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“Except it will.” Strider unthreaded his arms, taking a step forward. “Don’t even think about sending men to intervene—they’ll be too late on all accounts. Let me assure you, there is no stopping this. The letter clearly states I am his son. The birthmark on the back of my arm has already been verified.”
Both of Frederick’s arms swung wide, his yell filling the room, breaking from all decorum and gentility. “You don’t even want the title, you bastard, for how hard you’ve driven it into the ground.”
“I’ll rebuild.” Strider shrugged as he took another step forward. “For my father’s memory. For what should have been his.”
“No—your father was a wastrel—never good enough for the title, what with that whore of a woman he ran off with. He—”
His fist instant, Strider swung, connecting to jaw, to teeth that dislodged under his knuckles. Frederick flew backward, landing hard on his back, his head knocking into the wooden floorboards just beyond where the carpet ended. His eyes rolled back into his head, his eyelids closing, but breath still lifted his chest.
Too bad it wasn’t the marble.
Strider moved forward, grinding his heel into Frederick’s belly as he stepped over him on his way out the door. “Don’t ever disrespect my mother.”
{ Chapter 20 }
Pen curled around the corner of bricks on the elevated plant bed full of lavender. Dewy grass beneath her cheek, the smell of rosebuds opening behind her in the early morning sun wafted down to her.
Without opening her eyes, she sank her face toward the blades of grass, her parched tongue touching the moist tips.
When was the last time she had water? Two days? Food? Three…four days. Maybe five. She counted the private gardens she’d slept in the past nights. Two nights in that sequestered garden behind the lovelylight-yellowtownhouse on Seymour Street.Three nights in that garden with the weeping willow—far too large for its small plot of land, but perfect to hide away from the mist within the cloak of long, wispy branches. Two nights where she lay now, behind a wide townhouse with a facade of Portland stone—the stucco walls and thick hedges surrounding the private garden sheltering her from the mews and neighbors. She’d chosen all of the homes for their lack of current residents—easy, as so many were out of London at this time of year.
So many fancy homes empty. Such a waste.
But finding a place to sleep meant nothing without food and water, and she had barely staggered into this garden before collapsing into a sheltered corner by the tall evergreen hedge.
She’d roamed during the daylight hours, sticking to alleyways and mews for fear of aconstablehappening upon her, and she hadn’t found any discarded bread or food that she could salvage in days. Just half of a mincemeat pie tossed out of a window of a carriage house that had made her violently ill two hours after she had devoured it.
Her head lifted slightly, the rays of the morning sun breaking over the top of the evergreen hedge opposite her. She couldn’t go on like this, the hunger gnawing like a rabid dog at her belly, vicious, just as it had been in that year after the fire. She had lived in fear of falling into hunger like this for the last seventeen years, yet here she was again. Life with the Flagtons ended just as it had begun.
There was only one thing left to do. Well, two options, actually.
Sinking into the Thames was one.
She shook her head. No. She couldn’t do that.
That left the second option.
If she was to survive, she had to leave this area of frigid pomposity where no one gave her a second glance. She had to move into an area of the city where she could find pity, sell her body if she had to. Sell her body until she could find a different way—be it a seamstress, a maid, or a governess. But until she had food in her belly and a place to sleep, finding any one of those respectable jobs would be impossible.
Whatever it took to survive, she was ready to do it. There was no moral high ground in death.
Strider had somehow made his way in that world of debauchery. She could too.
She had to.
Her palm flat on the grass, she pushed herself upward and a barrage of spinning greenery filled her head, making her dizzy. She collapsed back onto the grass.
A deep breath filled her lungs, her eyes closing against the whirling in her brain that was quickly making her ill.
Another breath.
She would just lie by the lavender for a little while longer. Lie there and smell the purple buds, sink the memory of the freshness of them deep into her mind, for she would probably never smell them again.
She drifted into the land of darkness, the land filled with only one thing—Strider’s face in front of her, betrayed, disgusted. His face as he walked away from her. Done. Done forever. Walking away from her again and again.
With a gasp that sent her choking, Pen’s eyes flew open to find a gardener standing above her, poking the tip of a shovel at her belly. “Be gone with ye, ye wastrel.”
The metal tip jabbed into her stomach again, prodding the pangs of hunger to rage in her belly.
