A tear trickled down her cheek. Finley swiped at it angrily with the back of her hand and sniffed hard. Bawling wasn’t going to solve anything, couldn’t accomplish anything. Crying was a waste of time and the last refuge of a desperate girl.

Desperate as she might be, but she had not lost all hope. Not yet. She couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

“Run. Run. Run.” The eerie whisper seemed to come from all sides—up above and down below, even from the trees themselves. At least a dozen voices urging her to run and run fast. A dozen girls hiding in the forest, watching her with raw-meat eyes. Who were they? What were they?

“Run.”

Finley walked faster.

“Run.”

Bloody hell, she was not going to run!

“Run.”

She stopped in the middle of a sliver of that silver light. It had to be the moon. Shoulders back, arms loose at her sides, she concentrated on her surroundings, opened up her instincts.

“Run.”

“No.” Her voice was quiet but firm. No need to shout and call attention to herself—or more attention to herself. “I’m not going to run.”

“You’ll be sorry.”

“Sorry.”

“A place with us.”

“She’ll be one of us.”

“So very sorry.”

“One of us.” The gleeful tone of that last multivoiced whisper made Finley’s teeth grind together.

“Damnation,” she whispered, and took off running as fast as her legs would take her. She’d only gone round a bend in the path when she saw a lavish house looming above. Music played inside—the kind heard in dance halls. She could smell cigar smoke on the air, and hear the rumble of male laughter.

That laughter turned her bones to water. It was an awful sound. A cruel sound. Was this The Machinist’s lair? Was she going to have to fight her way to him? She had been wrong when she called it male laughter. Men didn’t make such an evil sound. No, it was something else altogether that smoked and drank in that house. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human—not anymore.

She took a step back, but she couldn’t go backward—even though she’d prefer those mad girls to this. She had to go forward. She had to know if this was where Griffin was being held. Tortured.

“I’ll be damned,” came a familiar voice from behind her.

A shiver slithered down Finley’s spine. It couldn’t be. Slowly, she turned around, her heart squeezing itself into her throat.

It was.

Not five feet away from her, on what had turned into a deserted street lined with theaters and entertainment parlors, was Lord Felix August-Raynes. He looked less angelic in this place, more like the devil he was. Tall, blond and blue-eyed, he wore a gray suit and carried a silver-topped walking stick that matched the small bar that bisected his eyebrow. The only thing he was missing from the last time she’d seen him was the imprint of her boot on his forehead.

He grinned at her as the eyeless girls crept up behind him, flanked him. They crouched about him, stroked his coattails as though they were so much less than he.

“Finley Jayne,” he said, eyes glinting like flint. “The one that got away.”

Before she could react, the girls rushed her. Lord Felix seemed to suddenly appear right in front of her—so close she had to lean back to avoid touching him. The girls grabbed her arms and legs. She tried to fight them off, but there were too many. Lord Felix grabbed her by the chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. He grinned.

“I’ve got you now.”

Chapter Six

Jack only came home to change. He wouldn’t have done even that had it not been for the blood on his shirt cuffs and waistcoat. People tended to be alarmed by that sort of thing when one was out and about.

There had been trouble at one of his clubs. He owned two—one that was for gambling, drinking and any other sort of “manly” pastime. The other was a bit more sedate. He called it The Bastard Club and meant it in the literal sense of the word. Everyone who belonged to the club—male or female—was the illegitimate offspring of a member of the upper classes and peerage, such as Jack himself. His father was an earl and a top-notch wanker.

Not many people knew of the club. Jack had only approached those he was certain of when he first started it, and then let the members discreetly spread the word. It was the sort of place that the nobs might get all up in arms about and cause enough of a fuss to make running it difficult—wouldn’t do for all their ignored, unwanted children to gather forces behind their backs.

At first, there were those who thought of the club as a place a body could go to rage about the unfairness of life, how they should have been the heir, and so forth. That wasn’t the case, however. What happened within those thick walls was an exchange of information. They each had their own little group of people who were closely connected to the aristocracy. Most of the information came from servants who worked in the various households, and some came from the fringe of society with whom they spent most of their lives.

