The Hellion (Wicked Wallflowers #1)(8)

“Worse.” Her lip peeled back in an involuntary sneer, and she fought the urge to wheel back and plant her brother a facer to break his damned perfect nose. She took up a spot on the plush pale-blue squabs and glared at the doorway.

His damned affable-as-always smile on his face, Broderick climbed inside and settled into the spot across from her. A mutinous battle of silence waged between them as Cleopatra and Broderick locked gazes.

A moment later, their carriage lurched forward and rumbled away from the fancy streets of London to the gutters where the Killorans belonged. Only her brother Broderick was the one who seemed incapable of knowing as much. Or mayhap he was accepting it.

When Mac Diggory, the ugliest, blackest rotter in St. Giles and the Dials combined, had brought Broderick into their gang, he’d become the first person in her then-miserable existence who ever smiled. That smile hadn’t been the street-hardened grin that promised death and retribution . . . but rather something . . . genuine. Something that she’d never known or identified with because of the hell that was life.

In time, that smile had shaped and twisted and transformed, and even as he wore that grin in amusement still, sometimes . . . now she recognized it for the practiced expression it was. Damn him for his control just then. Where had that bloody pride been earlier in Black’s townhouse? That snapped her patience. She hurled her bonnet on the bench beside him. “What in blazes was that?”

He winked, that slight, silent acknowledgment of her defeat. “What in blazes was what?” he asked with a nonchalance that brought her hands reflexively curling into fists once more. “That victory over the Blacks?” He stretched his legs out, knocking into her knees.

She whistled. “You’re nicked in the nob.” He was and always had been. “You’ve become mad with a lust for respectability.”

His cheeks flushed red. “There is nothing wrong with wanting a better life for all of us.”

She scoffed. “You still haven’t accepted that we’ve been born with the stench of the street on our skin. And it can’t ever be scrubbed away, no matter the fine bath oils or fragrances we use.”

When he said nothing, Cleopatra kicked him in the shins. He winced, drawing his long limbs back into their proper place. “Furthermore, that back there was not victory. That was you licking the boots of our enemy.” The smug, satisfied triumph on Adair Thorne’s face as Broderick had all but pleaded for a restoration of the vow struck between their families. She tightened her mouth.

A vein throbbed at the corner of her brother’s eye. “I lick no man’s boots,” he whispered with a steely edge that had sent countless people running in the opposite direction.

“No,” Cleopatra conceded, and some of the tension left his shoulders. “This time it was a lady’s slippers.”

He surged forward. “It is for our family that I do this. We’ve built a fortune to rival Croesus, and once we secure noble connections, we can ensure the Devil’s Den’s place in this damned uncertain world.”

She’d not humble herself with the truth that she didn’t have a jot of an idea who this Croesus fellow was. She’d learned long ago to listen to Broderick’s fancy talk and not reveal her own ineptness on those ends.

“Once we have those noble connections, nothing will stop us, Cleo.” A glint hardened his blue eyes. “Nothing.”

Forcibly concealing her disgust, she lifted her chin and got to the heart of it. “Who?” Who of the Killoran sisters would he sacrifice like a lamb upon the altar of his aspirations?

He set his mouth.

“Who?” she repeated, laying her palms on her knees.

“It should be Gertrude. She’s the eldest,” he said, tugging off his gloves. “The order of things matters to Polite Society,” he explained, stuffing the elegant leather scraps inside his jacket.

“Gertrude,” she repeated slowly. The eldest of their siblings, blind in one eye, and the quietest, meekest of their lot, she’d be eaten alive by the lords of London, and worse . . . destroyed by the nob who took her as wife. The carriage hit a bump and knocked an already unsettled Cleopatra back. She shot a hand out, catching the edge of her seat. Except . . . one word gave her pause. Should. “You won’t send Gertrude.”

He shrugged. “A gentleman doesn’t want a spinster bride, and she’s nearly on the shelf.”

Cleopatra growled, those tonnish words he tossed about only highlighting his sick obsession with the nobility. Which could only mean . . .

“Ophelia is the logical one to send.” Because with her ethereal beauty, any lord would wed her in an instant.

“You’d sell her to achieve your own gains?” It was a naive question that left her mouth before she could call it back where it belonged. Of course, that was the way of the streets. One did what one must, including selling one’s soul—or in this case, one’s sister—for their own gains.

Broderick scoffed. “This is as much for me as all of you. Look at the Blacks. Look at what became of them—”

“Because those bastards thought to marry into the nobility.” She jabbed her index finger against her gloveless left palm, punctuating her words. “Our place is not among the nobs, Broderick.”

“You would not understand it, Cleo.”

She growled. It didn’t matter that he was correct in that she didn’t understand the ways of the ton. No one, man or woman of any station, put her own ignorance on display.