The Sins of Lord Lockwood (Rules for the Reckless #6)(5)

Liam walked over to the sofa, his mere approach causing Stephen’s conversation with a courtesan to fracture into stuttering syllables. “More champagne?” he asked his cousin. Stephen’s glass had remained empty for an hour now. Hunted creatures could not afford to muddle their brains.

Stephen glanced up. He was Liam’s elder by eighteen months, with a full head of brown hair and a lineless face. Had he spent three years battling starvation, however, he might have looked different. His hair might have been bleached, his cheeks hollow, and his crow’s-feet deeper, to match Liam’s.

“How kind of you,” he said. “No, I’m entirely content.” His smile looked fixed; no doubt he was racking his brain for a reason to leave. Stephen aspired to public office—a seat in Parliament would go far to effacing the commercial stain of his wealth—and to that end, he cultivated a pious reputation. He sponsored charities. He paid newspapers to publish his homilies on Christian virtue. He volunteered as churchwarden in the parish where London’s most powerful men prayed.

To be seen at this raucous party would do him no favors. But he accepted all of Liam’s invitations. He could not afford to do otherwise. He was not yet certain if Liam knew what he had done.

“But it’s very fine champagne,” Liam said. The finest that money could buy—a fitting slogan for everything in this house. In the last eight months, he’d spent vast amounts of money refurbishing his London property. The glitter now gave him a headache, but it made excellent camouflage. Blinded by his opulent good taste, nobody ever bothered to look too closely at him. “Come,” he told his cousin. “Just a glass.”

“Just a glass,” echoed the courtesan on a giggle—she was one of Colthurst’s, a long-limbed beauty with a lisp and dyed scarlet hair.

Her hair annoyed Liam. He had told Colthurst not to bring redheads. He considered hunting down Colthurst and gutting the man—an image so vivid and pleasurable that he abruptly reconsidered the wisdom of trying Colthurst’s drugs.

Stephen’s mouth was tightening. This game was a delicate one; push him too far, bully him in any way, and he would find a credible reason to withdraw. “I’m certain it’s very fine champagne,” he said. “I order it occasionally myself, when the Lafitte is not available.”

Liam laughed. “Of course,” he agreed, “you would only drink Lafitte.” He felt kinder now to the courtesan, who must have been annoying Stephen, to set him so on edge as to allude to his own wealth. For a time, this had been Stephen’s great advantage—his only solace for having been born to a second son, and thereby deprived of the earldom.

That trick of birth had been the greatest tragedy of Stephen’s life to date. Liam meant to correct that, but he was taking his time. Revenge made an excellent hobby.

Stephen rose, drawing himself as straight as possible to diminish the difference between their respective heights. “A lovely evening,” he said. “I’m afraid I must be going.”

“Of course.” Liam straightened, looking down his nose, and Stephen’s mouth pinched. By their next meeting, no doubt, he’d be wearing lifts in his shoes. “Shall I walk you out?”

“I believe I can find the way,” Stephen said stiffly. “If you’ll recall, I once lived here myself.”

Ah, yes. The old reminder of their shared boyhood. After Stephen’s father had died, he had come to live with Liam’s family for a time. “Of course!” Liam clapped his cousin on the shoulder, just as a brother would, and felt the man flinch.

He had several advantages over Stephen, in fact, the earldom being the least of them. Thanks to Stephen, he had learned a great deal about torture, and come to grasp that the usual methods—floggings and starvation and terror—were not useful. Pain stripped a man of his humanity. What remained became bestial and wild: it could not be controlled. Common tortures were useless, then, unless one intended to put down the animal directly.

The subtler tortures held a world of possibility, though. To invite a man over and ask him to drink, to smile at him in one’s club, to clap him on the back—to keep him startled, second-guessing, dreaming of poison, his paranoia ever-growing: it made a fine game, far better than the brief satisfaction of a bullet in the brain.

“Perhaps I’ll drop by tomorrow,” he said into his cousin’s ear. “You can catch me up on the world of commerce.”

Stephen recoiled from this murmur and threw a hunted look over his shoulder as he hurried away.

“What’s so funny?” The courtesan wound her arms around Liam, the cloying scent of her lavender perfume tickling his nose as she pulled him down onto the sofa beside her.

“A great deal.” Laughter escaped Liam, though he no longer felt amused. The laugh felt like an animal, clawing and wrestling out of his throat. Stop it. The sound of the chatter intensified all around him, rattling and buzzing like bees.

Foul drug. Colthurst should know better. Liam wanted a numbing, not a false enlivening. He needed a quiet place to wait this out. He stood again, realizing belatedly that the courtesan still clutched on to him. He pried away her wrists, dropping a casual kiss on her knuckles when she protested.

“Find someone else,” he told her with a smile. He did not like being touched, but there was no need to advertise it.

The woman, perhaps hard of hearing, misunderstood the kiss as an invitation. “I’ll put you in a better mood,” she said, twining herself around him.