Page 31 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

E mber wore the gown she’d packed specifically with Beck’s downfall in mind.

It was a dull, crushed silver, like worn steel, the bodice structured with lines of cobalt thread. It made her feel like a warrior. She often saved it for those days where she needed to feel strong and stronger still.

Oddly, when she finished dressing, gathered her folio, and looked in the mirror, it didn’t look like platemail anymore. It just looked pretty, like delicate filigree, like the hoarfrost on the windows. Even the blue bits looked softer, daintier, somehow.

Wasn’t that just perfect?

She supposed pretty was just as powerful as armed, in any event, and sighed, letting Merryn catch her hair up in a spill of curls over her shoulder, clipped into loose array with a lapis-studded clip as a finishing touch.

“Is that all, ma’am?” the girl asked, looking anxious enough that Ember wondered if she hadn’t read the letters when Ember’s back was turned.

“For the moment,” Ember replied with a sigh. “But, Merryn, I will be leaving very soon. If you decide not to join me, my invitation will remain open. You need only to write me in London to have a place there.”

“I …” Merryn looked a little frozen with it, her brown eyes wide and blinking. “I understand, ma’am.”

“Merryn,” she said, placing her hands over her ribs, bracing for exiting the room. “Please call me Ember.”

She didn’t, of course. Not yet, anyhow. But it was enough of a distraction to get Ember back out of the room and into the corridor.

She’d written to Beck three times before getting it right. The first one had sounded like a taunt from a crazed ripper. The second had sounded like an attempted seduction. The third … well, Ember wasn’t a writer.

She never claimed she was a writer.

He would come, though. He’d told Merryn he’d come.

She watched the grandfather clock in the hallway until it was two minutes past the agreed-upon time and then made her way to the conservatory. This time, she was expecting him to be there, at least. This time she wasn’t surprised.

He was, however.

Thaddeus Beck was seated on the bench in front of the first Lord Penrose, running his fingertips over the rim of a calla lily, apparently deep in thought.

His head turned at the sound of her footfalls, and in rapid succession she saw hope, gentleness, surprise, and then, ultimately, disappointment.

All of it flashed over his usually expressionless face before he could think to hide it, to force his features back under control.

Until, of course, he did.

“Miss Donnelly?” he said, gruff until he cleared his throat and craned his neck to the side, clearly impatient to regain the typical velvet in his tone.

“Afraid so, Beck,” she said with a lift of her chin. “Don’t get up. It was me that sent the note.”

He had started to lift himself and aborted the effort at her words, landing with a delicate thump back on the stone of the bench. “Oh.”

She shook her head, crossing the room and sitting opposite him on the bench, the smell of lilies, cloying and sweet, stirring up from the earth behind it.

“Honest to God, I didn’t mean to mislead you, but I see now how it might’ve seemed the message was from Hannah, not me. You have my apologies for that.”

“Your …?” His brow lowered, casting a shadow over those deep-set black eyes. “Your apologies?” he repeated, all the softness scraped out of the hollows of his voice.

“Indeed. I wanted to talk, not to torment you. We have many things to talk about, after all.”

“Do we, in fact?”

She nodded emphatically, pulling the folio into her lap and flipping it open. The leather slapped lightly on her thighs, keeping her grounded, keeping her in place.

This time, she would not be paralyzed. God help her, she would never let anyone paralyze her ever again.

“Freddy isn’t going to say anything about your little fisticuffs,” she said briskly, inhaling the scent of ink and parchment.

“You needn’t worry about that. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if he sent you an engraved thank-you letter some months from now, complete with an elaborate illustration of his interpretation of the event. ”

Beck continued to stare, looking truly baffled.

It pleased her. She started to smile and then forced it down. It would not do to taunt or spook the lad.

“To be frank with you, Thaddeus—might I call you Thaddeus?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, fishing out a handwritten note from her stack of documents and dropping it into his lap.

“I’m not sure where to start. I have many things here to get through.

I suppose I should start with Hannah, however, as she is the subject of the accidental falsehood that began this encounter. This was under our door this morning.”

