Prince of Hearts (8 page)

She felt the weight of the pouch in her skirt pocket as acutely as if it were a block of lead.

This was shaping up to be the worst day of her life. She was staring at her feet, feeling so sorry for herself that she didn’t notice she was barreling straight into someone until too late. It felt like she’d hit a brick wall. She landed on her arse, her spectacles flying off her face, and cursed mightily. She glanced up.

And up.

To meet Lieutenant Matthews’ annoyed glare. A veteran of the underground boxing circuit in St. Giles, he had a battered face that had been patched with crude brass Black Market scraps. He was a handsomer version of the Bull, with both his eyes and eyebrows in tact. But he looked as put out with her as the Bull had. He extended one of his massive Welded arms to help her to her feet.

She took it with great reluctance. “You!” she huffed, as he jerked her upright. “You’ve been following me!”

“Aye, Miss,” he said grimly. “That I ‘ave. All bloomin’ day.”

“Do you often follow me?”

“Aye, Miss. Every time you get the hankering to visit the stews.”

“Every time!” she cried.

He looked at her like she was a four-year-old child. “Well, it hain’t luck that has kept you from getting’ yourself raped and killed, beggin’ yer pardon, Miss.”

She was speechless for a moment at his blunt words. “Nonsense! I have always navigated this neighborhood without an ounce of trouble.”

“As I’ve always been ‘ere to keep the trouble away.”

Aline’s eyes widened. Perhaps … well, perhaps Matthews was telling the truth. But still, she had never asked for this clandestine bodyguard. To think that nothing about her adventures into London’s seedy underbelly had been authentic was quite a blow.

And she didn’t think she could handle another blow at the moment.

She pushed her way past Matthews and stomped down the street. He sighed and fell in step behind her.

“So you’re not hiding your presence from me anymore?” she demanded after it became apparent he was not going to go away.

“No, Miss.”

“And why is that, Mr. Matthews? Decided your cover’s blown, as I now know what you and my employer have done to every gambling establishment in St. Giles?”

Matthews shrugged. “Somefin’ like that.” He held up a coin purse she recognized as her own. “And that blighter spice trader picked your pocket back there.”

Blushing crimson with chagrin, she took the purse and thanked him. Perhaps she
was
a hopeless case. “Did you leave his arms in tact?”

He smiled. “Aye, Miss. This time.”

“Are you going to follow me all the way to Mayfair?”

“Aye, Miss. Where you go, I go, until the Professor returns.”

She stopped abruptly and spun to face him. “You’ve spoken with the Professor? You know where he is, and why he won’t answer any of my tickertexts?”

Matthews squirmed. “Not exactly. But I’m to keep a close eye on you, them’s my orders. Straight from the top.”

“Inspector Drexler has allowed you to perform this … ridiculous task?”

“’Tis not ridiculous, Miss,” he replied stubbornly. “And it goes even higher up than my boss. All the way to the top.”

Aline had no idea what
that
meant. All she knew was the Professor was using his connections to stalk her! And he seemed to have been doing it for five years.

She took a deep breath, pushing through her rage.
It doesn’t matter
,
it doesn’t matter,
she chanted to herself. None of it mattered, because she was, as of this moment, done with her employer, whether he was still abroad or not. She was going to Egypt. Far, far away. And she was going to forget the past five years had ever happened.

She was going to forget him and his devil-eyes full stop.

She seethed all the way from Covent Garden to Mayfair, refusing to take the steam car, just to make Matthews have to walk the extra distance. Which was not fair for either of them. Matthews was just following orders, after all, and she was just punishing herself by adding those extra miles. London was not completely pollution-free, after all, and she was feeling the soot in her unenhanced lungs by the end of her journey. She was just too angry to care.

She’d managed to calm her nerves by the time she and Matthews reached Romanov’s townhouse. Unfortunately, the moment she opened the front door, her nerves were once again shattered. The two hellhounds jumped out at her, snarling, and sprinted down the steps and onto the street, their leashes trailing in the dirt. Madame Kristeva barreled out in pursuit, screaming in Russian.

