“I tell Jess when to come and go. I tell her when to breathe. I decide when she stops.” He waited another minute while the silence stretched out. “Nobody else touches her.”

Lazarus hitched his jacket closed and walked past what was left of Badger. The talking started behind his back. Speculation, approval, and relief. Jess had her life back. For the moment.

“Step into my office, Captain Kennett,” Lazarus said.

Twenty-three

IT ENDED WITH BADGER FLOPPING ON THE FLOOR and the Captain adjusting his neckcloth, calm as a cucumber. Everybody enjoyed the show. Just another of Lazarus’s bloody spectacles. Never a dull moment in the padding ken. That was something else she’d managed to forget in the last couple years.

When Lazarus jerked his head toward the back room and invited the Captain to talk, Jess was glad enough to follow and get away from all the eyes watching her. She’d known Lazarus would keep her safe. Known it all along. He’d taken his bloody time getting around to it, hadn’t he?

The back room where Lazarus conducted his private business had been a fancy parlor once. The wallpaper was peeling and most of the plaster had cracked off the ceiling. The place reeked of piss and onions. She wouldn’t have noticed that ten years ago. The table held an oil lamp, unlit, and a wine bottle and glasses. Ropes with climbing hooks were hanked up neat and stored in the corner. The tools of her old trade. One chair held an open book and a stack of newspapers. Lazarus read everything he could get his hands on. A crowbar leaned against the hearth. They’d use that for milling kens when they weren’t poking the fire with it.

“My pied-à-terre, Captain. Make yourself at home. Jess . . . you two . . . in here.” As he walked, Lazarus pulled his jacket off and let it drop. The current toy, that girl he was tormenting, bent and picked it up and folded it over a chair-back. She went to curl up in a chair near the curtained window, looking pregnant as hell. Generally Lazarus sent them home when they got pregnant.

She couldn’t help that poor woman. Nobody could. Not till Lazarus got bored with her.

Black John took up a place at the wall where he’d have a good line of fire. The Hand slid in and crouched down in the corner, being alert and inconspicuous. And her, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to act with Lazarus when she wasn’t Hand. So she stood there feeling sick and shaky, getting cold where her clothes stuck to her skin.

Lazarus stretched and yawned and took the chair beside the fireplace, kicking his boots up onto the empty grate. She’d got reasonably good at guessing what Lazarus was thinking, back when she was Hand. Just now, he was cold, bite-yer-arse-off angry. She wouldn’t have crossed him for any money.

She finally made herself meet his eyes. He said, “Welcome home, Jess.”

That was him telling her she was staying. He must have been planning to take her back ever since she walked into the padding ken. Always had to do things complicated, Lazarus did.

“Yes, Sir.” She rubbed her face and tried to think of some way out of this. Her brain had gone numb as a potato.

“Don’t get comfortable, Jess. You’re not staying.” The Captain prowled the room, working off the fighting edge he hadn’t been able to use on Badger. This was another man she didn’t want to cross right now.

There was no one like Sebastian. No one. Lazarus could beat him to a pulp, or slit his gullet and have him dumped in the afternoon tide. Kennett acted like he was on the deck of his own ship with fifty men at his back. All those years with Lazarus, and she’d never seen anyone stroll in so insolent. You’d think he wanted to get killed.

“Is that what you think?” Lazarus said.

Kennett helped himself to the other chair and sat, confronting Lazarus. There was nothing conciliatory anywhere in either of them. He said, “We have things to say. Clear these ears out of here.”

“My people don’t have ears unless I tell them to.” Lazarus was pretending to be genial. A king cobra, being genial. “Sorry to spoil your fun with Badger, but I can’t let you kill my pimps for being stupid. We’d be knee-deep in carcasses.”

“You let him raise a knife to Jess.”

“She could outrun that clod when she was six.” Lazarus gave a lazy, malicious smile. “Generally. I showed the Brothers she hasn’t gone soft. They’ll accept her now. Fluffy, I have a guest.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “Wine. For God’s sake, girl, anybody’d think you were raised in a barn.”

The toy scrambled to her feet and went for bottle and glasses. She carried the silver tray balanced over her protruding belly and offered first to Sebastian, who took a glass, then Lazarus. She didn’t offer any to Jess. Even the toy knew Jess wasn’t a guest.