He raised a single dark brow but lifted the document, holding it a distance from his face as his eyes adjusted to it, pupils flaring almost imperceptibly in those dark eyes. “What is this?”

“A letter from Mr. Woodville,” Ember told him. “An apology. A genuine one, I think.”

He scoffed, cynicism bouncing off the glass plates that made up the conservatory walls.

“Yes, perhaps you’re right,” she said with a little chuckle. “Regardless, the backlash has made him contrite in the action, if not the intent.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” Beck muttered, reading through each narrow line even so.

“You know,” she said to him evenly as she waited for him to read, “my da is a bit longsighted as well.”

“He’s what?” Beck peered up at her, his brow furrowed.

“Long… Mr. Beck, you need spectacles.”

His gaze narrowed, snapping into hers with furious precision. “Spectacles?”

“Yes!” She pressed her lips together, knowing that laughter would not help this situation, and forced her attention back to her lap. “But I digress.”

There was a beat of silence, a rustle of Mr. Woodville’s note, a clearing of his throat. She allowed it to indicate that she could move onto her next subject.

“Next, I think it is time we speak plainly about the Forge and her debts and my husband too. It’s hard to know how to orient the things I want to say, what goes first, what belays which.

I only ask that you bear with me. Do you agree?

” She spoke quickly and looked up only after the question had ended.

He nodded. Careful. Quick. He gripped the letter from Woodville between the pads of his scarred fingers.

“First, I wish to apologize to you,” she began, holding up a hand when his mouth fell open.

“I remember you, that day at the door, when we were both still but in our adolescence. I should not have turned you away. I should not have closed the door. I was in pain, and in my pain, I could not fathom yours. I was wrong. I am sorry.”

She let herself smile a little now, a sad sort of smile with no gloating or victory.

“I didn’t know about you, but I believe the story you told.

I think you and I were the same to the late Mr. Withers, you see.

We were both raw talent that he could refine and shape.

It was just easier to buy me outright. I think we can both see that neither of us truly had it better, only different.

“If he’d lived, you would have become his protégé too, maybe even his successor, but you would have been his subordinate just like I was. We were never his equals.

“I respect that you loved the Forge—the Sparrow’s Tail, Mr. Beck. I respect that you never gave up on her. In your place, I would not have either.”

She paused, sucking in another deep breath. She steadied herself in the smell of the lilies. It was not so cloying now, she thought, now that she was seated alongside it, now that she was letting it deepen. It was steadying, she thought, still sweet but not dishonest.

“You were the one who got to inherit it,” he told her, his voice soft this time but not with the venomous velvet of his careful control. It was soft in earnest. Quiet. He was listening.

“I was not written into the will in a clear way,” she said, blinking up at him, still towering even while seated.

“His children hated me. They gave me the most worthless thing they could find without breaking the law. If they’d honored me as his wife, if they’d cared for what he actually wished, they would have given me something better and you would have been able to buy your treasure. ”

She gave him a sardonic little shake of the head. “Mr. Withers did not expect to die. Men never do. It was his hubris that damned us both.”

“His children …” Beck began, flinching at even the thought of beginning this topic.

“I know,” she said immediately, pushing him back from that precipice before he could fall over it.

“I know you went to them. I know you bought debt slips from them. I don’t know what they told you, other than that they lied.

Mr. Beck, I think that if you didn’t hate me so keenly, if you didn’t see me as a villainess, you would have seen right through it. ”

“Seen through it?”

She nodded. He paralyzed her, and evidently she sent him into echoing mimicry. She understood.

“You know that the eldest son is in jail now, yes? For all manner of financial crime? You know they have squandered it all? They are penniless.”

She could see from the way he watched her, from the way he stared, that he did not know that. He didn’t know it was even possible.

“They sold you forgeries,” she said gently. “I have here, borrowed only for an hour, one of my true slips and one of the fakes. If you look at them side by side, you will see they are not the same.”

He released a little gust of breath, glancing at the slips she produced in her lap and then up at her face. “You know I can’t see them well enough.”

