The Hunter (3 page)

Blood. Spreading from the prone form of his mother, threatening each wall of their tiny cell. He cried for help, clinging to the bars and pressing his face as far against the opening as he could. He called out for someone,
anyone
. Female voices answered from the darkness. Some concerned, some angry.

But no one came.

Breath exploding from his thin chest, he turned back to his beloved mother, now wreathed in the golden glow of their pathetic fire.

“Mum.” He knelt next to her on the side the blood had not yet reached; distressed to see how fast it crawled toward him, the edge of the red pool beveled in the light of the flame. “What do I do?” He groaned, hot tears blurring his vision. “Tell me what to do.”

“Oh, Pigeon, there’s nothing … to be done.” Tears streaked from her own eyes, but she could no longer reach for him. She sounded afraid, which intensified his own despair. He gathered her head against his chest, clutching her to him as though if he held on tightly enough, he could keep her with him.

“Don’t leave me,” he begged, not caring how small he sounded. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay still. I’m sorry. I was angry. I didn’t know about the knife. Don’t leave. I’m sorry!”

“Sing me the lullaby, Pigeon,” she whispered. “I can’t see you anymore.”

He forced the words through a throat blocked with terror and pain.

Hush Hush in the evening,

Good dreams will come stealing.

Of freedom and laughter

and peace ever after …

His mother smiled, though blood leaked from the corner of her mouth and trickled into her hair. Her skin was so cold. Waxy. But the pool in which he sat was warm. Enveloping them both.

Ye’ll smile while you’re sleeping …

And watch I’ll be keeping—

His voice caught on a sob. Then another. He couldn’t go on singing. But he didn’t have to.

She coughed. Her chest heaving. Then it deflated, hot breath hitting his skin like the words she could no longer say. Out and out and out until she was perfectly still.

Christopher couldn’t hear. Someone was screaming. Loud, long, ear-shattering peals of desperation. Screaming like their soul might escape through their throat. Screaming loud enough to wake the gods. Loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the nightmarish place he’d called home. To be heard over the storm, and the thunder, and the silence of his dead mother.

Christopher wished the screaming would stop. But it didn’t. Not for a long, long time.

Eventually the fire died. The stones cooled the blood beneath him and turned it to ice. The shell of his mother cooled also. As the warmth seeped out of her corpse and she stiffened to a heavy weight in his young, trembling arms, all that was warm leaked away from him, as well. He felt it leaving with a mild sense of curiosity.

It felt … like water. Sitting in pool of water. It was only water. Surrounding him. Covering him. Caked to his skin. Filling the cracks of the stone. The space of his container.

Water
. He understood now. He’d learned the lesson Master Ping had been trying to impart to him. There in the stormy darkness he was learning to be like water. Patient. Ruthless.

Laying his heavy mother on the slick ground, he stood, feeling as though he had no bones. As though he didn’t reside in his body. But out of it. Around it. Like the water.

All the water on the stones.

He stood facing the door, still as the stone, and began the forms he’d been drilling earlier in the rain. When the door opened he would go to Master Ping. He would tell him that he understood now. That he was like water.

Ready for death to flow from his hands.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

London, 1877
Twenty-two Years Later

“I don’t kill children,” Christopher Argent informed the solicitor who seemed to be attempting to hire him to do so. “Or deliver them to their deaths.”

Sir Gerald Dashforth, Esquire, perched uneasily behind the desk, and persisted in eyeing the closed door as though he anticipated the need to scream for help at any moment. The man matched the furniture in his Westminster office, expensive, waspish, delicate in an almost feminine manner, and the most offensive shade of puce. He peered at Argent from behind wire-rimmed spectacles perched on ears that had long since outgrown his head.

Argent pondered the few observations he’d made about Dashforth in the minutes since he’d met the lawyer. The man was paid above his station, and yet still spent more than he made. He conducted business with the unscrupulous desperation of someone living well above their means. He was fastidious, vain, intelligent, and greedy to the point of immorality. He’d made a career of being the unassuming absolver of his clients’ malevolent misdeeds by whatever means necessary.

For example, hiring the empire’s most expensive assassin.

