“That’s enough,” she clipped.
“Sugar plantations in the West Indies,” Ezra went on.
“Brutal places, those,” Tej noted. “A crop irrigated by blood.”
Jessica swallowed hard. “I can’t help how my clients get their money.”
“Yet you’ll help guard it for them,” Rhys said.
She was silent. They were right, damn it, and it galled her that they spoke thoughts she’d already considered. The kind that kept her awake at night, wondering what she was doing with her life, and why, and for whom.
Her own family was part of the middling classes. Father ran a foundering chandler shop, and her brother Charlie had escaped the trap of near poverty by joining the navy. Jessica hadn’t had the same option. She’d helped in the shop, wondering if she’d have her health stolen by the work, as it had with their parents. They’d died in quick succession, taken by the fevers that often ran rampant through the poorer parts of town. Alone, she’d tried to run the chandler shop herself, but it was grinding work that left her perilously close to succumbing to the same fate as her parents.
After Charlie left the navy, he came home and taught her many things. They sold the chandler’s shop for a pittance. Then she’d taken her unusual set of skills and, after many years of struggling to gain clients reluctant to hire a woman, parlayed them into her current work.
Work that was already souring on her tongue like spoiled milk.
Jessica had fought too hard to let anything overturn her current reputation as one of the best providers of private security to men like Sir Harold Mowbray.
“He’s transporting jewels tonight,” Tej said.
“How do you know about that?” she demanded.
Tej offered her a wry smile. “We know everything that happens on the Essex road.”
“Face forward and keep walking,” she insisted.
Tej did as she said, but kept talking. “The emeralds and diamonds were stolen from India. Hell, nearly everything in his estates was pilfered from somewhere else.”
Jessica pressed her lips together. They were only trying to sway her so that she’d let them go. But she couldn’t do that. Not without imperiling her professional reputation, and if she couldn’t get more assignments, she’d be left without a profession and without a means of supporting herself.
“Mowbray’s not content with living high off ill-gotten capital,” Ezra continued. “He funds a group of men who call themselves the Guardians.” Acid corroded the edges of Ezra’s words.
“Guardians.” Jessica murmured the word softly to herself, testing it. The word tasted sinister, ominous.
“They’re…hunters,” Rhys explained.
“Many people hunt,” Jessica couldn’t stop herself from saying.
“Their quarry isn’t typical,” Ezra said tightly. “Nor does this prey harm anyone. Yet these so-called Guardians have taken it upon themselves to rid the country of what they have deemed a scourge. They’re led by a man called Jonathan Page, and he and his men leave sorrow and misery in their wake.”
“And Mowbray finances them,” Tej threw in.
“He spends a good third of his income keeping the Guardians in gunpowder and steel,” Rhys said.
There was more to the tale. That much Jessica understood. Anger and sadness thrummed in Ezra’s voice, and it seemed clear that both Tej and Rhys knew the depths of this story. She did and she didn’t want to learn more.
Was any of this true? The three of them could be feeding her lie after lie, merely to save themselves. She couldn’t allow herself to be swayed. She could ask Mowbray to confirm this, but by then it would be too late.
Hell and damnation.
“This is the last time I’m going to tell you,” she said tightly. “Still your tongues. Or I’ll shoot you.”
“There are three of us,” Ezra noted. “You have the one pistol.”
“In my hand.” She patted the satchel carrying their confiscated weapons. “There are many more in here, all of them primed and loaded.”
To her surprise, the men did as she bade, falling mute. Yet it gave her far too much leisure to mull over what they’d said. Was there any kernel of truth in their tale? Or was she simply being manipulated?