“Oh.” She blinked, realizing he was right. “Oh, yes. I didn’t, of course, but yes, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

He shook his head, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes and running them up over his heavy brow, and he took in several deep draws of floral air before dropping them again. “So, Miss Donnelly,” he said, sounding utterly resigned. “What will you do now?”

“I will advise you to pull your escrow before anyone notices,” she said, putting the slips back in their pocket. “Else you might lose everything you’ve built.”

He laughed, a humorless, bone-dry laugh. “I’ve lost a great deal already,” he pointed out, directing his finger at the folio. “Thousands of pounds.”

She nodded. “I’m already taking steps to seek recompense for those who were defrauded by my … my … oh,” she cut herself off, shaking her head. “Don’t make me call them my stepchildren.”

“Your enemies?” he suggested with a quirk of his lips.

“My lessers,” she decided, considering him. “ Our lessers. Beck, how could you trust them? You’re not of that world. You know how they see the likes of us. Don’t you? Mustn’t you?”

“I …” He looked truly unsettled, scratching at his jaw, leaning backward like he wanted to topple into the flowers. “I thought they were like him. Like their father?”

“Oh.” She frowned. “They aren’t.”

He sighed. “I suppose I’m not like mine either.”

They sat with that for a moment, the air pulled taut between them.

“You won’t get the money back,” she said softly. “They don’t have it to pay you. I’m afraid it’s gone. But, from what I understand, you had plenty of my debt alongside it. You aren’t completely flush. You just can’t drive me from my own doorstep anymore.”

“No, it seems I can’t,” he agreed, almost politely. “I suppose I deserve that.”

“I suppose you do.”

He scooted back a little, not to get away from her, she realized, but to get a better look at her, to regard her with those dark eyes.

She could see the boy in him now. She could see that dirty flophat and the threadbare trousers, could see the coins he held in his too-big hands, scarred up even back then, even when he was little more than a child.

“Teddy,” he said suddenly, almost startling her. “Or Tod. People call me both. No one uses Thaddeus.”

“No? That’s a shame,” she replied. “It’s the only name I’ve ever heard half as big as you are.”

His eyes widened; perhaps he was shocked by her gall or perhaps he agreed or perhaps he didn’t. It was impossible to say.

“You tried to talk to me,” she acknowledged. “More than once. You weren’t as … weren’t as verbose as you ought to have been, but I probably also didn’t sit down and give you the chance. We did this to ourselves, Teddy. So let’s do better now that it’s all gone completely to hell, hm?”

She fished past Millie’s letter, her fingers closing over the smoothed edges of the playing card she’d put there, all the way in the back.

She pulled it out, the Ace of Hearts, and held it out to him.

“What’s that?” he asked, still very clearly unsettled. “A card?”

“It’s Mr. Withers,” she said, laughing at her own absurdity. “It’s … it’s a card from the deck he taught me to cheat with. His card. Yours. I want you to have it.”

He reached up, his hand giving one single uncertain twitch. He wanted to take it. He didn’t. “Why would you give me that?”

She sighed. “Because we’re the same, fool,” she said.

“And we should do what good gamblers do. We should play the hand we’ve been dealt.

Don’t you think so too? I couldn’t figure out why you wanted to buy me out so badly, you know.

Gambling hells are a kind of … a kind of biology.

Each den in a chain supporting the other, a rotunda for vice, a feeding loop.

The more there are on a stretch, the more people fall into them, the more they graze, pasture to pasture. ”

She flicked the card into his lap, not willing to let him refuse it. She felt a thrum of satisfaction when he caught it under those thick, scar-streaked, impeccably manicured fingertips.

“You wanted a second club,” she reminded him. “A sibling for your Vixen. You wanted the Forge. You can’t have her.”

“I … yes, I think that’s been made perfectly clear,” he returned, bafflement battling irritation in his tone.

“But there’s an empty lot,” she continued, closing the folio, drawing it into her chest, “one I couldn’t afford all on my own, between the Vixen and the Forge. A place with potential and no funding. Like I was once upon a time. Like you were.”

He continued to stare, continued to waver between all the emotions she hadn’t known him capable.

“Think about it, Teddy,” she said, standing. “You know where to find me.”