As the Duke of Caine’s heir, Barrons would be reporting directly to the ruling Council of Dukes, despite their friendship. Lynch frowned. “This is the second incident in a week. Byrnes has barely begun to go over the facts of the Haversham case.”
“Seems it weren’t an isolated incident after all.” Doyle shrugged.
“Curse it.” Lynch spun on his heel, pacing the rug. “I don’t have time for this.”
“I don’t think that excuse will suit ’is Royal Pastiness,” Doyle replied bluntly. “Not with nob’s gettin’ their hands all bloodied. Might be different if it were just us rogues.”
Interesting. Rosalind’s gaze flickered between the men, wondering if Lynch would chastise his man for the insubordination, but his expression remained coolly neutral.
Division in the blue blood world? She went very still, her mind racing. All along she’d thought the enemy was one, but if she could use this information to somehow turn the Nighthawks against the Echelon then she would have a powerful weapon on her hands.
The men seemed to have forgotten her for the moment. “Excuse me,” Rosalind asked. “But what is going on?”
Lynch shot her a piercing look that went straight through her. “A murder scene, Rosa. Now we’ll see whether you are suited for the job. Fetch that writing case and follow me. I’ll need to see the bodies while they’re fresh.”
Three
Rosalind ground her teeth together as the carriage shot around another corner. The strap dug into her hand and she clutched the writing case to her chest so as not to lose it.
Lynch rolled with the sway, his long legs eating up the interior. He sat opposite her, rifling through a sheaf of papers and frowning occasionally. Though he largely ignored her, the occasional quick glance scoured her like fire. She didn’t like being in here, trapped so closely together. He was too large, the force of his presence dominating the space.
It didn’t help that, in the dark confines of the carriage, all she could remember was what that hard body felt like pressed against her own. The taste of his mouth and the depth of his longing as he had kissed her startled something into life deep within her. Hunger. Newly awakened and barely sated. A desire for flesh, for sin, for wet kisses and the hard stroke of his body over hers.
She’d told herself to forget the memory, but it lingered on her skin like some textural apparition. She’d been a fool to kiss him. A fool—even now—to want more.
“Who were the Havershams?” she asked.
Lynch barely glanced up. “Lord Haversham, his consort Lady Amelia, and their three children. A minor branch of the House of Goethe. They were found on Monday morning by the eldest son, who’d returned from a gaming club. The entire household was torn apart, humans included, and Haversham had shot himself in the head.”
“He tore them apart?”
“We suspect so. There were two quarts of blood in his stomach and his consort had pieces of his skin under her fingernails from where she’d tried to fight. The man’s bloodletting knife was on his person and the blade matches the marks found on the servants and…the children.”
Rosalind absorbed that. The tone of his voice had sounded as though he repeated the facts by rote, but at the end… He didn’t like the part about the children, she thought.
“Why would he do such a thing?” Despite her personal feelings about blue bloods, it was an odd thing. Haversham was a minor lord. No doubt he kept enough thralls to satisfy the bloodlust, unless he was close to the Fade, when a blue blood lost all trace of color and began to evolve into a mindless, blood-driven predator. “It wasn’t the Fade, was it?” The thought unnerved her. She knew what happened when a vampire stalked the city.
Lynch shook his head. “His craving virus levels were holding at sixty percent.”
Not the Fade then. The craving virus made a blue blood what they were, but most of the Echelon kept a careful monitor on their CV levels. It was law. A spate of vampires a century ago had forced the ruling Council of Dukes to make it compulsory. Any blue blood whose levels began to hit seventy-five or even eighty were closely monitored.
Any higher and an ax was sent for.
“Doyle said there’d be children here.” As a child she’d seen enough gruesome sights to consider her nerves steel—indeed, she’d been the cause of some of them. But children…children were always bad.
“Yes,” Lynch said in a deadly soft voice. “Falcone had two. A boy and a girl.” He considered her for a long moment. “If you wish, you can wait outside.”
“That’s not necessary.” She needed to make herself useful to him.
“I won’t think less of you.” The stark gray of his eyes became shadowed with something else, something haunted. “Nobody should have to see children like that.”
“What about your last secretary?”
“That was different. The victim was a grown man, a blood addict. He’d beaten his thrall one too many times and so she cut his throat when he was asleep.”
“Cut his throat? I thought he was decapitated.” A blue blood could heal from almost anything but that.
“She used a large knife,” he replied, “with great force and a considerable amount of times.”
Rosalind considered his words, slowly drawing her own conclusions. She needed to know more about this man—her adversary. Yet she couldn’t deny the slight tingle of genuine curiosity. “Children unnerve you then?”
“You might be surprised to find that I do occasionally display and feel emotion. I’m not a machine.”
He might have been asking if she’d like some tea. Rosalind looked out the window, at the fog-laden streets. She didn’t want to empathize with him. Lynch was the enemy. But she’d heard whispers of how even the Echelon thought him cold and mechanical. A steel heart. Virtually a mech, they laughed.
Evidently he’d heard those rumors too.
“How do you do it?” she asked, despite her intentions. “How do you do this job?”
Lynch lowered the papers into his lap. “Because I’m good at what I do. I’m the best. For every woman I find assaulted, every child murdered, I know that I can find the culprit, perhaps even stop them before they get at someone else.
“And I can…switch it off. It’s a gift I have,” he replied softly. “I try not to think of them as human. They’re gone by the time I get to them. Bodies. Nothing but bodies. All I can do is offer them justice.”
That she certainly understood. Emotion had been burned out of her long ago. It was easy to simply…push it to the side. To not think of it. To focus on her cause.
The mystery of Lynch deepened. Who was this man? He was her opponent, the shadowy entity on the other side of the metaphorical chess game they played. She needed to know him, and yet, each answer humanized him in a way she didn’t like.
He was nothing like the Echelon. Like Lord Balfour.
Not a steel heart, she thought, but steel walls. Built to protect him. And that would be how she would bring him down, she realized. The man was not impervious, which meant he had a weakness. Rosalind simply had to find it.
Lynch’s gaze dropped. “You toy with your gloves. Do I make you nervous?”
Rosalind stopped playing with the fingertip of her glove immediately. “No.” Perhaps. It was that damnable stare of his. She’d faced many an adversary, often at knifepoint, but there was something about Lynch that itched at her skin, along her nerves. It wasn’t fear. She’d killed enough blue bloods to know they weren’t infallible. But…something… She couldn’t yet identify the reason for it. “It’s a habit.”
Folding her hands in her lap, she peered through the window. The streets raced past, an endless tapestry of brick, mortar, and fog. Gas lamps still gleamed on the street corners. And the touch of his gaze was almost a physical pressure. She found herself shifting in her seat and forced her body to still. It had been easier as Mercury, when the mask hid her from him. “Perhaps it’s the thought of what lies ahead. What we’ll see.”