He’d thought he lacked this intrinsic element.
He didn’t fear death. Didn’t appreciate life. He was fond of nothing and therefore didn’t fear pain or loss.
So why was he chasing his own body through the streets of predawn London? Why couldn’t he feel his skin? Or the breath in his lungs? Was this trembling a sign that his body was shutting down, or becoming more powerful?
Images transposed themselves over the stormy darkness. A lake of blood the size of a prison cell, growing larger with each lifeless body he tossed into it. Large, lovely marble-black eyes flickering with the last vestiges of life to roaring applause. A small boy, watching his mother die. What had he done? What had he left undone? What was the strategy for his next move?
Please—don’t hurt my son.
His chest tightened so abruptly, he gasped as his hand flew to cover it.
He needed to think. He was too scattered, too caged. How a man could be both detached from his body and imprisoned by it was infuriating. He needed to center himself, needed release, and knew exactly where to find it.
Veering to the left, he crossed Limehouse Street and turned down what they called “Poplar Alley.” Not for the foliage, but for the small lodgings made of the poplar tree.
The smell of foreign spices, street vendors roasting strange delicacies on spits, penned animals, and raw sewage mixed with things better left to the shadows and fog.
Exotic food was not the only delicacy on display. Petite women with blue-black hair and robes of glimmering silk beckoned from white tents filled with sweet-smelling smoke and bodies limp from one excess or another. Opium, drink, food, sex, any of it was for sale here in the Asian markets, and Argent had tasted it all without developing a taste for any of it.
The markets and back alleys were clogged with too much humanity, even at this time of night, to maintain his jog. Though wherever he walked, people made room. Argent was a tall man in any place he found himself, but here in the Asian quarter, he stood out like a flame-haired beacon in a sea of darkness. Eyes followed him, but he didn’t meet them. Nor did he look down.
He’d always avoided looking directly into anyone’s eyes. He stared through them, or focused on the space between them. He imagined it was because life, itself, resided in the eyes. He’d learned that early on. And if he watched life drain away once, he’d watch it again. Every time he slept. Or sometimes tattooed on the back of his eyelids when he blinked.
The next gaze he met could belong to a potential victim. At first that thought had sickened him, and then it didn’t. It—drew him. Made him feel powerful. Like a god. As he grew older, he realized that the only time he felt alive was when he took a life.
And that came with its own dangers.
There was no shame in taking pleasure in a kill, but for some, it became an obsession, an addiction, and Argent didn’t want to give anything that power over him.
So he used other means with which to fill the void.
“I know you,” a sweet voice crooned from one of the silk tents. “You only want girl on her knees.”
Argent turned, looking down at a small woman with long, long black hair and startlingly red lips painted on a face so white, he could barely distinguish it from the color of the tent.
She was right. He only took women from behind. He didn’t want to look them in the eyes, either.
Reaching for him, she placed a demure hand on his jacket. “I get on my knees for you,” she offered in a husky voice. “I not afraid like the other girls.”
She said that now …
“Some other time, perhaps.” He brushed her off.
It was a different vice he searched for tonight. A different woman he wanted on her knees …
God, what that image did to him. Millie LeCour bent over for him, her creamy skin bared and her body accepting his.
Christ, he needed some kind of release or he’d immolate there in the frigid London night.
When a door opened and two men dragged a half-naked body to bleed into the gutter, Argent knew he’d found the right place. Nodding to one of the house employees he’d known for years, he caught the gleam of greed in the man’s eyes. “You going to give me time to place my bets?” the man asked, dumping his charge and wiping filthy hands on his trousers.
“Only if you place mine, I’ll give you six percent of the winnings.” Retrieving his clip of notes from his pocket, Argent tossed the entire thing to the man, Wei Ping was his name, and mounted the rickety stairs into the unmarked building.
Three flights down into the bowels of the earth the sound became so deafening, it drowned out the storm. Men. Hundreds of them. Some in white-tie finery and others in tatters and rags, all screaming, sweating, and swearing at the fighter upon whom they’d risked their money.
Ducking below the door frame, Argent nodded to the corpulent Chinese, Pan Lee, who leased the building from Dorian Blackwell who took a commission from the business. The man held up two fingers, raising a questioning eyebrow.
Argent held up three.
Receiving a nod from Pan Lee, Argent strode toward the pit. His jacket hit the filth that covered the floor. Then his tie, his waistcoat, and finally his shirt.
People always gasped when he removed his shirt. He’d stopped noticing years ago.
Rainwater and sweat dropped from his hair and ran down his spine. His muscles were warm from his run. He was ready.
He was like water.
Pandemonium spread through the crowd when they saw him. Christopher Argent. Last student of the Wing Chun Kung Fu master Wu Ping. The weapon of the Blackheart Brothers of Newgate Prison. The youngest, highest-earning pit fighter of the previous decade. The Blackheart of Ben More’s master assassin.