Page 23 of The Business of Blood

“Also, I needed the firelight to see by. My night vision isn’t what it once was as a young man, and the stitch work was intricate…and important…” The Hammer slid his hand from my elbow, up my bare arm, and across my shoulder to graze the flesh beneath his handiwork. “It will not leave too much of a scar, I think.”

My breath trembled, and my thoughts scattered.

The Hammer was not a young man, I noticed. Grooves next to his hard mouth, and fine creases branching from his eyes advertised that time was currently having its way with his youth. But his hair remained free of silver, and he carried himself like a gentleman in his prime. He could have been anywhere from a hard-won thirty-five to an age-defying fifty.

I looked away from him, finding a rather queer display case straight ahead the safest target for my gaze.

“Are you feeling like a sacrifice, Fiona?” he asked.

“What?”

“The Shofar.” He gestured to the curls and grooves of what appeared to be a ram’s horn. “Among many things, it is a symbol to my people of the goat Abraham slaughtered in place of his son, Isaac, to honor God. You are familiar with this, as I understand it is also in your Bible.”

I frowned, feeling the skin between my brows pinch together. “I did not realize you were fond of religious iconography.” Especially as nothing he did seemed pious in the least.

He shrugged his insouciance, but a current of something deep and dangerous shimmered in the air around him. “It is meaningful to me. It is a reminder of the story of which I am a part.”

“Ancestrally, you mean?”

His mouth twisted in a wry wince. “Metaphorically.”

“Who are you in the story?” I queried, arrested. “Metaphorically speaking. Are you Abraham or Isaac or…God?”

He gazed at me for a long time before his lithe fingers reached toward my throat. “We are not well enough acquainted for me to answer that question.”

“Then tell me this,” I said tightly. “What happened to my blouse?”

With a heavy breath, he dropped his hand. “You bled all over the eyelet lace collar. It’s completely unsalvageable.”

It was my turn to quirk a half-smile at him. “I can get blood out of anything. That’s sort of what I’m known for.”

He stood, startling me a little, and walked to a covered window across from the settee, pushing the drapes aside to gaze into the night. It astonished me sometimes how tall he was. How, even in his hastily rolled-up shirtsleeves and without a jacket, he cut such a sophisticated profile.

“Your blouse was ripped from your body. It is in tatters and no longer here. Do not ask for it again.”

He did not look back at me, and thereby missed the drop of my slack jaw.Ripped from my body? Had he done the ripping?

Or had the Ripper?

The word unsettled me a great deal. As did the images it evoked.

I recovered my composure after a pregnant pause. “Where ishere?” I tried again.

“Why, the Velvet Glove. You’ve been here before.”

“I’ve never been in this room.” I’d been in what Iassumedwas his office on the ground floor, a sumptuous affair done in crimson and crystal from which he lorded over the Syndicate.

This place was a world away from that one.

“I call this chamberShiloh,” he murmured, his chin touching his shoulder. “I wonder, was my establishment your destination when you were pulled into the alley in which you were found? Or was your course somewhere more…official?” He gestured out the window.

Possessed an excellent sense of direction. I always know which way is north and, at the moment, it was a little behind me. Which meant, the Hammer’s window overlooked the south and east.

Toward Scotland Yard.

I became overwhelmingly aware of how dangerous his question was to me.

“I hoped for an audience alone with you, actually,” I hurried to say, remembering my original purpose. “I needed to tell you—”