Unsatisfied with his response, Leo watched him return to his office. Men’s voices echoed up the stairs and along the corridor, giving her what felt like a nudge in the back. She descended the stairs, her fingers clenched as she hoped to clear the building without seeing Jasper—or James, if that was how she should be thinking of him now. That name felt entirely wrong though, as did the cinch of her stomach and the ache of her heart whenever she thought about him. Paired with the boiling of her blood, the mixed emotions never ceased to confuse her.
He had tried to speak to her several times since that morning two months ago, when Leo let herself into his home on Charles Street. She’d surreptitiously entered his bedroom to view the old scar on his chest, of which she’d caught a glimpse the night before, after Jasper had been injured in an explosion at a wallpaper factory. Only after a sleepless night had Leo realized why the scar bothered her so deeply. The shape of it perfectly matched the shape of the porcelain shard broken off from her old china doll’s leg, the very shard a young Leo had used to stab the mysterious boy who’d found her in the attic the night of the murders. It was how she had received a pair of parallel scars on the palm of her right hand.
Jasper had followed her from his room after she’d stormed out, a bedsheet clutched around his waist—the only thing concealing the rest of his naked body. But Leo had not paidany attention to his undressed state. It was a minor scandal compared to what he had just admitted to her.
“Wait, Leo. Wait, please, let me explain.” He’d taken the stairs after her but abruptly stopped when she’d opened the front door. For her to be seen leaving his house just past dawn would have spurred rumors. For Jasper to potentially be seen in nothing but a bedsheet coming after her would cement Leo’s ruin.
She had not allowed him to explain, as he’d begged, and had slammed the door behind her. Predictably, he’d come to her home on Duke Street later that morning, but she’d instructed her Uncle Claude to send him away. The next day, Jasper had shown up at the morgue. Leo told him that unless he left the premises right then, she’d upend a bucket collecting run-off from one of the autopsy tables all over his shoes.
When Jasper met her on the pavement outside her home the following day, he’d asked whether she would at least give him five minutes to hear him out. She’d held her temper and calmly stated, “I cannot even look at you right now. Please, just give me space.”
Reluctantly, he’d nodded and left.
She hadn’t spoken to him since.
Not thinking about Jasper—or James—hadn’t been as easy as avoiding him. Unless she occupied her time with other things, all she found herself doing was thinking of his lies and all the unanswered questions that cluttered her brain but were too unwieldy to unpack.
So, when her friend Nivedita Brooks invited her to a meeting of the Women’s Equality Alliance, she’d jumped at the chance. Not only did Leo believe in the cause, but focusing on the dearth of women’s rights in England, especially the right to vote, gave her another injustice toward which to direct her anger. One that had nothing to do with Jasper Reid.
The women at the WEA meetings were forward-thinking and bright, and most had accepted Leo even after learning she worked as an assistant in her uncle’s city morgue. Some, of course, kept their distance, choosing another row in which to sit, but it hadn’t offended her much, and it hadn’t bothered Dita at all. Most of the WEA members, including their president, Mrs. Geraldine Stewart, were welcoming. In the past few months while she’d been attending meetings, her uncle had supportively pointed out that it was good for her to be a part of something that wasn’t connected to either the morgue or the Metropolitan Police.
As she reached the doors to the entrance lobby, Leo turned her mind to the WEA meeting that she and Dita were to attend that week. But as one of the doors opened, her legs and heart came to an abrupt stop.
Detective Inspector Jasper Reid and Detective Sergeant Roy Lewis entered the lobby of Scotland Yard together. Jasper locked eyes with Leo, and whatever he was in the middle of saying to the detective sergeant fell off. He stopped moving. Leo’s throat cinched as she took in the sight of him. His hooded, dark green eyes, his slightly rumpled clothing, and the dark blond stubble on his cheeks and chin. He’d either forgotten to shave that morning, or he was beginning to grow a beard. A sense of helpless misery pierced her chest.
Sergeant Lewis tipped the brim of his hat to her before moving past them and further into the building. At the clearing of Constable Woodhouse’s throat from where he stood behind the reception desk, Leo’s sudden paralysis lifted. Her heart thrashed against her ribs as she averted her welling eyes and stepped forward again.
“Leo, wait.”
“I’m in a hurry, Inspector.”
“I suspect you’re only in a hurry to avoid me.”
The accusatory tone brought her to a standstill. She whipped around, the coals of her temper stoked to life. “Yes, I am, although that turns out to have been a complete failure.”
Jasper glanced toward Constable Woodhouse, who was openly listening to their exchange, then stepped toward Leo and lowered his voice. “It has been months, Leo. We need to talk.”
She squared her shoulders as fury prickled under her skin. “I’m not ready.”
The muscles along Jasper’s jaw tensed. “I didn’t think it possible to underestimate your propensity to be mulish, but it seems I have.”
Her lips parted on a gust of disbelief. “You have no right to be upset.”
She barely suppressed kicking him in the shin before she turned for the doors again.
“Leo,” Jasper pleaded. “I’m asking you to stop.”
She didn’t know why she complied. Maybe it was because, as furious as she was with him, as intent as she’d been to uphold her vow to never speak to him again…she missed him, which only made her more upset. Although this time, withherself.
He whisked off his bowler and, more quietly than before, said, “I think it is high time we spoke. Not here, of course?—”
“No, not here.” Leo struggled to keep her voice equally soft but managed to whisper, “If anyone here found out why I haven’t spoken to you in two months, you’d be sacked, wouldn’t you? You’ve lied to everyone, not just to me.”
He pressed his lips thin, his expression injured and subdued. Her eyes, already brimming with tears, began to sting.Blast!She needed to get out of there before they fell.
Leo rushed outside into the courtyard behind the building. She filled her lungs with warm, late spring air and blinked back hot tears. What she’d said was true: Jasper hadn’t just lied to her. He was related to one of the most powerful crime familiesin London, and surely, if anyone within the Met were to learn of it, he’d be released from duty at once. How Jasper had managed to come face-to-face with Andrew Carter in March during the investigation into the murder of his wife, Gabriela, and not be recognized was beyond her comprehension. Had Andrew known who he was? Or had Jasper changed so drastically since the age of thirteen that his own relative did not know him?
It was just one of the dozens of questions she’d been stewing over. Another was whether the late Chief Superintendent Gregory Reid had known the truth about him. The Inspector had rescued Leo from the attic and taken her in as a ward while searching for her aunt and uncle, Flora and Claude Feldman. At that time, Jasper had been a runaway from the East End, who’d been arrested for thievery. But after a show of heroics at Scotland Yard—stopping a drunkard from colliding with nine-year-old Leo—he piqued the Inspector’s interest, and Gregory Reid had taken in Jasper as well.
