“Faster. Just go.”
The gold door was unlocked, and the minute he swung it a few inches, James knew where it led.
A staircase carpeted in black and lit by a dozen wall sconces led to the club’s underground. The area where the desperate or debauched came for higher stakes games and to find pleasures the crowd upstairs might want but wouldn’t wish to be seen partaking of in public.
James expected them to descend to the bottomfloor. He knew there was one more stairwell behind a black door that led to Beck’s private quarters. An office, study, even a bedroom. But the man at his back shoved him forward, across the room, and James spotted their destination.
Upon a dais of glossy black sat an ornate marble table featuring a lady contortionist, performing a routine involving her long, shapely limbs and glasses of what looked like absinthe. Behind her, James spotted Beck and two more ladies, one seated on each side of him.
The man at his back pushed him closer to Beck. “Look what I found upstairs, boss. I wager he’s come to pay up.”
Beck looked happier than James had ever seen him, and he didn’t know whether to chalk that up to his feminine companions or the drink. The man’s cheeks were ruddy, his eyes glossy, and what James imagined was his version of a smile twitched beneath his curling mustache.
“Is that so, James? Come with money, have you? Finally?”
“I have part of what I owe. And I’ll have the rest to you soon. Things have turned around for Pembroke Shipping.” A generous interpretation of gaining one customer and still owning half of one ship, but James had a concrete reason to hope the tide had finally turned in his favor.
“Those weren’t the terms, friend.”
James dipped his head and battled his sleep-deprived brain for the right retort. The first that came to mind seemed too inflammatory, yet it somehow slipped out first.
“Financially ruining thefriendsyou expect to collect a debt from isn’t a stellar strategy, is it?”
Beck leaned forward. That blasted gun barrel was grinding into James’s lumbar. The contortionist lady climbed off the table and glared at James for interrupting her act.
The room quieted, and a sound emerged. A wet, raspy sound, almost a squelch.
Beck’s laughter. Not the menacing snicker he often paired with his threats. This sounded genuine. Sickly and entirely unappealing, but genuine.
“Not sure I wish for strategy lessons from an unlucky bastard who’s lost everything.”
“He hasn’t lost everything.”
James’s heart dropped so quickly, he felt dizzy. But he couldn’t waste time because he was terrified. And angry. And jaw-droppingly stupefied to hear Lucy’s voice emerge from a corner of the smoke-filled room.
Maybe he was hallucinating. He was tired enough. Perhaps he’d sipped some absinthe and forgotten.
Then she stepped into view, and he was too astounded to be as furious with her as he should have been.
She wore that same awful black frock with the dainty white collar and held a tray of glasses fullof absinthe in her arms, as if she’d come back after he’d put her in a hansom and obtained a serving job at the Helix Club in the last hour.
Her cool green gaze flickered his way.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered, though everyone could hear them.
“I couldn’t let you do this alone,” she whispered back.
“I put you in a cab not ten minutes ago.” He was too frustrated to keep his volume to a whisper.
She shrugged. “We turned around.” She bit her lip. “Honestly, I was willing to speak to Mr. Beck alone, if need be. But now we can do it together.” She had the brass to beam at him.
“You’re impossible.”
“Tenacious.”
“Reckless.”
“Rebellious was, I believe, the word you once used as a compliment.”
