Page 10 of The Duke and the Darkness

She tossed the button onto the desk. It pinged against the wood, then rolled to a stop. From several feet away, she couldn’t see the tarnished design, but she knew what it was. It was engraved on her soul as surely as it was engraved in the silver…the entwined initials D-R.

Devlin Raines.

“The Devil Reigns,” she murmured.

But not for much longer.

Chapter Three

The bells ofSt Giles in the Fields rang three times over the city’s streets and faded into the black night as Devlin made his way down the damp street. The bells were the only presence of God in this forsaken area of London, an area that made Devlin doubt if God even cared that the people who lived here existed, or if He’d simply resigned them to the damnation that was life in Seven Dials.

The thin blade of the long knife he kept shielded beneath his jacket sleeve pressed against his palm, the sensation a constant reminder to stay on guard.

Be aware of your surroundings at all times, Anthony Titus had repeated during their long hours of training, starting when Devlin had still been little more than a boy. So young, in fact, that he’d barely begun to shave.

A wild animal never goes against its instinct. It never willingly puts itself into danger. Never do the same.

He nearly laughed at that. Hadn’t Devlin done the exact opposite of that, launching himself headfirst into danger after danger?

The first time was against his father, when he’d stood up to the tyrannical bastard for physically abusing his mother and his sister Margaret. Never had he taken more satisfaction in any act than when he’d backed his father against the wall with a knifeand threatened to slit the bastard from balls to throat if he ever laid a hand on his mother or sister again. Andneverhad he been so terrified—not of retribution from his father, but of himself and what he was truly capable of doing. He’d been barely eighteen, but five years of study under Titus, a former mercenary and Captain of the Guard at Windsor, had prepared him well for that confrontation, if only because he’d possessed enough control not to kill his own father.

The next time came when he left England for the Continent to put as much distance between himself and his father as possible. Fighting in the wars had nearly killed him, but he’d felt compelled to rush head-long into the fray. He’d been young and stupid, and so had his three friends—Lucien Grenier, Seamus Douglass, and Chase Maddox—who fought for the Prussians alongside him.

Yet he’d felt the danger most of all four years later when he returned to London at his mother’s urging and learned what the Duke of Crewe, Charles Chandler, and his father had truly been doing all those times when the three men had secreted themselves away with their port and cigars in their studies. Instead of gossiping over drinks about horses, hounds, and Parliament, the three men had been creating a web of criminal businesses. No evil had been overlooked in their pursuit of power and money, nor did they care how many lives they ruined in the process. Including those in their own families.

Devlin had put a decisive end to all that business, closing them down one by one, by scattering the pieces to the winds, and doing it all in complete secret so no one would ever know the extent of those crimes. Now, after seven years of living as Duke of Dartmoor, of burying and reburying his father’s atrocities every time a new one revealed itself, he thought he had finally put all the old ghosts to rest. That the pact he and Lucien Grenier, the current Duke of Crewe, had made to keep theirmutual silence of what their fathers had done was still being enforced. He’d always believed he could trust Crewe.

Until tonight, when a beautiful siren in blue velvet had so distracted him that he was still reeling from the encounter. It was as if she knew all his weaknesses, and the only way she could have known those was if Crewe had told her.

His old friend had been playing a bad joke on him, which was just like Crewe to do, especially if the joke was to make Devlin lose at cards to a woman. Such a prank would buy him dark gossip about himself for weeks and serve as a warning to those gentlemen who wrongly thought they might wheedle their way into becoming Crewe’s confidantes or cronies. After all, if Lucien was willing to play such a prank on Devlin, no one was safe.

And if it wasn’t a joke, then Lucien had let slip information he shouldn’t have to the prostitutes he was so fond of spending time with, who then passed it along to the woman who’d taken advantage of him tonight.

Either way, when he found Crewe, Devlin planned on hurting him. Repeatedly. Tonight’s encounter, hot on the heels of dark rumors circulating through London’s underworld of a new criminal enterprise rising from the ruins of what their fathers had done, wasn’t at all amusing.

