“Ten thousand,” Christian murmured, leaning over him. “Perhaps. If you give me some information.”
“Anything.”
“Maura. Where is she?”
“Who?”
He hauled Tennant up and threw him across the room. Tennant landed on the floor with a crunch, howling as his shoulder popped neatly out of joint.
“Maura. The girl you nonces pulled from the Creche. The one with the pretty blonde hair. She’s too old for your little stable here, so where is she?”
“Blonde hair,” Tennant repeated, his gaze sharpening through the pain. “But she had no relatives, no one to come looking. Thorne assured us—”
Christian punched him square, breaking his nose.
“Please!” Tennant shrieked. “We didn’t take her! We needed someone, but it was Thorne who found her! He found her and brought her here! We didn’t even have to pay the fee for the club; Thorne said he would take care of that, so long as we remembered later—”
“Remembered what?”
“Debt, man! It’s all Thorne wants, to collect noble markers and be able to call them in! He’s piled up favors like a hoard—”
Christian bent down, wrapping his hands around Tennant’s throat.
“For the last time,” he said softly. “Where is Maura?”
“In the back!” Tennant replied, his voice a hoarse wheeze. He threw an arm toward the back of the chamber, the doorway that opened into another room. “Back there! We didn’t harm her, I swear—”
But Christian had heard enough of the harm these men had not done. He tightened his grip on Tennant’s throat, unmoved by the sounds the man made, the gasps and gulps that echoed throughout the silent chamber. When it was done, Christian turned and followed the direction indicated by Tennant’s outflung hand.
The doorway at the rear opened onto another cavernous room, but this room was as different from the room of light as could be. The walls were lined with small beds. Not cheap beds, Christian noted; the mattresses were thick, the covers made of soft wool. On one wall was a basin and a long flat piece of furniture that Christian recognized as a changing table; he had seen one in the Queen’s Wing, in the enormous chamber adjoining Elyssa’s, which was now being prepared as a nursery. A drawn curtain to his left indicated a toilet. Christian noted all of this in a quick glance, then forgot it, for the children had gathered around a tall girl in the center of the room, a girl with a wasted face and long, gleaming, white-blonde hair. She clutched the children close, staring fearfully at Christian, and an impassive part of him—the guard part—noted that she looked at least ten years older than when he had last seen her. Then her face softened in recognition, and she looked younger . . . almost like her old self.
“Christian?”
“Maura. You’re alive.”
She smiled. Christian lowered his mace, meaning to move toward her, but in that moment his nostrils registered the bittersweet smell in the air: morphia cooking. He stopped, looking around the room again, seeing it anew, an almost ghastly mirror of the enormous chamber being prepared downstairs for the royal heir. The floor was covered with soft toys. At Christian’s feet lay a box of whittled animals. There were even a few hand-bound books sitting on a low shelf.
“This is where Thorne took you,” he said flatly. “This place.”
“It’s a club. For nobles. It’s—”
Maura stopped talking, a sudden flush spreading over her face. And now Christian saw the worst thing, the very worst thing: one of the thick, comfortable beds was much bigger than the others, not made for children at all, and on the nightstand beside the bed was a tiny crucible, a twisted spoon.
“They brought me here,” Maura said, her voice rising in alarm at the look on Christian’s face. “To care for the children.”
“Care for them,” Christian repeated, thinking of the way the dead men had stared at the children as they sipped their drinks. Anger began to coil inside him now, anger so black that he could not begin to imagine how to keep it in check. “I see.”
“I do care for them!” Maura snapped. “Are you to sit in judgment on me now? You, Lazarus?”
Christian stared at her for a long moment, then asked, “The words on the wall outside. What do they say?”
“I can’t read any more than you can!”
“But you know what the wall says.”
Maura glanced in both directions, trapped.
“What does it say?”
“The Devil’s Club. All right? The Devil’s Club, that’s what they call themselves.”
“I see,” Christian repeated, his voice deadly soft now. He