Page 26 of The Forsaken

If you fail to appear when you are supposed to, the price will be exacted. An even a heftier one.

Your connections will not help you. Your ties to Dukes, Earls, and privateers are nowhere near the power I yield.

Should you enlist their assistance, should any of them learn this, not a single gentleman will pay the price. Nor will your sisters. It will be their daughters and sons—your beloved nieces and nephews. With all the trauma your weaker sister, the Countess of Culross, survived, it would be a shame to set her recovery back with the loss of a child.

Andromena stared at the black ink, written in a flawless hand.

Your servant.

Bile burned her throat.

Underlined three times with the meaning clear—she was this man’s servant.

He hadn’t buried his disdain under mention of having courted her. Instead, he had used it to accentuate her inferiority and call her unworthy of a match.

She didn’t give two figs on Sunday what this man thought of her fitness as a bride. A coward who hid in shadows and exploited a woman’s innocuous adventure could never be one to make her feel badly about herself.

What he could do and what he had done was make her feel bad for what she had done that night she’d convinced Fleur and Meghan to sneak out to Lord Rutland’s.

With a chilling incisiveness, he had cut right to what mattered most to Andromena—her family. It meant he was very familiar with the McQuoids and Smiths. But that could make him anyone. The McQuoids and Smiths were notoriously known for their tight-knit bond.

He was wrong in one way, though: if one of her older brothers, younger brothers, cousins, nieces, or nephews were being harmed, it would break her into a million shards. But to harm one of her siblings’ or cousins’, children, and the anguish that would bring to them, was something that would kill her in every way that death could not.

Somehow, Andromena’s fingers were steady when she took the page and tucked it away.

“Is this all, madam?”

When she looked up, the earlier ice had since melted from the young diviner.

Andromena would have preferred that to the piteous expression she now wore.

She rose.

The Siren caught her before she was all the way up. “Oi can tell your future.”

“You’ve done enough for me.” Disdain and bitterness permeated.

“Let me read yer palm, Miss Smith—for both of us.”

For both of them?

The Siren was as much a stranger to Andromena as the Rookeries were. Still desperation needed no introduction. It bled straight through the clash of the girl’s proper English and rough Cockney.

Andromena looked down at the palm the girl was begging to read.

A gentleman of the ton should not move in the furthest fringes of impolite society, yet he did. He cared nothing for Andromena’s family. He toyed with her the way her twin’s feral cat, Stalk—a fat-bellied mouser named for its awkward stalk—toyed with half-dead mice. He forced her into St. Giles in the dead of night, pressing cruel demands upon her. A girl like the Siren, who was barely on the cusp of womanhood, would fare far worse.

That’s why, moments later, she was not only seated, but had her glove off, and her hand positioned in the other woman’s palm.

“Please, do not feel you have—”

“Shh. I cannot see the lines clearly and understand what they’re saying without complete silence.”

Andromena gave the young seer the quiet requested.

As the Siren turned her hand, brought it closer to her eye, and traced the lines with her fingertip, Andromena realized the girl was much younger than expected. Despite her mature demeanor, she seemed no more than thirteen or fourteen years old.

Women held no power in the world. A young girl born to London streets would have even less.