Eva dropped to the ground, fumbling between the men’s heavy boots as they fought. There! Her fingers closed around the pipe.

She rose up behind the bully, then brought the pipe down onto the base of his skull. The guard made a gurgling sound before sinking to the floor. Jack caught himself before he toppled backward, his hands gripping the railing. Once he’d righted himself, he bent over the slumped bully, his ear to the man’s mouth.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

Jack straightened. “He’ll want to make friends with a bottle or ten of whiskey when he wakes up.” Eyeing the pipe in her hand, he said, “Should consider myself lucky you didn’t do anything like that to me.”

She hefted her acquired weapon. “It’s early yet.”

A corner of his mouth curved up. “Will I get any warning?”

In response, she waved toward the stairs. “Keep climbing, and find out.”

He nodded and started up the next flight, with her following. Either he was foolish, or he truly did trust her. And Jack was no fool.

But they still had farther to go, with a fight every step of the way.


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The commotion roused the rest of the house. As Eva and Jack continued to ascend the servants’ stairs, she could hear women’s panicked voices and irritated and alarmed men hurrying out. No one wanted to stay in a brothel under siege.

At the very top of the stairs stood a baize-lined door. Cautiously, Jack eased it open, holding his body in readiness if another bully tried to attack. All they found was an empty carpeted hallway. As they stepped into the corridor, it was eerily silent. Two doors faced each other across the passage. Presumably, one of the doors led to Rockley’s private chamber, and in that chamber was the evidence.

But where was the guard? Surely there had to be one. Even with Jack supposedly dead, a man as paranoid as Rockley wouldn’t leave dangerous documents unprotected.

Jack nodded toward one of the doors. He placed his finger against his lips. She nodded in understanding.

They edged beside the doorway, backs to the wall. Jack stuck his foot out and pressed down on the floorboards directly in front of the door. The floorboards obligingly creaked beneath his weight.

From within Rockley’s private room, four gunshots rang out, bullets flying through the door. Splinters flew. Eva flattened herself tight to the wall to keep from being hit by both the shattered wood and the bullets.

Then more silence. The guard inside waited.

Jack tensed, readying himself to storm into the chamber. She stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Oh, my God!” she screamed. “You killed ’im! You killed the madman!”

The door slowly creaked open. Leading with the gun in his hand, the guard poked his head out. Jack struck instantly, grabbing the bully’s hand and slamming it into the door frame. The guard’s hand opened with a pained spasm, and the gun dropped from his grip. Eva lunged for the gun just as Jack shoved the guard back into the chamber.

She caught the pistol before it hit the ground.

A tremendous crash sounded from inside Rockley’s chamber. Inside, she found Jack and the guard furiously trading punches. This guard was just as big as Jack, just as brutal a fighter. The two men threw vicious blows, pummeling each other as if they were in a Bethnal Green brawl rather than an elegantly furnished bedroom in St. John’s Wood. She immediately discarded the idea of taking a shot—with the two men locked in combat, she ran the risk of hitting Jack rather than the bully. But she kept the gun, just in case Jack got himself into a tight situation.

She had to make use of the time he was buying her. Dodging the men as they threw each other into walls and furniture, she checked under the four-poster bed and behind the framed paintings. No sign of a strongbox or vault.

She tugged open a dresser’s drawers and dumped their contents on the ground. Bile rose in her throat as floggers and restraints tumbled over the carpet. She had a feeling that Rockley wielded rather than received the flogger. And he’d never consent to be restrained.

Eva jumped aside as Jack and the guard crashed into the dresser. The sound of breaking wood filled the room as the dresser broke apart beneath their weight. Neither of the men seemed to notice. They hauled themselves to their feet and resumed fighting. Blood dripped from the corner of Jack’s mouth, and the guard’s eye had already begun to swell shut. Yet they didn’t slow or stagger as they brawled.

At this rate, they’d tear the house down around them before she could find the evidence.

“Damn,” she muttered to herself, glancing around the chamber. “Where the hell is it?”

