“Thank you, Inspector, thank you all.” Farah gave one last smile of gratitude, and swept inside.
The smell intensified in the strong room, and Farah lifted a lace handkerchief dabbed with lavender oil that she kept in her pocket until the usual wave of nausea passed, before acknowledging the occupants of the room.
When she lifted her gaze, she froze, stunned in place at the sight before her.
Chief Inspector Sir Carlton Morley was in his shirtsleeves, which he’d rolled to the elbows. The manicured hands clenched at his sides had blood on the knuckles, and his usually well-groomed hair was mussed into disarray.
A large, dark-haired man sat on a lone chair in the center of the room, his hands chained behind him, and his posture deceptively relaxed.
They were both panting and sweating and bleeding, but that wasn’t what startled Farah the most. It was the almost identical expressions on their faces as they looked at her, an intense compilation of surprise and ruefulness, with a barely leashed undercurrent of … hunger?
Violence hung in the air between the two men with a tangible vibration, but as the prisoner in the chair studied her, all became extraordinarily silent and still.
Farah had once developed a fascination with exotic predators after seeing them on display in large cages at the World’s Fair in Covent Garden. She’d read about them, learning that great hunting cats, such as lions and jaguars, could make themselves preternaturally still. Going so far as to conceal their frighteningly powerful bodies in shadows, trees, and tall grasses in such a way that their prey could pass by without even realizing a beast was about to pounce and rip out their throats until it was too late.
She’d pitied and feared them at the same time. For surely a creature so dynamic and powerful could do nothing chained in such a small cage but hate and whither and eventually die. She’d watched a particularly dark jaguar tread the scant four paces behind his bars as his wild yellow eyes promised retribution and pain to the brightly dressed masses who’d come to gawk at him. Their eyes had met, Farah’s and the beast, and he’d demonstrated that unnatural stillness, holding her stare for an unblinking eternity. She’d been mesmerized by that predator while hot tears had scalded her cheeks. By the terrifying fate she’d seen mirrored at her in those eyes. He’d marked her as prey, as one of the weaker and more desirable morsels in the herd of people milling about them. And in that moment, she’d been grateful for the cursed chains that held the beast in check.
That exact, disquieting affectation suffused her now as she met the mismatched gaze of Dorian Blackwell. His features were those of cruel brutality. His one good eye had that amber quality that had belonged to the jaguar. The flickering lamplight made it glow gold against his burnished skin. It was his other eye, though, that arrested her attention. For starting above the brow, and ending at the bridge of a bladed nose, was a jagged, angry scar, interrupted by an eye leached of every pigment but blue by whatever had caused the wound. And, indeed, he stared at her like a predator recognizing his preferred meal, and lying in wait to pounce until she haplessly wandered into his vicinity. His cheek was split and bleeding along the sharp line of his masculine cheekbone, and another small trickle of blood dripped from his right nostril.
Catching her breath, Farah ripped her stare from the prisoner’s compelling regard and sought the familiar, aristocratically handsome features of her employer.
Sir Morley, generally a self-possessed man, seemed to be at the end of a frayed rope, clutching for control of his temper with both hands. This wasn’t like Morley, to beat a man whose wrists were chained behind him.
“I see you’ve come prepared,” he clipped, his tone belying the glimmer of warmth and yearning in his eyes as he gave her a curt nod.
“Yes, sir.” Farah nodded, giving herself a stern shake as she fixed her gaze on the desk at the back of the room, and willed her shaking legs to carry her all the way to it without dropping something, or worse. She hid her discomfiture behind a carefully arranged mask of serenity as the heels of her boots clipped a sharp echo against the stones of the strong room.
“As much as I approve of your change in tactics, Morley, dangling this tasty piece in front of me still won’t have the desired effect.” Blackwell’s voice reached out to her like the first unwelcome tendrils of frost in winter. Deep, smooth, caustic, and bitter cold. Despite that, his accent was astonishingly cultured, though a deeply hidden brogue rounded out the r’s, enough to hint that the Blackheart of Ben More might not have been London born. His neck swiveled on powerful shoulders as he followed her progress toward the writer’s desk placed behind him at a diagonal. He didn’t take those disturbing eyes from her once, even as he addressed Morley. “I warn you now that more brutal men than you have tried to beat a confession out of me, and more beautiful women than she have endeavored to bewitch my secrets from me. Both have failed.”
The desk chair came up to meet her much faster than she’d anticipated as she dropped into it, nearly upsetting the items clutched in her arms. Unutterably glad she was stationed behind Blackwell so he could not see her unease, she smoothed the pad of paper in front of her with an unsteady hand, and positioned her inkwell and pen just so.
“You’ll learn, Blackwell, that there are no more brutal men than I.” Morley sneered.
“Said the fly to the spider.”
“If I am the fly, why are you the one caught in my web?” Morley circled Blackwell, jerking on the manacles imprisoning his hands behind him.