Page 8 of Greed: The Savage (Seven Deadly Sins #7)

T hornwick was never wrong.

Nor was it arrogance or self-conceit on his part in thinking so. At the Home Office, he’d been required to look at everything with the same precision as a diamond cutter.

Details mattered. Not just at the government level, but on every level there was. It paid to understand people, their habits, what made them the way they were, all of it.

Hadn’t that incisiveness and focus on details been what allowed him to spare his brother and mother from the duke’s violent tendencies?

In his assessment of people, he was unfailingly correct. Always .

Thornwick had to be.

On this night, with club business concluded and all the inebriated lords sleeping off too many spirits, with their lusts slaked, sated in the arms of the Devil’s Den’s most skilled courtesans, Thornwick was forced to make a correction.

He was rarely wrong.

Standing in the dark kitchen with the obstinate, tart-mouthed Addien and a gaggle of the Devil’s Den’s prostitutes collected around her, he discovered the lady didn’t live quite so solitary an existence as he’d first thought.

He narrowed his eyes.

So, at the late-night hour when staff, servants, and patrons slept—including Thornwick—Addien gathered with Dynevor’s finest courtesans.

To what end?

Addien sat flanked on either side by Delilah and Kara.

Directly opposite Addien was Magdalene, one of the club’s most sought-after new hires, and Ruth.

The gathering remained as oblivious to Thornwick’s presence as the moth caught in the far corner of the kitchen wall trying to get out through barriers that couldn’t be breached.

Huddled at the table, the women studied an object at its center.

Thornwick immediately had an answer to what held them so enthralled.

“A Book of Manners?” Delilah snorted. “You got to be jibing me. This is the shite Thornwick has you reading?”

The other courtesans snickered.

“Waste of my bloody time it is reading this,” Ruth muttered.

Icy rage trickled along his spine.

Her opinion was met with a flurry of agreement—from Thornwick too. It was a waste of their time. The work that was currently being, apparently, critiqued and mocked hadn’t been intended for them, but rather for the infuriating, obnoxious, insolent bit of baggage at the center of their helm.

“Go on, read,” Addien instructed as if she was a schoolmarm lecturing a student who was evading her work.

“What’s Thornwick’s story?” Magdalene, the newest addition to the club and also the most sought-after courtesan, put to the women around her.

He tensed.

“I don’t want to talk about Mauley,” Addien surprisingly said.

Briefly stunned by—

“Bad enough, I got to spend my day working with him,” she mumbled.

A fresh wave of laughter erupted from Addien’s devoted audience.

He seethed. Ah, as if it’s all roses spending the day with you .

A voice in his head taunted him with the real truth.

You did enjoy the battle of will she put up.

“Got to be more interesting than this rubbish he’s picked out for you,” Delilah jested to a fresh round of giggles.

He thinned his eyes into dangerous slits and kept Addien in his sights.

Kara pressed her pale hands against her cheeks. “Perhaps you’d like it if we were talking about…”

The name was lost to a chorus of “oohs.” But it was enough to know the crew of courtesans were gently ribbing a blushing Addien.

Thornwick’s ears pricked up. Now, what was this that had her all pink in the cheeks like a lily-white virgin?

“Can we please return to the assignment?” Addien implored.

Their assignment or yours, Addien? he silently mocked from the corner.

The courtesans weren’t having it. They were stuck on Thornwick and there they would stay.

“Ye wanna know about Thornwick? I can tell ye,” Delilah volunteered for the new girls. “Too good he is. He won’t spend a night with anyone of Dynevor’s girls.”

He gritted his teeth. He didn’t because he didn’t play where he worked.

“Entertains the fancy sort. We ain’t good enough for him,” Delilah drawled.

“All the better for us,” Ruth interjected.

Her comment was met with a chorus of laughter.

The anger that had been slowly stirring like a storm inside kicked up, and every snickering comment and fun they were having at his expense because of Addien sent him into a rage to rival a tempest.

“Oy.” Addien thumped a fist on the table, instantly bringing the room round to silence.

She had an impressive way of effectively managing staff here. He’d never admit it to anyone.

“Oi,” she said, “as I was saying, it doesn’t matter what’s on the pages.”

Oh, that’s what she thought, did she? What an unfortunate surprise the chit was in for.