But it wasn’t the new he feared as much as the old, and one old enemy in particular—Horrender.

Where Josiah Horrender had come from, no one knew, but as a child, he’d haunted the nighttime streets of the Almony as nothing more than a common pickpocket. He’d insinuated himself into London’s criminal underbelly by the time he was in his teens, working for gin palaces and brothel owners and steadily raising himself to distinction as one of the most vicious men in St Giles. He had established his own businesses by his early twenties, with a hand in all kinds of crimes—smuggling, fencing stolen goods, extorting so-called protectionfrom merchants and gin distillers. But his reach had been local, his crimes minor. Until he met the Duke of Crewe.

Lucien’s father had strayed out of his usual King Street haunts, for once making use of a brothel in Seven Dials to which Horrender had a connection. It only took a handful of conversations for the two men to realize the potential of joining forces and how the reach of their crimes could grow to encompass most of London. But with the involvement of Devlin’s father and Charles Chandler, an astute London businessman, their reach could be limitless. While Horrender and his men oversaw the hands-on aspects of the crimes, Dartmoor and Crewe used their influence as peers to protect their growing enterprise, and Chandler used his business acumen to hide their money. Their crimes exploded in scope, and smuggling became the least of it…forced child labor, the slave trade, the sex trade, extortion, bribery—

“Murder,” he muttered to himself as he quickened his pace.

God only knew the size of the fortune they’d made or how far the tentacles of their criminal enterprise reached. Just recently, Devlin had uncovered evidence that their fathers had illegally purchased slaves from Africa and shipped them to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, that they’d supplied women for sex parties for East India company officials in Calcutta and child laborers for secret factories in Ireland. They’d managed to do it all beneath a cloak of secrecy.

But on one horrific evening ten years ago, their schemes all went to hell. All thanks to Horrender.

Before that night was over, three innocent people would be dead in an assault so grisly that even the two old dukes were stunned at what they’d done. Worse, one of the men involved had been captured, and to save his neck, the brute had named Horrender as being responsible. His testimony by itself wouldn’t have been enough to make Horrender swing, but theadditional proof that Devlin could provide would have ensured it. Horrender fled England to save his own neck and had not been heard of since. Left in his wake, their two fathers thought they’d escaped all scrutiny.

That was when Devlin coolly explained to both men that he would personally turn them over to the authorities and watch them hang if they dared to so much as even consider restarting their enterprise. The courts might not believe the word of a common criminal, but they would certainly believe Devlin. An agreement was struck—if either duke so much as even whispered a word to anyone about what they’d done, they’d both be tossed into the flames.

It was an unholy accord that Devlin and Crewe had no choice but to continue when their fathers both died three years later. It was either that or face the destruction of both dukedoms, their families, and everything they held dear. Perhaps even imprisonment for covering up their fathers’crimes. More innocents would be harmed, more lives destroyed. Knowing that didn’t ease the guilt nor wipe away the blood Devlin had gotten on his hands by his silence. But he’d begun to take solace, however small, in the fact that at least the blood was no longer fresh.

Yet he couldn’t get that woman out of his head. Nor could he banish that feeling from his bones that she might be a portent of something wicked rising in the night. Beyond the money he’d lost to her, beyond the frustration of being denied the carnal pleasures she’d dangled in front of him, he couldn’t move past the dark suspicion that he knew her.

He’d forgotten the very first rule Titus ever taught him, the one that four years fighting with the Prussians had branded on his soul…Know your enemy.

The lamp at the end of the street burned like a beacon against the black night—or like a torch lit from hellfire, welcoming thedemons who gathered here. The light was the only signpost of the business housed within the old structure whose plain front door it illuminated. Madame Pierre’s, the most popular brothel in Seven Dials. All kinds of wickedness could be unleashed within its walls, and none of it ever saw the light of day. Including her special entertainments, attended by invitation only, which included evenings of nude dancing by twelve nubile nymphs of both sexes, all of whom went up for sale, to carry on the performance in private rooms upstairs.