“I think it’s best if you just see for yourself, Your Grace,” the butler said after a pregnant pause. “In the parlor.”
Ezra steadied himself for… Hell, he didn’t even know what for. This could be bloody anything, really. But he braced himself anyway as he turned into the parlor and faced?—
A child.
A girl, he was fairly certain, though it wasn’t exactly easy to tell apart the disheveled cloud of dark hair and the large blanket—his blanket, he noted—wrapped around her shoulders, turning her into no more than a pile of cloth and a pout.
“Marling,” he asked carefully, turning slightly to where his butler hovered anxiously behind him without quite removing his gaze from the child. “Why is there a small child in my parlor?”
“Someone left her on the doorstep, Your Grace,” the butler replied.
Ezra pondered this. His butler wasn’t an idiot—Ezra didn’t hire fools—and there were plenty of scruffy children in London. There had to be a reason why this particular scruffy child managed to get inside.
“She had this with her,” Marling went on.
He placed a medallion in Ezra’s hand. Ezra turned it over and froze.
He would recognize this sigil anywhere. He’d recognize it even in his sleep. He grew up seeing it stamped on almost everything his grandfather touched, and he learned to resent it because it was the symbol that made his mother feel so superior to his father.
The Lightholder family emblem.
“Where did you get this?” he asked the little girl, too startled to modulate his tone. He should not be speaking so sharply to a child, some distant part of him realized. Not a child who wasso clearly distressed. He forced himself to lower his voice. “Who gave this to you?”
The girl said nothing.
“How did you come to my house?” he tried.
Nothing.
Maybe an easier question.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Still nothing.
Frustration swamped him. He clenched the medallion in his hand hard enough that he could feel the grooves of the engraving. Damn this family! He made the tiniest step forward on a mystery that had haunted him foryears,and so they dumped a new mystery in his lap the very same day? Only this new question needed to be fed, housed, anddefinitelybathed!
The little girl’s eyes watched his expression warily. Her lower lip began to tremble. Her eyes glistened with tears, but she blinked them away, hunching her shoulders closer in toward her face. Her intention was clear. Sherefusedto cry.
Something inside Ezra cracked.
God, he was an utter shite. This little girl was aperson,not a mystery for him to solve. And she had clearly been through some kind of ordeal. Children didn’t appear out of nowhere because they had cheerful, comfortable homes to return to.
No, someone had left this girl here with this medallion for a reason. They had not taken her to Xander or anyone else in the family. They had brought her to Ezra.
He didn’t know who or why, but he would honor it anyway.
“Right,” he said with a sigh. “Well, you look as though you can use a bath and a hot meal. Does that sound all right?”
The little girl hesitated, but she gave him the tiniest nod. That felt like progress over the blinking.
“Good,” Ezra said. He was trying to sound warm and welcoming, but he feared he wasn’t very good at it. “I will have one of the maids help you, hm? And then tomorrow, we’ll see about getting you settled and finding someone who can take care of you.”
The girl nodded again, this one the tiniest bit more confident.
“Good,” Ezra repeated. He turned and nodded to his butler, who had already signaled for a maid. The servant who arrived was round-cheeked and smiling and looked undoubtedly more qualified to care for a scared little girl than Ezra was. “Good.”
He spun around and went upstairs to his bed, feeling as if someone had come up behind him and hit him right on the head.
