan recognized the voice a split second before the door was wrenched open.
Fam Dyer strode into the room so swiftly the strip Ethan had fixed to trip someone snapped as if it were nothing.
The end did tangle around Dyer's Hessians enough to cause him to stumble, but he did not go down.
From the fire in his eyes and the tautness of his face, Ethan decided nothing short of cannon fire would bring the man down at this point.
"Come here," he barked, his eyes narrowed on Ethan once he'd spotted him. "Get up, you scurrilous son of a Mayfair whore."
Ethan shot to his feet and crossed the room in two strides.
In the space of a breath, he punched Dyer on the chin and drew his fist back for a second blow.
Only to find himself wrapped in a bear hug and pulled back by Dyer's Irish minion.
He struggled to get free to no avail. Dyer rubbed his chin and worked his jaw back and forth.
"If you ever again offer my mother even the slightest insult, I will kill you with my bare hands or die trying," Ethan declared, still fighting against Sullivan's iron grip.
"Was your mother such a paragon?" Dyer stood, arms folded across his chest with a slight smile creasing his lips as if it pained him even to think of smiling.
"What the fuck would a slum-born gutter rat like you know of a decent mother?
" Ethan kicked back and was rewarded with a grunt of pain from Sullivan.
When he glanced back at Dyer, he went deathly still.
The man's face had gone completely blank as if no soul at all dwelled behind those obsidian eyes.
"Let him go." How could words spoken so quietly in that cold, flat, deep tone fill a chamber as if spoken from some high, hidden place? Sullivan let go with such alacrity, Ethan nearly fell to the floor. He caught himself and faced Dyer, hands fisted tightly at his side.
"I understand you had objections to your breakfast." The gang leader bent to pick up the pewter plate, still half full of food. He placed it carefully onto the table before the hearth.
"I have objections to many things about my accommodations .
" Ethan curled his lip for emphasis. "The food is not fit for pigs and--.
Unhand me, damn you!" Dyer grabbed him by the arm and propelled him out the door.
A handful of ruffians in the corridor backed away instantly.
Ethan heard them fall in behind him and Dyer and the Irishman.
"Where are we going?" Ethan gasped as he struggled to keep pace.
Dyer dragged him up one flight of stairs and then another.
He went to a narrow door at the end of a dark corridor, wrenched the door open, and shoved Ethan up a set of worn-thin steps that seemed to go on forever. They reached a door set at an angle.
"Sullivan," Dyer barked. The Irishman pushed his way next to Ethan and produced a ring of keys.
He unlocked the door and stepped back so that Dyer might shove the door open and drag Ethan through into the cold, stiff morning breeze on the roof of the building.
He had but a moment to take in the fresh air before Dyer clamped a hand on his elbow and began to drag him toward the next building.
"What the devil," Ethan cried, and dug in his heels. "Where are we going?"
"To hell," Dyer muttered. "Keep moving." He pulled Dylan onto a walkway that stretched between the two buildings.
They continued in this fashion from building to building.
Some roofs had walkways and some were close enough together to step or leap across.
Ethan did not dare look down or even behind him where the shuffling of footsteps and the whispered conversations of Dyer's men had begun to unnerve him.
They knew what was about to happen. Ethan did not.
The journey went on for minutes, perhaps hours as Ethan had given up trying to think.
Thinking led to imagining and imagining led to fear.
He sought to assess his surroundings, difficult when all one could see were rooftops that seemed to go on to the horizon.
The air was oppressively heavy with the burn of coal, the must of constant damp, and the ever-increasing cloy of rot and human filth.
Even the scent of the river was beaten back by the perfume of what could only be the heart of London's most desperate rookeries.
Dyer came to a stop so precipitously, Ethan nearly pitched over the side of the building.
Dyer dragged him back from the edge and stood behind him so close, the only warm spot on Ethan's body was where the gang leader's breath soughed across his cheek.
"Look," Dyer ordered as he palmed Ethan's skull and pushed his head down. "Look."
Ethan took a moment to focus on the activity below.
The buildings formed a sort of courtyard.
Carts rolled in and dumped refuse into an ever-increasing pile.
He squinted to discern precisely what was being deposited onto the wet and filthy brick yard.
Vegetables, dark and rotting vegetables, from the odor floating up to the rooftop.
"Where does it all come from?" Ethan mused, half to himself.
"Covent Garden," Sullivan said behind him.
"The ones they can no longer sell come here and to other places like this.
" The bitterness to the normally jovial man's tone struck Ethan.
A few pigs were suddenly turned into the yard and began to root at the edges of the pile. Why would he care how pigs were fed?
"I don't under..." Ethan inhaled sharply as the word caught in his throat.
Children. Once the last cart pulled out of the courtyard, a swarm of children came from windows and doorways to join the pigs in foraging through the pungent mound of castaway farm fare too far gone to sell to even the lowliest denizens of London.
Some began to eat the food immediately. Others gathered handfuls in the skirts of stained dresses or the tails of ragged shirts and scurried into open doors and windows as if afraid their prize might be taken.
Ethan tried to turn away. His belly pitched and roiled.
Dyer forced him back around. "Only a useless son of the nobs of London who has never owned a moment's hunger would toss food away without a thought.
" Dyer snatched him away from the horrific scene below and shoved him into Sullivan's hands.
"Get him out of my sight. Let him do without for the rest of the day. "
Sullivan steered him through the crowd of men and walked Ethan slowly back the way they came.
Ethan looked back once to see Dyer hand one of the men a heavy leather pouch.
The man nodded and crossed to the side of the building where an iron ladder led down to the street.
Most of the other men followed him. When Ethan looked back toward where this rooftop journey had started, a young man appeared to be coming to them.
Sullivan immediately shoved Ethan behind him though he held fast to Ethan's wrist.
"Ho, Dickie," Sullivan called. "What brings you up here?"
"Judah Kamish sent me," the young man called back. "Says Fam should come now. I told Dyer's coachman to ready his carriage."
Sullivan and Ethan turned back, but Dyer was already running across the rooftop. He raced past them without a word. Ethan and the Irishman finished the trip back to his chamber in silence. The spilled food and the plate on the table had been cleared away.
"Sullivan?" Ethan said softly as the big man prepared to quit the room.
"Yes, lad?"
"Does he often do that? Take men up on the roof, show them...that?"
"Count yourself lucky, lad. The last man he took up there he threw off the roof."
"Why?" Ethan didn't attempt to hide his horror.
Sullivan ran his hand through his hair. "The man had a son, sweet boy but a simpleton, couldn't even feed or dress himself.
He locked the boy in the attic and starved him to death.
Beat the mother near dead for trying to save her son, threatened the servants.
Once the boy died, 'twas all hushed up. When the mother recovered, she sold her jewelry.
.." He shrugged as if Ethan might guess the rest.
"She paid Dyer to murder her husband. He's an assassin." Ethan sat down hard on the edge of the bed. His brother had hired a professional assassin to kidnap him. Bloody hell.
"He's a problem solver," Sullivan corrected. "He's the one the rich nobs of the West End call on when they want to disappear or when they want someone else to disappear."
"The man who starved his son, he was from Mayfair?" Ethan could not believe he had not heard of this.
"Berkeley Square, or did you think only rookery scum kill their own children?"