Page 46 of The Hunter

“Are ye hurt anywhere?” the Scotsman asked gently.

He shook his head and wiped a runny nose on his sleeve.

Argent made a face.

“What’s yer name, son?”

There was that questioning glance at Argent from beneath long, sandy lashes again. What did the boy want him to say? He knew his own name, didn’t he?

Lifting an eyebrow, Argent looked at the child askance before his gaze needed to dart away.

Somehow, the boy took it as an encouragement. “Jakub.”

“Yer ma’s still on stage, Jakub,” McTavish consoled. “Do ye want me to go wait in the wings, and I’ll bring her to ye as soon as I can?”

The boy nodded so many times Argent lost count.

“All right, lad, I’ll return with her straightaway.” McTavish ruffled the boy’s light locks and seemed to miss Jakub’s flinch as he addressed Argent.

“Looks a bit like ye did as a wee boy. Is he yer git?”

The short and burly officer had been hired barely out of boyhood, himself, to work at Newgate. Due to a sick mother and an absentee father, he’d been more than willing to take bribes from Blackwell, Argent, and their band of criminals back in those days. Though he’d risen through the ranks to inspector at Scotland Yard, his loyalties had never faltered so long as his pockets were full of coin.

He was their man on the inside, and they did favors for each other when they could.

“He’snotmine.” The idea was preposterous.

McTavish leaned in, lifting a conspiratorial hand to hide his mouth. “Are ye certain? I’ve likely a few bastards peppering the streets from the randy days of my prime. Ye never can be sure, can ye?”

Argent glanced over at the inspector from beneath a sardonic brow. “I’ve never sired a bastard.” He let his low voice make his unmistakable point. “I promised I never would.”

McTavish hadn’t been there the night his mother had died, but he’d seen the aftermath. He’d been the only one to clean his mother’s blood from Argent’s catatonic body the night after and deliver him into Wu Ping’s protection.

He’d been the one to look the other way as Argent took his bloody revenge.

He didn’t know why, but Argent found the former guard’s presence unsettling even after two decades. To look into the inspector’s soft, understanding Scottish eyes was to glimpse a past best left alone.

“Aye, well, I’ll be after his mother then.” He put on his hat and straightened his coat as though going outside instead of down a hall and into the wings of the theater. Winking down at Jakub, he left.

Silence yawned in a room where chaos had only just reigned. It didn’t belong here in a place of such riotous color and cheerful disarray.

Argent and the child stared at each other warily, and he tried not to think about how the room smelled like Millie. At least the boy’s tears had ceased. Somehow that… improved things.

Exponentially.

“Thank you.” Jakub’s soft, somber voice echoed as loudly as a gun blast between them.

Argent blinked, but was saved from the expectation of a reply as the child uncurled his fingers from the implements he’d been protecting, and bent to retrieve his short easel and set it to rights. He restored the canvas to its place and took an inordinate amount of time centering the piece.

Argent didn’t know what to do with gratitude. He’d never before been faced with it. Should he clarify just exactly what he’d done to deserve it? Which, in essence, was nothing now that he thought about it, because he didn’t save the boy from capture, or his mother from a deadly ambush, out of any altruistic spirit. He’d done it because Millie LeCour was going to pay him for the deed.

With her body.

A foreign sensation coiled in his chest as he watched Jakub’s small hands deftly and compulsively arrange the supplies around the canvas. His tongue tasted wrong and his skin felt—smudged somehow. What unsettled him the most was that the distasteful feeling seemed to be directed at himself.

Millie LeCour stared out of the canvas posed in a dress of emerald green, standing in a disarray of roses. The colors were heavily applied, and the nose completely skewered, but her smile, high cheekbones, and heavy dark hair were unmistakable.

Drawn to the painting, as he was to its subject, Argent took a step forward, then another. “You’re… painting your mother.” He stated the obvious, painfully aware that he could think of very little to say to a child. As he constantly had to remind people, he refused to harm or assassinate them, and therefore very rarely found himself in their company. The only child he came into contact with on any semblance of a regular basis was Faye Marie, Blackwell’s infant girl, and she did little more than squawk, drool, and put things in her mouth that had no business being there.