“You broke three of Montlake’s ribs.”
Temple drank deep, a rivulet of water spilling down his chin. He swiped the back of his hand across his face and said, “Ribs heal.”
Chase nodded once, shifting in the chair. “Your Spartan lifestyle is not the most comfortable, you know.”
Temple set the glass down. “No one asked you to linger. You’ve velour and stuffing somewhere above, no doubt.”
Chase smiled, brushing a speck of lint from one trouser leg and placing a piece of paper on the table, next to the stack already there. The list of challenges for the next night and the one after. A never-ending list of men who wished to fight for their fortunes.
Temple exhaled, long and low. He didn’t want to think on the next fight. All he wanted was hot water and a soft bed. He yanked on a nearby bellpull, requesting his bath be drawn.
Temple’s gaze flickered to the paper, close enough to see that there were a half-dozen names scrawled upon it, too far to read the names themselves. He met his friend’s knowing gaze.
“Lowe challenges you again.”
He should have expected the words—Christopher Lowe had challenged him twelve times in as many days—and yet they came like a blow. “No.” The same answer he’d given eleven times. “And you should stop bringing him to me.”
“Why? Shouldn’t the boy have his chance like all the others?”
Temple met Chase’s gaze. “You’re a bloodthirsty bastard.”
Chase laughed. “Much to my family’s dismay, not a bastard.”
“Bloodthirsty, though.”
“I simply enjoy an impassioned fight.” Chase shrugged. “He’s lost thousands.”
“I don’t care if he’s lost the crown jewels. I won’t fight him.”
“Temple—”
“When we made this deal . . . when I agreed to come in on the Angel, we agreed that the fights were mine. Didn’t we?”
Chase hesitated, seeing where the conversation was headed.
Temple repeated himself. “Didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t fight Lowe.” Temple paused, then added, “He’s not even a member.”
“He’s a member of Knight’s. Now afforded the same rights as any of the Angel’s members.”
Knight’s, the newest holding of The Fallen Angel, a lower club that carried the pleasure and debt of four hundred less-than-savory characters. Anger flared. “Goddammit . . . if not for Cross and his idiot decisions—”
“He had his reasons,” Chase said.
“Lord deliver us from men in love.”
“Hear hear,” Chase agreed. “But we’ve a second hell to run, nonetheless, and that hell carries Lowe’s debt. And he’s due a fight if he asks for it.”
“How has the boy lost thousands?” Temple asked, hating the frustration that edged into his tone. “Everything his father touched turned to gold.”
It was why Lowe’s sister had been such a welcome bride.
He hated the thought. The memories that came with it.
Chase lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Luck turns quickly.”
The truth they all lived by.
Temple swore. “I’m not fighting him. Cut him loose.”
Chase met his eyes. “There’s no proof you killed her.”
Temple’s gaze did not waver. “There’s no proof I didn’t.”
“I’d wager everything I have that you didn’t.”
“But not because you know it’s true.”
Temple didn’t even know it.
“I know you.”
No one knew him. Not really. “Well, Lowe doesn’t. I won’t fight him. And I won’t have this conversation again. If you want to give the boy a fight, you fight him.”
He waited for Chase’s next words. A new attack.
It didn’t come.
“Well, London would like that.” The founder of the Angel stood, lifting the list of potential fights along with the stack of papers that had been on the table since before the fight. “Shall I return these to the books?”
Temple shook his head, extending one hand for them. “I shall do it.”
It was part of the ritual.
“Why pull the files in the first place?” Chase asked.
Temple looked to the papers, where Montlake’s debt to the Angel was accounted in clear, concise script: one hundred pounds here, one thousand there, a dozen acres. A hundred. A house, a horse, a carriage.
A life.
He lifted one shoulder, enjoying the sting of the muscle there. “He might have won.”
One of Chase’s blond brows rose. “He might have done.”
But he hadn’t.
Temple returned the record to the scarred oak table.
“They lay everything on the fight. It seems the least I can do to acknowledge the magnitude of their loss.”
“And yet you still win.”
It was true. But he understood what it was to lose everything. To have one’s entire life changed in an instant because of a choice that should not have been made. An action that should not have been taken.
There was a difference, of course.
The men who came to scratch in the ring beyond remembered making the choice. Taking the action.
Temple didn’t.
Not that it mattered.
A bell on the wall above the door rang, announcing that his bath was drawn, pulling him back to the present.
“I did not say they do not deserve to lose.”
Chase laughed, the sound loud in the quiet room. “So very sure of yourself. Someday, you may not win so handily.”
Temple reached for a towel, draping the fine Turkish cotton around his neck.
“Wicked promises,” he said as he headed for the adjourning bathing chamber, dismissing Chase, the fight, and the wounds he’d inflicted. “Wicked, wonderful promises.”
The streets east of Temple Bar came alive at night, filled with the worst of London—thieves and prostitutes and cutthroats set free from their daytime hiding places, released into the wild darkness. Thriving in it.
They reveled in the way corners rose from shadows, carving welcome blackness from the city, not half a mile from its most stately homes and wealthiest inhabitants, marking territory where proper nobs would not tread, too afraid to face the truth of the city—that it was more than they knew.
Or perhaps it was exactly what they knew.
It was everything that Temple knew.
Everything he was, everything he had become, everything he would ever be, this place, riddled with drunks and whores—the perfect place for a man to fade away. Unseen.
Of course, they did see him. They had for years, since the moment, twelve years earlier, when he’d arrived young and stinking of fear and fury, with nothing but his fists to recommend him to this brave new world.
The whispers had followed him through filth and sin, marking time. At first, he pretended not to hear the word, but as the years passed, he had embraced it—and the epithet turned honorific.
Killer.
It kept them far from him, even as they watched. The Killer Duke. He felt the curiosity in their gazes—why would an aristocratic nob, born on the right side of the blanket with a diamond-crusted spoon in his mouth, have any reason to kill?
What devastating, dark secret did the rich and privileged hide so well behind their silks and jewels and coin?
Temple gave the darkest souls in London hope.
The chance to believe that their lives, dank and layered in soot and grime, might not be so very different from those that seemed so far above. So unattainable.
If the Killer Duke could fall, he heard in their furtive gazes, so, too, might we rise.
And in that flickering hope was the danger. He turned a corner, leaving the lights and sound of Long Acre, cloaking himself in the darkened streets where he had spent most of his adult life.