Page 85 of A Deal with the Devil

He shook his head, going pale. “No! I never touched her! I’ve been here since morning. Ask the lamplighters.”

“Who, then?”

“There’s three of us meet at the Lion. But we stay on this side of the river. The others I don’t know. Fancy ones, from your part of London.”

“You don’t work for them anymore,” Devil said. “Am I making myself clear?”

The man gulped, nodded.

“I’ll know everything there is to know about you within the hour,” Devil added. “Don’t cross me.”

Another nod, and then a grunt when Devil knocked the out cold. He slid down the brick wall with a satisfying thud.

Devil crossed the street, heedless of the rain and the puddles and everything that was not Kitty and her safety. “Follow him when he wakes up,” he called to Michael, who jumped off his perch. “When you know enough about him, let him see you.”

Michael nodded with a grim, glittering smile. Memories of army encampments, muddy battlefields. Blood. Nothing’s forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.

Devil’s temper was not improved by overhearing Mrs. Bartley’s strident voice, which carried with all the subtlety of a rain of bullets through the open window. Her words were just as bad. Worse. That Kitty had to listen to vitriol daily at her shop and then again in her home where her family ought to be caring for her infuriated… The tired droop of her shoulders through the glass and the way she favored her twisted ankle filled him with incandescent rage. The kind that no one walked away from unscathed. He had already knocked a man out tonight. He could do so much more.

Although Kitty might not thank him for burning this house to ash as punishment.

It was still tempting. Too tempting.

The door was locked, as he’d ordered. He didn’t have the patience to wait for it to be opened or the composure to watch Kitty limp with pain because no one else would answer it.

So he kicked it in.

That did help his temper. Enormously.

He stalked into the house, knowing that his expression was stone and iron, the one even his brother did not try to tease him out of. It was a warning. The only one he was going to give.

Kitty’d aunt shrieked. He speared her with a glare that had once made a grown man wet himself. “Quiet.”

She swallowed thickly. “Lord Birmingham.”

“You do not talk to her that way,” he said, very clearly, with every word like the slice of a sword. She had called Kitty stupid. Useless. Blood should have been pooling at his feet in retribution. There were consequences when someone came for one of his own. “Ever.”

“It’s fine,” Kitty said haltingly. Haltingly. His firecracker.

“It is not fine.” He didn’t take his eyes off Priscilla. “Where’s the baron?”

“He…” She was flustered, unaccustomed to this kind of command. Or the front door hanging off its hinges, letting in the rain. “That is…”

“You wanted me to speak to him,” he said. “Fetch him.”

She hurried away, and Kitty sent him a dry smile. “I’ve never seen her move that fast, even the time a rat got into the carriage.”

“Are you hurt? Did she hurt you?”

She was taken aback. A simple question over her wellbeing bewildered her. The rage sharpened. Her family had a lot to answer for. By his estimation, they should be weeping with gratitude for the care she took of them. He noticed the hole in the wall behind her head, only partially covered by a watercolor sketch of a hedgehog. The illustrious Galahad.

He knew exactly what it looked like when someone punched through a wall with fist or pipe. And why such a someone might do so in the front hall of the house of this particular baron.

“Send your maid to pack your things,” he told her.

She rolled her eyes, even though she was still pale with the kind of fatigue that itched at his bones. The soul-deep weariness that had no business touching her. He wanted to bring her tea again. Why was he obsessed with giving her tea? “I don’t have a maid, Rhys.”

Rhys.