Prologue
1852, Whitechapel Road, East End of London
“You came,” saidher tormenter, his tone laced with delight.
As if she’d had a choice!He’d become more insistent and threatening over the past two weeks.
“What do you want from me?” Sophia demanded, wishing she hadn’t acted so impetuously this time. She hadn’t hesitated to leave her driver outside the Burlington Arcade and hail a hackney so no one would know of her destination.
The address she hadn’t recognized turned out to be a frighteningly squalid place. A crooked sign proclaimed it The Pig and Whistle. As the cabbie sped away, leaving her there, she had no choice but to go inside.
The interior was worse than the exterior, if possible. The room with a bar along its left-hand length and a handful of sticky tables made up the paltry tavern. The few patrons were dressed in rags, and every one of them glanced at her when she let in the light from the street, then continued to stare slack-jawed at the fine young lady in their midst.
As she turned to flee,hehad stepped out of the shadows and beckoned her to follow him upstairs. When she hesitated, he promised a hackney would take her swiftly home after they’d spoken. If he hadn’t caught her in a compromising situation in France, she would not have spared him an instant of her time.How could she have been so careless?
While living with friends of her mother, she’d stayed in their luxurious, albeit small, townhouse in Paris, which afforded none of them much privacy. Foolishly, she’d been caughtin flagrante delicto.
After returning from her year abroad, a little wiser and more cynical, with polish and a superb accent, she’d hoped to leave certain indiscretions behind.
Back in London, however, the tyrant had approached her, claiming to want merely her silence regarding his own private matters. To her, these amounted to nothing more than boastful words to his French cousin, which she’d overhead while not understanding their meaning. She knew only how the men had laughed and toasted to an impendingcoupwith fine Bordeaux. It all seemed a lifetime ago.
Along with her own reckless imprudence in Paris.
Recently, remarks her persecutor made had needled her with fear. He vowed to ruthlessly disclose her wild behavior to her parents—unless she did him a favor. She could not imagine what she could do for him, but apparently, the time had come to find out.
Preceding her blackmailer into the seedy upstairs room, Sophia turned to face him and gasped.
Chapter One
1852, Mayfair, London
Lord Owen Burnleypaced the floor of his study. When he reached his desk for the third time, he sent every item from the surface crashing to the floor with a sweep of his arm. It had been one day since they’d found his sister’s lifeless body, he and his friend Whitely, after a frantic search. Only twenty-four hours since she had been strangled.
He stood and stared at nothing.
Two days earlier, he could still have spoken to Sophia, asked her a question, touched her pretty hair, and smiled at her. Never again. Someone had choked the life out of his sister and even left the rope around her pale neck. Her eyes had remained open, too.
“Aahh,” Owen howled. His gut twisted with imagining her fear and pain in those final moments, until he, too, could barely breathe. And his parents!Dear God, his devastated parents!
His mother had fainted at the news and taken to her bed, her physician dosing her with laudanum every time she nearly came to the full awareness of her only daughter’s death. And their father had looked…broken. He’d aged a decade in the span of minutes. He’d doted on his little girl, sent her to France when she’d asked to spend a year there, and, when she’d returned to London, he’d set her up for her first Season with new gowns and the greatest of expectations.
All dashed. Snuffed out with Sophia’s last breath.
Squeezing his hands into fists, Owen closed his eyes, summoning her pretty face before him.
“I vow to get you justice.”
He would bring his sister’s murderer to light.
And then kill him with his own bare hands.
*
Lady Adelia Smytheentered her family’s townhouse on Hyde Park Street, shut the door softly, and leaned against it. Closing her eyes with relief at being once more in her own home, she stood there for a few seconds and breathed in the familiar scent of lemon furniture oil. Some things never changed. And she liked that. Too many things did change, quickly and not for the better. Her brother was the primary constant in her world. And the lemon polish.
Footsteps heralded another constant. She felt the floor shake and heard the staccato steps, opening her eyes to the butler’s hasty appearance. She knew Mr. Lockley wished he’d been there to open the door for her, but, alas, she thwarted him regularly. When she did go out, which was as infrequently as possible, she returned when least expected—usually before a social event was even halfway over.
If she was lucky.
