Robin Schone (39 page)

And then he wanted to kill him.

“Mitch ... my brother is not at home.”

Mrs. Collins’s voice held the ring of truth.

The butler wheezed for air.

“Who are you?” Mrs. Collins ordered, imperiousness winning over fear. “I demand that you release

Keanon.”

Gabriel did not want to have to hurt the woman. But he would.

“Do you have a governess, Mrs. Collins?” he asked, intently watching the butler.

The pockmarks stood out on his livid face.

Keanon was afraid. He knew about Mitchell Delaney’s collection of governesses.

“Yes, of course, but I hardly see what that has to do with—”

“Your brother likes governesses.” Gabriel pressed the sword tip more deeply into Keanon’s throat, blood

spurted; at the same time he loosened his fingers from around the butler’s windpipe. “Tell her how Delaney

likes governesses, Keanon.”

The butler read his death inside Gabriel’s gaze.

“He ...” Keanon croaked; blood dripped down his throat. “I didn’t have anything to do with it, Mrs.

Collins.”

Not good enough.

“Tell Mrs. Collins exactly what it is that you didn’t have anything to do with,” Gabriel softly ordered.

The butler hesitated: he was afraid Delaney would dismiss him or he was afraid Delaney would kill him.

The more immediate threat to his life won out.

“Mr. Delaney, he ... he has a special place prepared in the attic.” Crimson red stained the butler’s

starched white shirt collar. “He brings women there . . .”

“My brother is a bachelor.” Moral outrage spiced Mrs. Collins’s voice. “It is none of our business what

women he brings into his home.”

Victoria had spent eighteen years at the mercy of women such as Mrs. Collins, women who hid behind

their virtue in order to be comfortable with their lives and their men.

Never again.

“Your brother terrorized my woman,
madame”
Gabriel said softly. “It
is
my business.”

The butler’s eyes widened in shock. The women whom he and his employer preyed upon were not

supposed to have men to protect them. To care for them.

To love them.

The approaching clip-clop of a lone horse’s hooves sounded out over the butler’s labored breathing. All

Delaney’s sister would have to do was scream .. .

“If my brother is guilty of nefarious practices, these women should have informed the police.”

Mrs. Collins continued to hide behind her wealth and her virtue.

The governesses were poor; Delaney was rich.

No bobby would arrest him.

“Do you love your brother, Mrs. Collins?” Gabriel asked impersonally.

The lone horse was even with the house; the faint grind of carriage wheels sang out through the evening

fog.

“Of course I love my brother!” Mrs. Collins exclaimed. “It is a virtuous woman’s duty to love her

family.”
No matter their faults.

But she wouldn’t admit that, let alone confess it.

Gabriel wondered how Victoria, at the age of sixteen, had gained the courage to walk away from her

father.

The grinding echo of the carriage was obliterated by fog and distance; the horse’s hooves faded to a

dying echo.

“Then you don’t want your brother to be killed,” Gabriel said flatly.

“Of course not,” Delaney’s sister said on a loud intake of air. Unaware of the passing carriage that

could have been her salvation.

“But he is going to be killed—”

Mrs. Collins gasped; yellow fog curled around the butler’s livid face.

“—if I do not reach him before another man does.”

Gabriel lied. Or perhaps he did not lie.

He did not know if Delaney worked with the second man. Gabriel would not know until he found

Delaney.

Either way he was a dead man.

“My brother did not... he did not tell me where he went.”

Mrs. Collins spoke the truth again.

Knowledge glittered inside the butler’s eyes. Pale green ringed his dilated pupils.

“You know where he is, Keanon,” Gabriel said silkily.

The twin rings of pale green vanished; the butler’s eyes transformed into two black holes of fear.

“I don’t know,” he gasped.

Was Delaney a killer? Gabriel speculated. Who was Keanon more afraid of, Gabriel or Delaney?

“You do, Keanon,” Gabriel crooned. “But if you don’t, then there really is no reason why I shouldn’t kill

you, is there?”