Her gaze caught on a small door that presumably led to a closet. Flinging it open, she found several men’s jackets hanging there. Useless. But on the floor of the closet …

There sat an iron strongbox, roughly the size of a traveling valise. Two locks secured its lid, and handles were on either end of the strongbox, making it relatively easy to transport. But the strongbox wouldn’t be traveling anywhere in a hurry—a locked chain secured it to a metal ring mounted to the wall.

She crouched down and removed her lock picks from her handbag.

Fire suddenly spread across her scalp as someone gripped her roughly by the hair and jerked her back. “You ain’t getting in there,” snarled the guard.

Her eyes burned, and her hand came up automatically, grasping her own hair to lessen the force of his tugging. Twisting around, she jabbed the fingers of her free hand into his unprotected windpipe as he bent over her. He gagged and his grip on her hair lessened. She kicked at his knees at the same moment she brought the side of her hand down onto his forearm.

Howling in pain, he released her. And then he wasn’t there anymore. Jack slammed into the guard, tackling him to the ground. Jack pinned the bully’s arms with his knees as he knelt over him. If Jack had been fighting viciously before, he was rage personified now, his face dark with fury as he landed blow after blow to the guard’s face.

Though the sight was brutally fascinating, she had her own task to accomplish. She turned back to the lock fastening the chain to the strongbox. Forcing herself to ignore the wet, crunching sounds of Jack’s fists pounding into the bully, she worked her picks on the lock. She’d never before had to pick a lock when someone in the same room was administering a relentless beating, and she strained to sense the tiny clicks and barely perceptible movements of the lock’s mechanism as Jack unleashed the full extent of his fury on the guard.

The man’s groans stopped, but Jack’s assault didn’t. She glanced over her shoulder. The bully was unconscious, blood flowing from his nose and mouth. But Jack kept going.

“Jack,” she said sharply. “He stopped fighting back.”

Snarling, Jack whipped up his head. The moment his gaze fell on her, the mask of rage fell away.

“Don’t add murder to your list of crimes,” she said.

“He … hurt you.” His words were a low rasp.

“I hurt him back.”

His scowl slowly faded. “So you did.”

“Now stop distracting me.” She turned back to her work, fighting for calm when she felt anything but. He’d been on the verge of killing the bully, and all because the guard had tried to harm her. He’d been callously efficient when fighting with the other guards, but this had been personal.

The lock’s tumblers clicked into place. She unfastened it, separating the strongbox from the chain that bound it to the wall. Her arms strained with effort as she struggled to pull the heavy container out of the closet. It might be the size of a valise, but it was far heavier, as though someone had packed the case with bricks instead of clothing.

“I’ll see to that.” Jack grabbed the strongbox’s handles and hefted it easily.

Getting to her feet, she said, “Now you’re just showing off.”

He started to grin, but winced from the cut at the corner of his mouth. “I want a look at what we’ve got on Rockley, but we ain’t opening this here.”

“A neighbor may have notified the constabulary,” she said in agreement. “Between the gunfire and this”—she gestured at the ruined bedchamber, where every single piece of furniture had been destroyed by Jack and the bully—“we’ve made enough noise to summon the entire Metropolitan Police. The army, too.”

She stepped around the prostrate form of the guard, and together she and Jack left the bedroom. They hurried down the main stairs, Jack in the lead as he carried the strongbox. The house stood silent. Either everyone had fled, or the women cowered in their rooms.

Eva and Jack reached the ground floor. The front door was only steps away. But as they crossed the foyer, Smashed Face charged. Jack didn’t slow his steps. He swung the strongbox at the attacking guard. The metal container caught the bully right in his gut. He grunted and careened backward, gagging. As she and Jack sped through the front door, the bully didn’t try to stop them.

They hastened out into the street. Whistles and the clanging bell of the Black Maria police wagon broke through the night’s silence. She and Jack ran in the opposite direction, toward the hansom they’d hired for the night. The cab waited for them in an alley, and moments after they’d clambered into the vehicle, the strongbox settled across Jack’s knees, the driver snapped the reins and they were off. If anyone looked askance at a woman riding in a hansom, Eva didn’t give a damn.

She’d just stormed into a brothel to steal incriminating evidence from an embezzling nobleman. Reputations were just bits of tissue paper in comparison.