“I wonder if you made a mistake coming here, Captain.” Lazarus must have been holding the Medici Necklace all this time. He held it up next to the Burgundy in his glass, comparing color. “You have the reputation of being shrewd. You’re sure you won’t try the wine? It’s excellent.”

The Captain wasn’t playing the game at all. He was grim as a rock-bound coast. “Let’s talk about Jess.”

“You’re always wanting some woman from me. Can I interest you in Fluffy here? I’m about done with her.” Lazarus took a sip and gestured with his glass. “A little close to whelping for some men’s taste, but a lively bit. Do you know how I pick these girls? Every one of them’s done something a poor girl would get hanged for. Every one. Shall we hear what Fluffy did?” He motioned the woman to him.

She came, stiff and unwilling, ducking her head behind a curtain of hair. “I had a maid. She was fifteen. I . . .” No telling how often she’d had to confess this.

Lazarus was showing off how evil he could be. She hated it when he did that. He wasn’t like that. Not really. You’d think he was doing it on purpose to see how far he could push the Captain.

Sebastian stopped it. His voice would have sawed through hardwood. “Do we have to waste time with this? I get your point.”

“As you say, you get my point.” Lazarus touched the blonde girl. “Go. Did you own women, out in Turkey and Syria, Captain? They say you can buy any color or shape of woman in the East. Women of infinite sexual variety.”

“I hear the same about London.” Sebastian finished the wine in a single, long pull and tossed his glass to the Hand. “What are you going to do with Jess?”

Lazarus smiled. “Whatever I please. That’s the joy of it.”

They glared at each other like hawks or eagles or something. Made her feel like a mouse trapped between them. She didn’t know what this Fluffy was feeling like. Yesterday’s catch, regurgitated into the nest, probably.

Sebastian said, “She lives in my house. I pay the pence. The agreement is, you don’t molest my people.”

“Captain . . . Captain . . . she was mine before she grew hair between her legs. I own her right to the bottom of her miserable soul. Look.” Lazarus made the hand sign. She was beside him before she thought about it, feeling surprised to be there. Habit. She hadn’t lost it, seemed like. He snapped out, “Who do you belong to, Jess?”

“I belong to—” She caught herself. Damn. Almost, that had been, “I belong to Lazarus.” She must have said that ten thousand times. When Lazarus first made her move into the crib, he asked that fifty times a day, and she had to give that answer. In the end, she’d believed it. “It’s been a long time, Sir.”

Lazarus wasn’t looking at her anyway. He was watching Sebastian. “Do you know what my people have to do? My special ones? The ones I own. They have to kill somebody for me, even pretty girls like Jess here. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, Sir.” He had to bring that up, didn’t he? The worst night of her life, brimful of death and terror and having nowhere to run, and he had to keep harping on it. After all this time, it didn’t matter why she’d sold her soul to Lazarus.

But Lazarus was just reveling in it. “She came to me with the blood still on her. She’s one of us. She’s mine. Men who come asking for what’s mine get hurt.”

Sebastian didn’t look impressed.

“I don’t need rescuing, Captain,” she said. “Clear off and leave me to—” Crikey. Now she’d got Lazarus irritated at her. She’d made it worse. She knew better than that.

Lazarus said mildly, “Jess, do you have advice on how I should deal with the Captain?”

She shook her head quickly. Stupid. Stupid.

“I didn’t hear you, Jess.”

“No, Sir. Nothing to say. Not a word.”

“I didn’t think so.”

He turned back to the Captain. “It took me months to teach Jess silence. For a long time, whenever she begged me to leave someone alone, I was forced to be especially loathsome to them. It was a difficult time for both of us.”

The Captain’s eyes glinted like sharp knives. “That was a long time ago.”

“Was it?” Lazarus held the bauble up. “Report to me, Jess. The necklace.”

The Medici Necklace. Easy. “Eleven rubies, perfectly matched. All flawless, except the central stone. That one’s twelve carats and historic as hell. Legend is, it dates to the Rajput in the ninth century. The upper right-hand quadrant holds a crystal inclusion, visible to the naked eye. The third on the left is from the twelfth-century diadem of the princess of Navarre. The necklace was assembled in 1480 for Lorenzo de’ Medici. Louis Bolliard lifted it from the Romanov treasury two years ago and fenced it in Geneva, where Whitby’s bought it. Intact, it’s worth eight thousand on the gray market in London. Its white market breakup value is less than six, after three identifiable stones are recut.”