“I don’t know!” Shrillness laced the butler’s voice.

Only cartilage separated the tip of Gabriel’s sword and the butler’s windpipe.

“Take a deep breath, Keanon,” Gabriel said gently. “It’s going to be your last.”

The last of Keanon’s loyalty dissipated in a surge of terror.

“He said he was going to get the governess!” the butler babbled. “That’s all I know! I swear, that’s all I

know!”

Ice raced through Gabriel’s veins.

Victoria was at Gabriel’s house. But did Delaney know that?

Or did he plan to collect her at the cheap room that had been her home?

“How does he know where she is?” Gabriel gritted.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I swear to God I don’t know!”

So many people who
didn’t k now.

“Are there women up in the attic now, Keanon?”

“No! No! Not now.”

But the attic was prepared for a woman.

It was prepared for Victoria.

“Do you watch while he rapes the women?” Gabriel asked softly. Time ticking, pulses beating.

“Mrs. Thornton—she watches!”

There were women as well as men who derived pleasure out of another’s subjugation. Gabriel could

very easily imagine Mary Thornton as being one of those women.

“Does Delaney give the women to you when they finish with them?” he asked.

“No—” Keanon thought better of lying. “Yes. But I don’t hurt them. I swear I don’t hurt them.”

Sweat poured down the butler’s pockmarked face; ice spread up Gabriel’s spine.

Wounds healed; memories did not.

But perhaps the governesses were deprived even of those...

“Do you kill the women for Delaney and Mary Thornton?”

“No, no!” The butler’s bulging eyes rolled round in their sockets. “Mr. Delaney gives them money to live

in the country. I put them on the train. I swear it. I can tell you where they bought tickets to ...”

Keanon’s head slammed against the wall; a half dozen silver-and-glass picture frames crashed to the

floor.

Gabriel stared down at the photograph of a man who stood by a tree; he had an arm about a woman.

He stood in shadow, she in light.

His features were blurred; his hair looked black in the shadow. The woman’s features were clear; her

hair was hidden underneath a straw hat.

Was the man in the photograph Mitchell Delaney?

Did Delaney have black hair?

Was
Delaney
the second man?

Pivoting, Gabriel gazed up.

Delaney’s sister stood on the eighth step.

She was the woman in the photograph, an icon of English motherhood. In her early thirties, she had pale

brown hair secured on top of her head in a loose knot. Her white blouse and dark green wool skirt were

expertly tailored to square her shoulders, flatter an artificially narrowed waist, and to maximize full hips.

There was nothing artificial about her shocked expression.

Mrs. Collins had just learned that every family has a secret. The skeleton in her closet was her brother.

Gabriel turned his back and walked out of Delaney’s house.

He remembered Victoria and the slick lick of her tongue as she shared with him the taste of his seed.

He remembered the letters that Delaney had written, seductive missives promising pleasure and protection.

The handwriting had not belonged to the same man who had written on the silk napkin. But the writing

on the napkin may not have belonged to the second man.

Gerald Fitzjohn had sat at his table.

Gerald Fitzjohn could have written the note on the silk napkin.

It did not matter.

Delaney. The second man.

A man was going to get the governess.

A man was going to get Victoria.
Tonight.

Twin lamps shone through the yellow fog.

Gabriel sharply called out to the passing hansom cab.

The ride through the fog-shrouded streets was endless.
He said he was going to get the governess,

the cab wheels sang.

I
wanted your touch . . . Does that warrant my death?

Gabriel jumped out of the cab the moment it stopped.

“Hey, guv’nor!” the cabby shouted. “Ye owes me two shillin’s!”

Gabriel did not stop to pay the cabby.

Eight distant bongs dully penetrated the blanket of fog, Big Ben announcing the hour. The house doors

opened in another hour.

Using his private key, Gabriel quickly let himself inside. Yellow tendrils of fog writhed in the darkness.

He followed the wafting trail of beeswax polish, roast lamb and danger.

