Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(115)

It never got easier. How many had they seen die? Dozens? A score? A hundred? When one grew up on the streets of Covent Garden, death was a part of life, like violence and illness, but it never got easier.

“Who is it?” he asked again.

Devil shook his head, his eyes filled with something awful. Something Whit didn’t understand. What then? What else could it—

“Whit.” Devil wasn’t angry. It wasn’t frustration in his words, thick with the accent of their past. Thick with sorrow. “Bruv. It’s Hattie.”

Whit stilled, his brother’s face coming into sharp focus. Full of sadness. Fear, too. Fear of what might happen when Whit understood everything. And something else—fear that it might one day happen to him.

And that fear—tinged with the hot, panicked relief of a man who had dodged a bullet—brought the truth. Whit froze, understanding crashing through him. A third explosion. One that did more damage than the others.

Nik came toward him, horror on her pale face. “Beast,” she said softly. Entirely un-Nik-like.

He dropped the hook to the floor of the hold, his step toward Devil the only movement, no one working, everything stopped, like time. Like his heart. “No.”

Devil nodded. “The boys found her on the docks, a hundred yards from here.”

Whit looked over his shoulder to where Nik stood sentry, several feet away, her brow furrowed. He shook his head. “It’s not her. I put her in a hack.”

He’d paid the driver. Sent her to Mayfair.

Sent her away, not wanting her here. In danger.

Protecting her.

And she’d begged him to stay. Believe in me.

If he had—she would have been with him. Safe.

“She came back,” his brother said. “The second explosion must have—”

Whit slid a hand into his pocket, running a thumb over the pocket watch within. His warrior wouldn’t have waited half a block before finding a way back if she wanted to be here.

She’d found a way back. To stand beside him. His equal.

Would you know if she were dead?

Ewan’s question the night he’d threatened Hattie. The night he’d promised to take her from Whit if he didn’t give her up.

Would you know if she were dead?

He’d know. He’d know that the whole world was upended. He’d know the light had gone out. He’d know.

He shook his head. He’d know. “Where is she?”

“They’re bringing her to the surgeon.”

The surgeon.

“I have to get to her.” He couldn’t be late this time.

Devil nodded. “Yes. But—Whit . . .”

Fuck that. He wasn’t losing her. Not now. Not ever. “No.”

No. Whatever his brother was trying to say, Whit wasn’t hearing it. He was already tearing out of the hold to get to Hattie.



High on the rooftops above the docks, the third Bareknuckle Bastard crouched low, watching as her brother exited the hold of the burning ship, fresh with the news that his love was lost. She saw the fear in his gait, the determination, too, the way his expression flattened into stoic, strong resolve, as though he could go up against death.

As though he would, if it meant keeping her.

She watched as he landed on the firm ground, his mind fracturing just as his life would if Henrietta Sedley didn’t survive, into two halves—like a mast in a storm—before and after Hattie.

Grace watched, and she ached for Beast, and for his love.

She knew what it was to lose the most important person in the world.

She knew what it was to have him ripped from you.

And she knew what it was to survive it.

But she was through with mere survival. And she was through with the boy she’d lost—the boy they’d all lost—toying with them for sport.

She came to her full height, her long coat billowing out behind her, hat low over her brow. “This ends now,” she said to the pair of women who stood at her side. “As it should have ended years ago.”

Her lieutenants stood in silent sentry, watching the tableau below, blades at their belts. Grace pointed to the darkness, to the doorway where the wounded man had dragged himself into hiding after the blast. Where he’d watched as the Bastards’ lookouts had collected Hattie.

“Bring him to me.”

He’d waited for a ghost for twenty years.

Tonight, the Duke of Marwick got his wish.



She wouldn’t wake. So he kept vigil.

Whit didn’t remember how he got to the infirmary, didn’t remember the path he’d taken, whether he’d come via hack or on foot. Didn’t remember if he’d met anyone else along the way, nor how he got inside. Had he knocked on the door or kicked it in? Had he been led here? To this bed in a poorly lit corner of the main room of the Rookery hospital, where a single candle burned on a nearby table—the only thing that kept the darkness at bay?

It didn’t matter.

None of it mattered but her.

Hattie—still as stone in the bed, eyes closed, chest barely rising and falling, as life and death battled for her. Life and death . . . and Whit.

He didn’t remember seeing the doctor. Didn’t remember whatever useless words he’d offered—some explanation of her lack of consciousness. Some reference to a blow to the head. Something about ice and swelling and the mysteries of the human brain.