“I have three unequivocal policies that my clients
must
be aware of.” Argent ticked them off on his fingers, beginning with his trigger finger. “The first, I don’t intimidate, maim, rape, or torture, I
execute
. Secondary, I leave no messages, clues, or taunts behind for the police or anyone else, handwritten or otherwise. And tertiary, I don’t kill children.”

Dashforth forgot to be afraid for a moment, and his thin, dry lip curled up in an imperious sneer. “An assassin with a code? How very droll.”

“Not so droll as a confirmed bachelor who pays to bugger young, foreign boys.” Argent didn’t only rely on observation.

“How dare you accuse me—”

Argent stood, and the lawyer gasped in a breath so abruptly, he choked on his own spittle. It wasn’t just his uncommon height that reminded the man of his fear, Argent knew. It was the contrast of his appearance. The flawless press of his expensive suit against the unfashionable breadth of his body. The crook of his repeatedly broken nose against his aristocratic features. The gold and diamond cuff links above hands so scarred and callused from years of forced labor, they could never have belonged to a man of blue blood.

“The daylight is fading, Sir Dashforth,” Argent stated calmly over the man’s indelicate fit of coughs. “And I mostly work in the dark.” Turning from the sputtering man, he counted out five measured paces.

“Wait!” The lawyer wheezed, hacking up a last bit and pressing a trembling hand to his heart as though willing it to slow.
“Wait,”
he repeated. “My employer doesn’t wish the child harm, I promise … It is his dreadful mother that is to be—disposed of and the document recovered from her.”

Argent faced Dashforth, who cleared his throat once more behind a fist and loosened his tie. “Go on.”

“So long as the boy cannot be traced back to his father, whether the child lives or not is inconsequential.”

Argent blinked. It was not uncommon for nobility to try and get rid of their bastards; he only had to ask his employer, Dorian Blackwell. “And this woman,” he inquired. “What did she do to incur the wrath of your client?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not especially.” Argent ambled toward his vacated seat and lowered himself back into it, unsure of the structural dependability of the chair beneath a man of his size. “What matters is how much you pay me to do the job.”

Bending to his desk, Dashforth made quite a show of dipping his pen and scrawling an astounding sum on a scrap of paper. “My employer is prepared to offer
this
recompense.”

Had Christopher Argent been prone to sentiment or emotion of any kind, he imagined astonishment would have been where his features would have landed. As it was, he wondered if he might need to show some just so he could perform the human expressions and responses he’d been practicing.

“That’s quite a sum,” he affirmed tonelessly. “Who does your employer want me to murder, the queen?”

Behind his spectacles, Dashforth’s eyes widened at the word
murder,
and again at the treasonous implications at the mention of the death of the British monarch. “Have you heard of Millicent LeCour?” he rushed on.

“Who hasn’t?”

“She may be London’s darling, but she’s nothing but a treacherous viper.”

Still looking at all of the zeros on his scrap of paper and doing some quick calculations in his head, Argent gave the man a distracted, “Is that so?”

“Millie LeCour is not just an actress on stage,” Dashforth continued. “She’s a thief, a prostitute, and a blackmailer, who has forced my employer’s hand in this matter.”

Argent stood again, crumpling the paper in his hand and tossing it into the fire. “I’ll take half the payment up front, and when the job is finished, I’ll return for the rest.”

Dashforth also stood, though he steadied himself on his desk before shuffling to the Diebold safe in the corner of the room. Though the gold dial gleamed and the safe was obviously new and expensive, the bulky item seemed as out of place in the frilly room as Argent, himself.

Once Dashforth extracted a leather satchel from the safe, he turned and pushed it across the desk at Argent. “This is more than half. Millie LeCour premieres as Desdemona in a special presentation of
Othello
at Covent Garden in two days’ time.”

“I know.” Looking inside the case, Argent picked up a pile of banknotes and counted them.

“She’s constantly surrounded by people,” the man continued. “But we know she has apartments above Bow Street not far from the theater. That’s where she keeps the child.”

Argent snapped the satchel closed, causing Dashforth to start. “I do my own reconnaissance. I’ll contact you within three days when the job is done.”

