Page 1 of The Hellion is Tamed

Prologue

The Past

1802, An Unappealing Public House on the Thames

Wapping, London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Her smile told lies. Made promises. Worked an angle.

Simon Alexander recognized the angle even at twenty candlelit, smoke-filled paces, because he’d worked it so many times himself.

Out of desperation, then later, when he no longer had to hustle, out of self-preservation and a low threshold for boredom. Thief, liar, swindler. All parts of the pathetic boy he’d supposedly left in the slums. When in actuality, he’d taken the despicable pieces with him, dusted them up with fine clothing and a fancy education. Society had no clue a renowned pickpocket, legendary on the filthy avenues of St Giles for sleight of hand unlike any the city had ever known, wandered their ballrooms and danced with their daughters.

A legend no one wanted to be—engulfed in a life no one wanted tolive.

Until his rescue, he’d spent his boyhood in a wretched locale a mere twenty-minute carriage ride from the dreary public house he currently found himself in. Streets he’d vacated when a viscount with expertise in the occult, and a calling to save those afflicted, heard about a gifted pickpocket who spoke to the dead and came to retrieve him.

A starving, neglected urchin, Simon wouldn’t have made it out alive without his adopted brother, Julian. The man who’d created his narrative of being a deceased viscount’s byblow.

He wouldn’t have survived without Finn. Humphrey. Piper. The Duke of Ashcroft.

In the early days, he’d stolen from them, rejected every kindness, snubbed every offer. Until the morning his view of the world changed. Shifted on its axis. He remembered the exact moment it hit him, sunlight streaming through his opulent bedchamber window and tumbling across a silk counterpane that cost more than any one item he’d ever owned. His heart cracking open like a locked trunk, emotion spilling free.

No one was abandoning him.

He’d finally understood that, unlike his abusive mother and his mislaid father, his new family wasn’t goinganywhere.

Like he wasn’t going anywhere until he retrieved the Soul Catcher, the mystical gem the hellion sitting across the crowded den from him had stolen from the League, Julian’s faction of supernatural misfits. She’d lifted it right out of the Duke of Ashcroft’s pocket all those years ago, her image like a faded daguerreotype. He’d been unable to touch her, could only beg her with his eyes.

And she’d left anyway. Gone back to her time, never to return.

Consequently, he’d followed her into the past the moment—after ten years of study—he’d figured out how to do it.

He laughed beneath his breath and took a lazy sip of truly rotgut whiskey. He was going against his instincts on multiple fronts—but still, here he was. Fighting battles for the League, a group he’d resisted joining in the first place. But love led a man where it led a man, and he loved his brother. Hence, Julian’s objective was becoming, in part, Simon’s own, the lines dissecting life blurring, as they did the longer one walked this earth, he supposed. Layer upon layer of inconsistencies, contradictions. Until you didn’t know who you were anymore.

The woman he’d tracked eighty years into the past had no idea what he’d done to reach her. Left his home, his cherished gaming hell. Walked through a portal he’d spent years researching when he had no way to return. Chasing a woman he’d never spoken to but who’d haunted him since he was a boy. Not his usual type of ghost, either. A daring girl who’d stepped in and out of his existence, a wordless, yearning presence, like his haunts. Yet so very alive when he was surrounded by death.

Then, one day, as if she didn’t need him anymore, she was gone for good.

Much like his mother.

Simon dug his boot heel into the pitted plank and swallowed the rest of the whiskeyandhis resentment. He’d gotten over the slight long ago. Forgotten all about her.

Although, believing he’d found his person when she was not his person at all had been as devastating as watching his mother willingly step in front of a cart to her death.

Today, his goal was straightforward and didn’t involve benevolence, deviation, or mooning over the past. The girl had filched something that belonged to the League—something he was going to reclaim or die trying. If he witnessed a stray spark of remembrance in her bloody blue eyes, for him or what he’d thought she felt for him, then he’d take that curiousnugget back to 1882 and feel damned good about it, like a winning hand or fortuitous roll of the dice.

Unmistakably rotten luck, since he was thinking about luck, when his was usually good, that his time travel had landed him in the correct year, the correct month, but in the middle of a dank pub, his target surrounded by cutthroats, during a game of hazard she actually looked to be winning.Fucking luck,Simon thought with a grim laugh he wisely kept to himself.

The girl was reckless.

The type of hazardous distraction that Emmaline Breslin would expire from in two years, knife wound to the chest in a tavern two streets over, if she didn’t travel back to 1882 with him.

This knowledge that he’d lied to himself all along about why he’d come swirling through his mind and his belly, twisting both, Simon squinted through the hazy candlelight at the girl he’d once loved.

His greatest fear wasn’t facing Emma again.

Or the mission he’d sent himself upon.