Daring and the Duke (The Bareknuckle Bastards #3)(43)

Confusion furrowed his brow. “You’re keeping it.”

“Course we’re keepin’ it!”

Fucking hell. “Then why—”

“’Cuz it ain’t enough,” Beast growled from behind. “We’ll give them your money, but they deserve more. They’ll be gettin’ more.”

He did not pretend to misunderstand. “But not money.”

“Not only money,” Devil corrected him.

“What, then? My head on a pike in Seven Dials? Are we back to who gets to kill the duke?”

“It still ain’t the worst idea,” Whit said, looking very much like he was sizing up Ewan’s head for a strong stake.

“These aren’t aristocrats, Marwick. These are real people, with real lives and real memories. And they don’t want you paying them to leave off their anger and grief. And if you ever thought a moment about your life before you became a toff, you’d know that.”

A memory flashed at the words. Grace, inside the copse of trees on the western edge of the Burghsey estate. Their place. Devil and Whit had been playing in the distance, shouting and tilting at each other, inseparable like they’d always been, and Grace had asked him for the thousandth time to tell her about London.

He’d told her about the Garden—the only part of the city he’d known. The only part that had mattered. He’d told her about the people. About how they fought for everything they had. How they did it with pride and determination, because they couldn’t afford anything less.

They don’t get what they need, and not what they deserve, neither, he’d said. But we’re going to change all that.

He hadn’t made good on that promise.

But she had.

He looked to his brothers, knowing, instinctively, that they understood what Grace hadn’t the other night. They weren’t here to keep him from taking a debutante bride and carrying on the family name. They knew he’d sooner drown himself in the sludge of the Thames than touch a woman who wasn’t Grace.

And that’s when Ewan knew the worst of it. Whit and Devil were here to tell him he was to leave the Garden alone. That he was to leave her alone.

Impossible.

“I owe you; I won’t argue with that,” he said. “But I won’t leave.”

“You misunderstand, Duke,” Devil said. “You don’t owe us. You owe them. You don’t need our forgiveness. You need the forgiveness of the Garden.”

He’d never get it. But he wanted it.

We’re going to change all that.

“You need the forgiveness of Grace,” Devil added.

He wanted that, too. More. “How.”

Whit grunted, then said, “I told you.”

Devil smiled, his scar—the scar Ewan had put there with his own blade—pulling tight on his cheek. “Come and see us.”

For the Garden? Or for Grace?

“And what, you make me a gladiator and feed me to the lions?”

“High opinion of your fighting, bruv,” Whit said, dry as sand.

Devil’s smile turned into a rich laugh. “You’ve been away from us for too long, toff.” He popped his hat on his head, pulling it down low on his brow, so all that was left was his scar and the lower half of his face. “Come and see us to make amends, or we’ll come back and take them.”

He headed for the door, Whit coming shoulder to shoulder with him. Once there, the brother the Garden called Beast turned back to face him. “You didn’t ask us.”

“Ask you what?”

“Whether Grace made us promise not to kill you.”

He didn’t have to ask. He knew she had. He lifted his chin, refusing to ask the more important question. The one that would haunt his sleep.

“You didn’t ask why she made us promise not to kill you.”

That one.

He almost kept quiet. Almost. “Why?” The question came out harsher than he expected. More urgent.

Whit looked to Devil. “I told you.”

Tap. Tap.

Whit looked back at him, and in that amber gaze he knew as well as his own, Ewan saw fury and betrayal and something else—something like sorrow. “It’s what you did to her. What you owe her.”

“What?” The word was out before he could take it back.

Devil looked at Whit, then back at him.

“Tell me, or get the fuck out,” Ewan said, desperation in his voice.

Whit answered. “You broke her heart.”

The words sent pain straight through him, sharp and ragged enough to have him raising a hand to his own chest.

Whit watched him for a moment, seeing the truth. “We don’t have to wreck you,” his quiet brother, who’d suffered so much at his hands, said. “She’ll do the wrecking. And you won’t for a minute think you don’t deserve it.”





Chapter Twelve


“They say she won’t last the year.”

Grace looked up from where she was checking the line of debits from the monthly ledger as Zeva and Veronique entered.

Today, Zeva wore an elaborate aubergine gown, shot through with silver and worth a fortune, and Grace admired the ensemble even as she shook her head at the other woman’s utter disregard for practical dress. Veronique, on the other hand, wore breeches and a crisp white shirt, crisscrossed with a holster that held a pair of pistols at easy access beneath her arms. Grace couldn’t remember a time when the head of the club security had been without her weapons, though they were not always so visible.