“How about you, Ruth?” Addien tried the youngest of the courtesans. “Why don’t you read?”

“Don’t want to,” Ruth whined.

“Fortunate for you,” he heard himself say in a silky, dangerous warning whisper, “you needn’t bother as the book you have there is meant for Miss Killoran.”

A round of surprised gasps went up in an instant. Every last lady gathered about Addien and sailed to their feet. Their cheeks bloodless, their eyes round and startled.

No, not all the women.

Thornwick sharpened his gaze on the true source of his rage.

Unlike the soundless, uneasy quartet around her, Addien remained seated as calm and confident as the Queen of England herself.

“Leave.” That whispered order immediately sent their audience scurrying, leaving Addien alone.

The obstinate minx didn’t possess so much as a hint of unease, proving once more just how much of a fool she was. After he drew the door shut slowly behind him, sealing them off together, he sauntered over on slow, deliberate, sleek steps until he stood across from her.

She remained seated, boldly glaring up at him.

Even with him towering over her small, imperious figure, Addien exuded a stubborn strength—and worse, she did it with flashing violet eyes and wild black hair spilling like a banner of defiance, beauty that made his gut tighten, his body mutinying against him.

She managed to look down her nose at him, that pert little tilt making her seem at once insolent and untouchable—and it drove his lust higher.

Thornwick remained locked in a silent battle with the hellion; all the while torn between lust and loathing.

And he conceded a point to the blasted hellion. He might despise her. He might resent her. But as a warrior, he was wholly in tune with the rare type that she was—a fearless warrioress, a fighter in her own right, and he wanted her in his bed.

He curled his lips into a cool, derisive, and deliberately jeering smile, though his gaze had already betrayed him, caught on the sharp tilt of her chin, the stubborn line of her mouth. “I am not happy with you, Addien.”

I am not happy with you.

Those weren’t the first time those words had been uttered to Addien.

They’d been a favorite of Mac Diggory, the gang leader she used to answer to, who’d made her suffer for even imagined slights, reserved for Addien.

This was, however, the first time that sentence strung together of six words were delivered in that smooth, affluent King’s English by a true Mayfair nobleman.

Whenever that declaration came, it’d been swiftly followed by a brutal backhand.

Addien shivered.

Or worse…

She had preferred the quick strikes. There wasn’t any slow, agonizing build of terror. It came. Then it went.

The ominous threats that hovered in the air were what left Addien with a real, soul-quaking fear.

This is not Mac Diggory. This is Malric Mauley, Marquess of Thornwick.

That calmed her… some .

“Tsk, Tsk, nothing to say,” Thornwick purred like the sleek panther ready to pounce.

Somehow, Addien found the ability to lift her shoulders in an insolent shrug.

Upon his sleek, calculated approach, Addien swallowed the fear in her throat.

The nerve endings in her feet and toes twitched with the animal-like intuition that urged a person to flee in the streets. It took everything within Addien to make herself as still as possible.

She’d been wrong.

When it came to rousing fear in a woman’s heart, Diggory had nothing on the Marquess of Thornwick.

Under the cruel reign of Mac Diggory, she’d found pride to be a paltry piece of nothing. The Earl of Dynevor taught Addien pride was all a person was actually born with that couldn’t be taken away—unless one let them take it from you.

That gave her the strength to look an enraged Marquess of Thornwick in the eyes.

“It doesn’t seem like I need to say anything. You came down here and interrupted my time. So, why don’t you do the talking?”

A primal emotion somewhere between fury and something else crossed his face.

Something she’d seen and witnessed in the eyes of other men, but very rarely directed her way, which is why she suspected it was merely a flicker of the dim kitchen light.

As if a fine toff like Malric, who kept company with fine ladies with creamy white skin and flawlessly manicured fingers and didn’t bother with the courtesans here at the Devil’s Den, would ever feel desire for someone like her.

That realization, for some reason, only raised her annoyance and, strangely enough, not her relief.

It’s only the fact that he thinks he’s better than you. That’s the only reason you care one way or another.

Malric did not so much as crack a facial muscle.

Instead, like the predator he was, he stalked her.

Moving out from the other side of the table, he approached until he arrived at her side, and then like the king of the club himself, he straddled one leg over one side of her bench and seated himself, so he stared directly at her.

“What do you want?”

To his very small credit, he didn’t pretend he didn’t hear her.