Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(32)

He looked to the weapon. “Why do you have it?”

She hesitated, and he loathed the pause—the idea that this woman, who was full of honesty and truth, had hidden her reply.

“Because I promised I would return it,” she repeated. “I’m sorry.”

He took the knife. What did she apologize for? Was it as simple as the knife? As the set from which it had come? Was it the attack on the shipment the night before? The ones that had come earlier? Did she know they’d taken thousands of pounds? That they’d threatened the lives of his men?

Or something else?

Was it Ewan?

Fury and disbelief roared through him at the idea. And something else. Something like panic. If she was anywhere near Ewan, Whit wouldn’t be able to keep her safe.

He pushed the thought away. She wasn’t working with Ewan. He’d know if she was betraying him so keenly, wouldn’t he?

He struggled to tear his gaze from her, hating the way the light thieved her from him, the narrow streets of the Garden disappearing the sun prematurely, and his frustration had him reaching for her, taking her hand, and pulling her through the maze of streets, back to the market square, where white stone was aflame with the last vestige of orange.

He released her the moment they stepped into the clearing. “There. Back where you began.”

She turned to him. “It’s not just the knife.”

“No,” he replied. “It’s not. The sheer amount of what has been taken from me is far more than this knife.”

“I know that now. I didn’t last night.”

He believed her because he wanted to, even as he knew he shouldn’t. Even as he had absolutely no reason for it. “I want a name, Lady Henrietta.”

Prove you’re not a part of it.

Tell me the truth.

She shook her head. “Surely you can understand why I might not be able to give it.”

“Able? Or willing?”

No hesitation. “Willing.”

She was more honest than anyone he’d ever met. Far and away more honest than he was. “And so we are at an impasse.”

“We aren’t, though.” She turned a bright face toward him, full of truth and a simplicity that Whit wasn’t certain he’d ever exhibited on his own. “I have a solution.”

He shouldn’t have given the words even a moment’s thought. Should have stopped her from speaking and ended whatever madness she was about to suggest right there, as the sun set on the market square.

Instead, he said, “What kind of solution?”

“Reimbursement,” she said, happily, as though it were all perfectly easy, and trotted off toward the market, leaving him no choice but to follow her.

He did, like a hound, knowing that the spies on the rooftops above wouldn’t hesitate in reporting his actions to his brother and sister and Nik. Knowing, and somehow not caring. Instead, he followed Hattie toward the market stalls, staying several steps behind her, watching, until she crouched to inspect the contents of a basket at the feet of an older woman from the Rookery. Hattie looked up, an unspoken question on her open, friendly face, and received the only reply such an expression elicited. Yes.

Reaching into the basket, Hattie extracted a tiny, squirming puppy, coming to her feet to cuddle the black ball close to her chest and croon to it softly. Whit approached then, something tightening in his chest—something he did not wish to feel, and certainly did not wish to remember. Hattie didn’t seem to care about that, however, turning her bright smile on him to say, “I love it here.”

The words were a blow, this woman so unexpected and out of place on his turf, so impossible to ignore, with a soft joy in her voice that was impossible to miss. He didn’t want her to love it here. He wanted her to loathe it. To leave it.

To leave it, and him, alone.

But she didn’t. Instead, she elaborated. “When I was a child, my father would bring me to the market.”

It wasn’t a surprise. The market was a destination for London’s upper class—a way to play in the muck of the Garden without having to risk getting dirty. Whit had seen hundreds of nobs coming down from up on high in the market. Thousands of them. As a boy, he’d fleeced them, picked their pockets, led them astray. He’d watched the men with their pristine black suits and the women with their impossibly white frocks and the children, built in the image of their perfect parents.

And he’d hated them.

Hated that, but for an infinitesimal twist of fate, he might have been one of them.

He’d taken great joy in fleecing the rich. He’d lain awake at night, imagining the shock and anger and frustration on their faces when they discovered their pockets sliced, their purses cut, their money frittered away. Their money might rule the world, but in those moments, here, it was no match for Whit’s cunning. For the Bastards’ power.

“Before everything changed,” she said to the dog, and to him. Before Sedley had been given his peerage, he imagined she meant. He knew what kind of change that would have wrought. He’d wished it for himself once upon a time. More than once. A thousand times, even as he’d stood in this square and spit on the idea of it.

But now, as he watched this woman, cuddling a ball of black fur in her arms, he wondered if he’d ever seen her. If he’d ever watched her from the rafters above, or from behind a market stall. If he’d ever wondered at her strange violet eyes. If he’d ever seen her wide, winning smile and envied it. There had been days when his stomach was so empty of food that he’d fed on envy—and he would have envied Hattie her clean dresses and her happy smiles and her doting father.