Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(121)

That’s when he realized he could hear what he could not see.

A cacophony of muffled sound, shouting and laughter nearby—just beyond the room?—and a roaring din from farther away—outside the building? Inside, but at a distance? The low rumble of a crowd—something he never heard in the places he usually woke. Something he barely remembered. But memory came with the sound, from a similar distance—from farther away, from a lifetime ago.

And for the first time in twenty years, the man known to all the world as Robert Matthew Carrick, twelfth Duke of Marwick, was afraid. Because what he heard was not the world in which he’d grown.

It was the one into which he’d been born.

His heart began to pound, wild and violent in his chest, and he stood, crossing the darkness, feeling along the wall until he found a door. A handle.

Locked.

The angels had rescued him and brought him to a locked room in Covent Garden.

He did not have to cross the room to know what he would find outside, the rooftops filled with angled slate and crooked chimneys. A boy born in the Garden did not forget the sounds of it, no matter how hard he’d tried. He stumbled to the window nevertheless, pushing back the curtain. It rained, the clouds blocking the light of the moon, refusing access to the world outside. Denying him sight, so he might hear sound.

A key in the lock.

He turned. The door opened, the hallway beyond barely brighter than the room where he stood—just bright enough to reveal a woman in shadow. Tall. Lean.

She stilled and the darkness gifted him sound from the other side of the room. A little intake of breath. Barely there and somehow sharp like a gunshot.

And like that, he knew.

She was alive.