“Very good.” Dashforth put out his hand for a shake, but Argent only looked at it before striding for the door and retrieving his jacket from the stand.

“Don’t let her fool you,” the solicitor called after him. “She’s the best actress in London for a reason. That gutter whore has left a trail of corpses in her rise to the top. The woman deserves less than the swift death you’ll give her, make no mistake. She may be incomprehensibly beautiful, but she’s unfeeling and unspeakably ruthless.”

“If that’s the case, then she and I have much in common,” Christopher remarked. “Except my trail of corpses is indisputably longer and bloodier than hers.”

*   *   *

Millie LeCour strained her vision through the stage gas-lighting to once again find
him.
He wasn’t hard to find. Though he was cloaked in shadow, his magnetic pull was indefinable and unmistakable.

Two thousand two hundred and twenty-six seats at the Covent Garden Theater, and each one was occupied. But the moment Millie’s eyes had alighted on the rough-hewn gentleman in the impeccable suit, he may as well have been the only audience member she’d ever played to. She’d thought that he seemed more like a character in one of the Bard’s more violent plays than a connoisseur. Something about his presence excited and enticed her, and also made her utterly nervous.

The spotlights were dimmed by the light boy to illuminate only Iago and Rodrigo whilst they pontificated onstage upon
her
fictional demise. If she hugged the crimson velvet curtains just so, she could peer out at least three boxes on each tier of stage left without garnering any attention.

“Are you nervous?” Jane Grenn, who played Emilia, settled a friendly chin on Millie’s shoulder and peeked into the crowd. Her golden ringlets tickled Millie’s bare skin as they mingled with her ebony curls.

“No.” Linking her arm with her friend’s, Millie didn’t look away from the arresting shadow that hadn’t so much as shifted in the entire time she’d been watching him.

“Really? Not even for your debut at Covent Garden?”

“All right, I’m petrified,” she admitted with a whisper. “This is the biggest night of my life thus far, and the crowd seems so subdued tonight, don’t you think? What if it’s a disaster?”

Jane wrapped her arms around Millie’s corseted middle in an encouraging hug. “They’re all just waiting breathlessly for the great Millie LeCour to make her appearance.”

“Oh go on.” Millie waved her compliment away with an embarrassed huff of breath. “They’re here to see a Shakespeare play.”

Jane’s unladylike snort tickled her ear. “
Othello never
sells out Covent Garden like this, trust me. They’re here for Desdemona.”

“Or perhaps to see Rynd play Othello.” Millie gestured to the strong, coffee-skinned actor whose deep voice sent thrills through every lady in the audience, whether she deigned to admit it or not. The golden lights shone from his sharp cheekbones and illuminated the brilliant white of his smile. He was exotic, sexual, and powerful as the Moor of Venice, and when she was on stage with him, even
her
body responded to the sparkle of mischief in his dark eyes.

“We’re
all
dying to know if he’s as horse-cocked as reputation suggests. Is he?”

Millie hid her gasp behind a hand and backed away from the curtain lest she be caught by the audience making such a gesture. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know!” she stage-whispered at Jane, shooing her away with playful, indignant slaps.

“Don’t be coy.” Jane giggled. “Everyone knows you’re swiving him. It’s the reason you won’t take Lord Phillip Easton’s offer to keep you.”

“Bite your tongue,” Millie admonished. “There are innumerable reasons why I won’t take Lord Easton’s offer, all of which are my own. Besides, Rynd is married to that adorable woman, Ming.”

Jane wrinkled her nose. “Being married never stops anyone from swiving whomever they please. And while Ming is a dear, I heard they’re—you know—not right
down there
.” She made a discreet gesture between her legs. “Sideways or some such.”

“That is a malicious rumor,” Millie insisted. “
Really
, Jane.”

“How would you know? Have you seen one?”

“No, but they’re
people
. And we’re all pretty much made the same. I’m not discussing this further with you.” Millie sidled back as close as she dared to the edge of the curtain, sure to stay out of the way of the entrances and exits of the various actors from the stage that made up the populace of a fictional Venice.