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Which made playing the game impossible for someone who cared.
Like Henry.
I love you, he’d whispered to her the other night.Be with me. Stay with me.
Adelaide swallowed the memory as he approached, strong and furious, knowing that whatever was to come—whatever test her father had devised—it would trade on Henry’s emotions. His decency. His goodness. His honor. And because of that, he would not pass. She drew tight as a string, preparing for it. To save Jack and Helene. To save him.
This was the only way she could love him, this manwho deserved the wide world. This was what she could give him.
“Why didn’t you ever come after me?” she asked, not taking her eyes off Henry.
“You chose North over South. What was I to do? Fetch you from those rooms you let above O’Tiernen’s place? Bring you back? A traitor to your home? To your da?”
She narrowed her gaze on him at his reference to The Place, the tavern that gave safe haven to any women who needed it. “You’ve sent your thugs to knock over The Place a dozen times since I’ve lived there.” She’d fought Bully Boys herself inside the taproom on more than one occasion.
“Och. ’Tweren’t personal, gel. I take the job when it comes.”
“I’m to believe you didn’t enjoy taking those jobs?”
“Enjoyin’ it ain’t the same as orderin’ it. You ought to thank me, honestly, for not taking the lot of you out. There’s more than enough money in that job.”
“Then why not do it?”
He sniffed and looked over her shoulder, down the fast-darkening alleyway. “Don’t feel right, offin’ your own.”
“That, and we’re better fighters than you expected.”
He tilted his head, his lips turning down in silent acknowledgement that she might be right. Another day, she might have enjoyed the revelation. “So I’m not here to be punished or made an example of.” She turned to face her father. “Then why summon me? Why summon him?”
“Because, Addie, there’s more to life than punishment. Why not trust your ol’ da?” The words struck fear deep inside her, but she could not ask for clarification. Alfie was already shouting over her shoulder to the street below. “Your Grace, my boy! Good of you to come!”
Sucking in a breath, she turned around to face Henry, to look down upon him from where she stood on the steps of the church. For a wild moment, her mind playeda trick on her, and she imagined another scenario, another lifetime, when she might be on church steps looking down at him with hope and happiness and joy at their future, spread out before them.
The vision disappeared like smoke before she could toy with it, and she caught her breath at the ferocity of his gaze and the steel set of his jaw. At the way he didn’t look at her. Didn’t meet her eyes. Didn’t look anywhere but at her father. “You won’t think it’s good when I put you into the dirt, Trumbull.”
Behind him, the shadows shifted. Alfie’s guards.
“Now, now. Is that ’ow they teach you to treat your elders in Mayfair?” Alfie held his hands out. “We’ve never even met! How is it you think me deservin’ of a brawl today?”
“Not only today,” Henry said, his hand flexing at his side. “You were deserving of a brawl when you took my brother and his wife from their wedding holiday to use them as bait.”
“Can’t blame me for that, Duke. It’s no’ as though you and Addie would have come round for tea. They’re perfectly fine and just inside.” He waved at the church.
“That’s true,” Adelaide added, wanting him to look at her. Aching for it.
He didn’t, that muscle in his cheek twitching with anger at her father. And maybe, just a bit, for her. “You’re deserving of a brawl for the lifetime of crimes you’ve committed. The weapons you’ve run. The fathers you’ve taken from children. The husbands from wives. The scores of terrible men you’ve lent muscle to.”
“A man’s got to eat, Duke. We ain’t all born rich and titled.”
“And tell me, do men who have to eat often land their eight-year-old daughters in prison?” Adelaide went cold, then hot with recognition at the words, at the fury in them. At the way his fist curled, ready to fly.
“Oh, it’s that, is it?” Disdain crept into Alfie’s tone.“You’re horrified by my treatment of my daughter? I taught her how to survive. You lightweight toffs teach your girls nuffin’, then throw them to the fuckin’ wolves, and I know it, because then you hire my boys to do the dirty work of coverin’ up your mistakes.
“I taught my girl the truth about the world. And look at her. Now she tells you lot the truth. And you pay her for the privilege of hearin’ it.” He paused and looked to Adelaide, a gleam some might think was pride in his eye. “What do they call you, Addie? The Matchbreaker?” She didn’t nod, but he carried on. “A whole lot of ’em want your head, gel. But you’ve forgotten the most important bit of truth. That world, over the river? It ain’t yours. And this”—he looked at Henry with disgust—“dukeain’t for you on the best day, is he?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Adelaide...” Henry said, and it was her turn not to look at him.