The crystal chandelier at the top of the guest stairs forged jagged shadows in the dark cavern that was

the saloon. White silk tablecloths shone like sleeping ghosts. A single candle illuminated a black-haired man

who sat at a back table. A black wool coat framed a satinwood chair; a black silk dress coat framed the

man’s white waistcoat. He tilted a brandy snifter, long scarred fingers cradling the warmed crystal, both

human flesh and glass tempered by fire.

Gabriel felt all the old emotions that Victoria had briefly stemmed rise to the surface.

Love. Hate.

The desire to be an angel. The need to protect an angel.

The knowledge that he could never be an angel, beggar that he was.

With emotion came the memories of hunger that hollowed the stomach, cold that numbed the skin.

Poverty that eroded social barriers. Lust that never burned.

Sex had been Michael’s salvation; a violet-eyed, black-haired boy had been Gabriel’s deliverance.

Silently Gabriel crossed the thick wool carpet, crimson dye blackened by flickering darkness.

A feminine giggle drifted up the kitchen steps, a housemaid flirting with a waiter.

Michael sat alone, as he had sat alone on the dock in Calais.

Regret washed over Gabriel for the twenty-seven years that yawned between two thirteen-year-old

boys and two forty-year-old men. He paused outside the circle of the single candle flame. “I thought I told

you not to come here again, Michael.”

His voice was a hollow echo inside the cavernous saloon. A reminder of other houses, other saloons.

In another hour the House of Gabriel would be overflowing with patrons and prostitutes. Tobacco smoke

and expensive perfume would camouflage the aroma of beeswax polish and roast lamb and turn the smells

of a home into that of a tavern.

Briefly, Gabriel envisioned Michael’s country estate and town house. They smelled of roses, lilacs and

hyacinth, living floral scents to camouflage a past riddled with death.

Michael swallowed a sip of brandy before lowering the crystal snifter. “You didn’t read the newspaper

today, Gabriel.”

“Forgive me,
man vieux,”
Gabriel said ironically. “I have been busy.”

Downstairs his people were finishing off their supper, some preparing to end the day, some preparing to

start it.

Was Victoria still sleeping?

Would she welcome him back to her bed?

How did Delaney plan to take her?

Violet eyes calmly assessed Gabriel. “You were in a fight.”

“The streets are dangerous,” Gabriel evaded. His cheek throbbed from the butler’s fist. He lightly

gripped the silver handle to the cane that was no cane. “There is always someone trying to take that which

does not belong to them.”

Amber brandy sloshed the sides of the crystal snifter; scarring had not impeded the adeptness of

Michael’s hands or his ability to please women. “Who is he, Gabriel?”

Fear leaped inside Gabriel like a caged animal.

Michael would not stop until he had the truth.

The second man would not stop until two angels were dead.

But there was only one angel among them: Michael.

Victoria was the only living person who knew that truth.

Both Michael and Gabriel’s lives were in her hands.

“He’s the second man who raped me, Michael,” Gabriel replied, playing the game, dying a little with

each passing second.

If he went upstairs to Victoria now, Michael would follow him, and the truth would come out.

Gabriel couldn’t kill Michael, but the truth would kill Gabriel.

A masculine laugh wafted up from the kitchens.

Amber brandy swirled and swirled inside the crystal snifter. “She touched you, Gabriel.”

Gabriel remembered Victoria’s wet hair glued to her body, Victoria’s clear blue eyes glowing with

passion, Victoria’s smile at the French euphemisms for a man’s testicles.

Victoria’s hand reaching out to take his.

“She touched me, Michael,” Gabriel said neutrally.

He would kill for the pleasure of Victoria’s touch.

Yellow fire spat upward.

Michael’s eyes glinted violet in the flare of light. “An article on the front page of
The Times
detailed a

suicide and a murder.”

Gabriel did not have to
ask who the victims had been. The second man had dispatched the Thorntons.

Locks were easily picked.

Either Delaney or the second man could have entered the house while the servants were otherwise

occupied.

“There are always articles detailing murders and suicides in the papers,” Gabriel fenced. “If there weren