The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers #1)(13)

Adair flexed his jaw. “You’re a bloody fool if ya think we’re ever truly free of those streets.” He gave his head a disgusted shake. “You’re no different from Broderick Killoran and his lust for a connection to the nobility.”

Niall took a step closer, and Adair braced for the fight the hot-tempered sibling had always been eager to give. He stiffened as the other man laid a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t believe that.” Niall’s mastery of his Cockney, when Adair was wholly unable to control a single bloody thing in this instance, grated on his last nerve. “This is for the good of all of us.”

A battle waged inside, born of panic and uncertainty. “And so, we each take on different endeavors and begin from the ground up?” His mouth went dry at the horrifying prospect: the blood, sweat, fears, and silent tears he’d cried through the hell his existence had once been.

Calum rolled his shoulders. “We’ve done it before, Adair. We did it before when we had nothing but stolen coin to our name.” He caught his stare and gave a little nod. “We can certainly do it now with the fortune and connections we’ve built.”

To hide the tremble in his hands, Adair again picked up that hated page. He briefly closed his eyes as he was transported back long ago to the boy he’d been, returning from delivering goods for his father to find his family’s business destroyed and his parents and sister lost to the flames. Just like that, the past came flooding in. The acrid sting of smoke burned his nostrils. Nooooo . . . Papa . . . Mama . . . His own desperate cries churned around his mind. He fought the need to clamp his hands over his ears in a bid to dull the distant sounds of his own misery.

“I will see to the Hell and Sin Club, then,” he said at last, when he trusted himself to speak through the damned, unwanted emotion there.

“Is that what you want?” Ryker asked cautiously.

Adair chuckled. “Does it truly matter what I want?”

“It is a new beginning.” Calum motioned between them. “For all of us. If we wish the club to remain as it is or build it again, the options are both there.”

“Leave it as it is?” Adair was unable to keep the incredulity from his question. The clink of coins being thrown on the table and the laughter of their patrons on crowded nights pealed around his mind, familiar and fresh as the first night they’d opened their doors to the lords of London. “You would do that?” he challenged.

“Calum is only laying forth all the options,” Niall supplied for the silent trio before Adair.

“This,” Adair hissed, “is not an option. That club is everything of who we are.” Without it . . . who were they? Nay . . . who was Adair? He was the scared, cowering orphan in the streets wading through the uncertainty of an even more uncertain existence. “What of all the men and women dependent upon us?” Children, too. “All people like us, born to St. Giles and the Dials who’d finally found security. We’d just yank that away?”

“There’s more good we can do, the more ventures we have,” Calum said quietly. “Expanding our business—and taking on philanthropic pursuits, as we should have done long ago—only allows us the power to help others.”

Damn Calum for always being the calm, logical one of their group. And damn him for being correct.

Adair dusted a hand over his face, searching his mind for reasons to counter a plan he’d not truly had a say in.

“It is settled, then?” There was a question there as Ryker settled back in his chair. “The restoration of the hell falls to you.”

That was it. Just like that, after a lifetime of honoring a hierarchy where Ryker ruled inside the Hell and Sin, they’d all turn the decisions and responsibilities over to Adair. “It falls to me?” he asked slowly.

“We are partial owners in all endeavors and investments,” Ryker said, explaining the plan he’d hatched, “but with each of us overseeing one joint venture.”

It was a clever scheme. What his brothers spoke of was a way they might diversify their ownings and investments. It would cut them free of that dependency they’d had for so long on the nobility. If executed with the same success as they had with the Hell and Sin, they’d grow in ways they never could have with only the club to their names.

“This is the future,” Calum quietly urged, misinterpreting the reason for Adair’s silence.

And through the panic and despair at beginning again, Adair found something vital—purpose. He nodded slowly.

Ryker laid his hand out, palm down. Adair eyed it a moment and then, dropping the list back on his brother’s desk, covered his hand. Calum and Niall stacked theirs atop his, sealing the empire-building they’d agreed to undertake.

An unexpected excitement stirred in the embers of resentment. By the earnings he’d amassed in his days as a thief, Adair had found himself behind the other stakeholders. They’d all had an equal contribution to decisions, but Ryker had always had the final word . . . and that had gone for everything—from the location in St. Giles to the gargoyles that lined the steps of the Hell and Sin.

Agreement reached, Ryker stalked over to his sideboard. He lined up four glasses, and dragging a crystal decanter of brandy back and forth over that horizontal line of snifters, he poured drinks. “There still remains the matter of the Killorans.”