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“Luck is for the weak.” Strider smiled as the words from a lifetime ago rolled off his tongue.
“And we ain’t weak.” Rune closed the door behind him, his boots echoing down the main hallway.
Strider stared at the door.
He was close. So close to finally finishing this.
As for the after…the after he would think about when it was done.
He couldn’t afford to until then.
{ Chapter 18 }
Strider had left her with the carriage to get back to London.
A parting gift.
A small crumb of pity so she could sob to herself alone, in private. The tiniest fleck of mercy so she could make it back to London.
There had been those few fleeting moments walking down the stairs in the coaching inn when she had thought he had waited for her in the carriage. But when the footman had opened the door to her, the coach had been empty.
She hadn’t seen Strider leave that village. She could only assume he’d gotten a horse to bring him back to London, though that hadn’t stopped her from searching the road—every road—for him until the driver had let her out five blocks from the Flagtons’ rented townhouse.
Pen had needed those eight hours during the carriage ride to London to force her head right—to get it into her mind what her life would now become.
A life at the mercy of Percival.
For several minutes, as the carriage rolled through the city streets, she considered the option of never returning to the Flagtons’ home.
But there was nothing for her. She had no money. Nowhere to sleep. No way to buy food. London was still a mystery to her, with its streets converging here and there without any sense of reason. She could barely navigate her way through the town, much less navigate how to survive in it.
She presumed she could go from house to house, asking below stairs if they needed a scullery maid or a laundress or help in the kitchens.
A possibility, except if Percival ever found her, retribution would be swift—a hangman’s noose for her, if he had his way. She had no idea how long his tentacles were—who he knew or didn’t know.
There was only one place where she knew she could find work—a brothel in the rookeries where she could offer up her body. Something she couldn’t even consider for how it sent bile up her throat each and every time the thought crept into her mind. She knew she couldn’t willingly open her legs to any man. Not after being with Strider. Not after feeling his touch on her body. His breath on her skin.
There was only one man that would ever touch her and he had abandoned her. Fully and completely.
She had trudged back to the Flagtons’ townhouse three days ago, at a loss for any other option. And she’d been engulfed in a dark fog since then, her body moving, going through the motions of life at the Flagton’s, so dazed that she would lie down on the hard bed at night and not remember a single thing she’d done that day.
The fog hadn’t even lifted when she’d sneaked out of the Flagtons’ house in the wee hours of that first night and made her way to the Den of Diablo to see Strider. To beg his forgiveness. To do anything to erase the look of loathing on his face—the hatred she’d been left with.
He'd refused to see her. His men and Madame Juliet had sworn he wasn’t at the Den of Diablo. But she had known the truth. He was there and refused to see her. A stake through the last of her hope.
Three days since then of her body and mind deadened to everything about her. A walking ghost.
Even the sun that had broken through the London cloud cover that day did nothing to buoy her disposition as she stood just past the iron gate in the rear gardens of the Flagtons’ townhouse.
The sun, the scent of full gardenias surrounding her, the walk to and from the market—simple pleasures that she used to cherish couldn’t crack the despondency that had set into her bones.
Pen glanced over her shoulder at the Flagton footman that had trailed her every step to and from the market. He’d veered to the coach house as she had stepped in through the gardens off the mews. She’d timed her arrival back at the townhouse perfectly at dusk, when the scent of the flowers in the garden was the strongest—cool and moist, as though each bud was sending out the last cheers of love for the little bit of sun that day. She adored this small slice of heaven. Or, she knew she did, even if she didn’t feel any of it at the moment. The numbness had swallowed everything.
Nevertheless, she dawdled amongst theraised beds ofgardenias and multi-colored dahlias.It was still a relief to breathe her own air for a tiny slice of time without the footman, Percival, or Mrs. Flagton looking over her shoulder. Except that when she was alone, in her own mind, her head swirled, exploding with the last moments she’d been with Strider.
How he had looked at her.
The disgust in his eyes. Then the cold.