Servants often had the best information. They were broadly ignored by those who employed them, regarded as little more than furniture with limbs. By the same token, their masters often spoke freely in front of them, not even realizing they were there—or perhaps assuming they weren’t bright enough to understand. And of all those underpaid and undervalued household staff, there was none better than a lady’s maid. Not only did she overhear what the women of the house said to one another, but she would get news from other female staff, and—if she was comely enough—information from the male staff, as well. Plus, the lady’s maid was often in the company of maids of the same position from other households when ladies visited one another or attended balls. A good lady’s maid, possessed of wit and a degree of pleasantry, was one of the most informed people in all of London.

Jack had certainly befriended his share of lady’s maids over the past few years. As a result, and thanks to his club, he knew more about the aristocracy and nobility of England than they knew of themselves, and he rarely hesitated to use it to his advantage if opportunity arose. A man armed with knowledge was richer than any king.

Today he had heard that he was going to be an uncle. His father’s daughter—one of his wife’s children—was with child herself. The news disturbed him. He would probably never know the child and was pissed at himself for regretting it. He didn’t know his sister either, though he’d seen her several times. There was no denying their connection—even Jack saw the resemblance between them. She looked nice. Too nice to associate with her infamous bastard brother.

He had also heard that his father had taken a new mistress, a performer Jack knew quite well himself. That could certainly come in handy. The young woman would tell him everything she knew for the right amount of coin, and Jack didn’t mind spending it.

But the best news—the absolute best—had been word that his father needed a rather large loan to cover his gambling debts. Jack owned all of the man’s IOUs. Every debt. And now he planned to offer the man the money to pay them off, at an astounding rate of interest. Then, he planned to demand immediate repayment. He’d take silver, gold, whatever the lord had to give. He’d take the clothes right off the bastard’s back. He’d take until the slimy lord had nothing else to give and was in complete ruin. Men had committed suicide over less, and Jack didn’t care what path his father chose to take. He didn’t care about the loss of his own money.

Just last week he’d ruined Lord Abernathy, the man who had hired him to transport the crate Mila had been kept in. Abernathy had a romantic interest in young men, and it had only taken a few words in a few well-connected ears for the bounder to get caught in the act at a certain brothel that catered to those tastes. Abernathy was no longer welcome in society, so Jack had heard. Seemed his lordship had fled to his country estate in disgrace.

The man had put Mila in a box. Treated her like something less than dirt. He had to pay for that.

The house was quiet as he walked up the stairs. Mrs. Brooks would have departed for home already, as it was one of the days of the week when he cooked for himself and Mila. She liked to watch him in the kitchen and help him mix ingredients. It was a simple thing, but it was something he looked forward to every time. He wasn’t a master chef by any stretch, but he could cook and do it well.

“Poppet?” he called as he loosened his cravat, walking toward his bedroom. “What do you fancy for supper?”

There was no answer.

Jack paused in the corridor, and turned his ear toward Mila’s room, listening. “Poppet?”

Still nothing.

“Mila?”

Silence. She wasn’t put out about earlier, was she? Sulking because he wouldn’t treat her like something—someone—less than she was? Bloody hell, he wanted to kiss her—wanted to do lots of other things, as well. God knew he’d thought about it enough. She was his responsibility. He was supposed to protect her, not become one of the men he tried to protect her from. She deserved a good man—when she was ready for that. He wanted her to have the best of everything, and that hardly included him.

Mila didn’t know how the world worked, didn’t know that it could be so completely cruel to a young woman, or so judgmental.

As he walked up to her door, he thought about one of his other meetings that afternoon. He had gone to an establishment that specialized in teaching deportment and other such skills about which he knew very little. Oh, he knew all about manners and society, but not everything expected of a young woman. He’d hired someone to come to the house and instruct Mila in all those things. When she was done, Griffin King was going to take over as her guardian, pass her off as a distant cousin, settle a large dowry on her and make sure she ended up with the sort of man she deserved.