Aline dropped her daisies and turmeric, sighed, and ran to join Madame Kristeva, with Matthews on her heels bellowing for her to stop. Two things she knew for certain: for one, if anything happened to Ilya and Ikaterina, Romanov would start chopping off heads, and hers would be the first to go. For another, she was seriously, irrevocably done with her employer.

Madame Kristeva began to flag after the first couple of blocks. Aline groaned and raced past the winded woman, dodging pedestrians and carts, keeping her sights focused on the errant leashes. Matthews stayed stubbornly by her side.

At long last, some fifteen minutes after the chase had begun, it ended. They caught up with the hellhounds, who had found something interesting to sniff. She’d only to reach down and retrieve the leashes.

Which she did. After which, she was yanked off her feet as the two beasts lurched forward, barking excitedly. At what, Aline would never know, for she was hurtling through the air, the pavement having ceased to exist.

When she landed, she sank into the brackish, churning water of the Thames, and the last thought she had before everything went black was that she
was
going to marry Charles Netherfield as soon as humanly possible – if she survived the river, of course.

And Romanov could rot in hell.

Chapter 4

"You are what?" Dr. Augustus bellowed, though she stood not two inches from him.

Miss Wren sighed in irritation, tapping her foot against the rocky precipice upon which they were perched. Perhaps having this particular conversation with her employer was better suited to a comfortable drawing room and not the top of the French Alps, but it was too late to take back her words now.

"I said, I am returning to England, sir, and marrying Captain Standish."

"What utter nonsense," Augustus scoffed.

"Nonsense, sir? I rather think our present predicament – that is, being chased through the Alps by murderous thieves – is ripe with nonsense, not the fact that I am going to marry a proper English gentleman."

- from
The Chronicles of Miss Wren and Dr. Augustus,1896

London, 1896

AS expected, Franco had taken his damned time corroborating Sasha’s alibi. Without Rowan to moderate Franco’s grudge, Sasha and Fyodor had seen the weeks drift by behind Council guard, without any great hope of seeing London before the seasons changed.

Unable to contact the outside world, and without knowing what Rowan had found upon his return to London, Sasha could do nothing but stew in his worry and anger in his Genoese jail cell. Only the very real threat of Council retribution, and his growing suspicion the killer would not fulfill his threats while Sasha wasn’t in London to bear witness, had kept him from escaping his confinement.

Who knew how long Franco would have dragged things out had another body not surfaced. When Franco had admitted this development to him as he and Fyodor were being released, Sasha had suffered a moment of desperate panic, believing he had misjudged the situation, and the murderer had already killed Finch. But the victim had been found in Scotland, of all places, on a little island in the Outer Hebrides.

Not exactly a place Finch would have been likely to be, considering the amount of water she would have had to vomit over to get there.

But the facts were bad enough. The victim had been a local woman, blonde, petite, and bespectacled. The killer wasn’t through, and Sasha knew that it was only a matter of time before the storm hit London. For some reason, the murderer had decided to threaten those closest to him, on top of framing him.

The murderer had always had a singular vendetta against him – God knew why – but the stakes had escalated in a way that had finally pushed Sasha too far. Sasha’s three hundred year vow to temper his emotions was fast fading. He was losing control. Which scared him more than anything else.

Such were his rather bleak thoughts as Fyodor drove him home through the dirty streets of London after three weeks in prison and one week in the Outer Hebrides with none other than Franco himself, investigating another crime scene. Franco had not absolved him of guilt, of course. He was stubbornly clinging to his suspicions that Sasha had accomplices working for him, or some such nonsense. But he had at long last let Sasha and Fyodor return to London, unable to convince the High Council to extend the edict, in light of the events in the North.

Sasha had grown to think of England as his home in the six years he’d lived in London – or as close to a home as he'd ever manage. It seemed an unlikely match for him, having spent the better part of his three hundred forty two years on some part of the Continent, most recently in the cosmopolitan, intellectually sophisticated Vienna.

By comparison, England, despite its claims to be the center of the modern world, seemed rather ramshackle and quaint, populated by eccentrics and puritans. But he liked those eccentrics and puritans. He liked the friends he made and the work he did. He even liked English weather, having always had a partiality for rain.

And he liked the fact that England was about as far away as he could imagine from Russia. In England, it had proved easier to forget who he had been and what he had lost.

He sighed and rested his head against the window of his steam carriage, watching the rain drip down the glass and the gas lit streets of London pass by, impatient to reach his townhouse and see for himself that Finch was unharmed. She’d yet to answer any of his tickertexts, which was most odd. But he’d been assured she was unharmed by Matthews himself, who was still guarding her. Though from the tone of Matthews’ tickertexts, Finch was not entirely happy he’d been gone for so long.

His mood improved in anticipation of the pending reunion with a sulking Finch. No doubt his prim little English secretary would be waiting for him inside with a list of some sort, hiding her exasperation with him behind her spectacles.

He’d not met another like her in three hundred forty two years of life. She was the most fragile human he’d ever met, unenhanced in a world where even the street urchins of her generation had been fitted with Iron Necklaces. How she’d survived to adulthood with her condition was a testimony to her obstinacy. All five foot two inches of her was filled with a proud determination and a fierce wit he’d never encountered before. Hiring her had been the smartest thing he had ever done.

And he enjoyed having her around. After his long life, it was rare for him to find a human whose company he could still tolerate. He liked to provoke her, to test her mettle, and she never failed to delight him when she thwarted his assaults with one of her pointed, schoolmarmish glares. She was immune to him. No other woman was. It was refreshing.

But his little secretary was hardly the pillar of perfection, which made her all the more entertaining. When he discovered her gambling addiction, he couldn’t quite credit it at first. She seemed so proper, so excruciatingly scrupulous, that dabbling in such a torrid pastime seemed as unlikely as a pig sprouting wings. But it was one she must have developed in the years she’d lived with her eccentric uncle in St. Giles.

He paid his secretary quite a hefty salary, but he suspected she gambled away most of it on a regular basis. Which would explain why, in the five years he’d known her, she’d not scraped together the funds to buy a single new dress.

Not that he cared what she wore. But, bloody hell, mud had never been a good color on anyone.

Finch was a full-fledged addict, courting all sorts of trouble in her visits to the stews. He’d put a stop to that, however, before he’d left for Paris. Matthews’ tickertext this morning had informed him of Finch’s recent revelations on her last trip to St. Giles.

Finch would no doubt be spitting mad at him for his interference in her private affairs, but she would have to get over it. She’d nearly succeeded in losing much more than her money to that voracious bookmaker.

The Black Market dealt in other things besides automata. She’d no clue how rare she was, or that there were predators out there who craved that rarity. The Clean Air Act did not pass until 1880, so there was a dearth of adults over the age of sixteen who’d managed to survive the Fog without enhancement.

Sasha’s old friend, Aloysius Finch, had known his niece’s value, and he’d known Sasha could protect her as few could, which was why he’d asked him to hire her in the first place when he knew he was dying. Not that Finch was aware her uncle had ever known Sasha. She’d thought her employment agency had sent her to his door.

Finch had an even bigger secret that, again, wasn’t a secret to him at all. It seemed in her voracious quest for more funds to gamble away, she’d taken up another profession. He’d discovered Finch's double life as a sensational novelist quite accidentally while thumbing through the
Post-Dispatch
several years ago.

Drawn in despite himself to one of the popular serials the
Post
published, he began to realize the similarities between the storyline and his own life – or at least, Professor Romanov’s life. At first he was alarmed, fearing his secrets would be exposed. But then he’d been amused. It was romantic, fantastic drivel about the misadventures of a heroine named Miss Alison Wren and her overbearing employer, Dr. Augustus. He was convinced Finch was the author.

This discovery had delighted him. He’d not thought her to possess one romantic bone in her neat, gambling-addled little body. He sometimes wondered if there was a real life model for the insufferable Captain Standish, Miss Wren's noble but extremely boring suitor who followed her around the world like a well-trained lapdog.