he’d been tortured by them. Eventually, those nightmares had seeped into the daylight, following him from the dark until they filled every corner of every room. Shades and specters. The ghosts of those he’d killed, of those who’d endeavored to kill him. Of the souls he’d failed to save and the monsters who’d escaped justice.
For decades they’d haunted him, tormented him endlessly each time he dared close his eyes. Until he’d done something about it.
He became the thing from which nightmares ran.
He rid the night of monsters, so he could continue to be the man he was during the day without sinking into a miasma of slow and indelible madness. He was both the system of justice and the shadow of it.
Because the shadow could do what the system could not.
Because he still had a dead-eye, sharp fists, and even sharper blades.
Because he’d sold his soul to a demon for justice years ago, and every subsequent sin merely deepened the fathomless pit into which he’d been thrown.
Every time he’d thought he’d hit the bottom, he realized he was still falling.
That the depths could always be deeper. That the night could always be darker. That the world could always be colder.
That honor didn’t seem to mean much anymore, and he continued to fight a war that might have always been lost and for a cause that was nothing more than an illusion.
He’d been fighting for so long. For so many endless years, and for what? These days, every victory felt as though it made as much difference as a teardrop to the Thames.
And still he hunted, because what else could he do? Collect a wage until the inevitable forages of time and regret came for him as they did for everyone else?
A snap of a whip and a snarl came from the glasshouse covered in ivy. Morley squinted over at it, watching the shadows take shape, illuminated by one dim lantern inside.
If he wasn’t mistaken, a woman rode a man, but not his hips…Morley squinted…his face. Her pleasure sounds filtered through the fountain to him, hot and demanding.
They reverberated down his spine and landed in his loins.
God, it had been too long since he—
Another astonished sound broke his intent concentration, this one behind him. From his crouching position, he turned his neck to watch a woman’s windmilling arms fail to balance her before she crashed down upon him like a felled tree, toppling them both to the grass.
Morley swam in a sea of skirts and petticoats, taking a slap to the jaw for his troubles, though he was fairly certain she hadn’t meant to strike him.
The woman draped across his lap writhed and wriggled, apparently as surprised as he. He attempted to gather her up as one might a child, one arm behind her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, but she didn’t seem capable of holding still enough for him to manage.
“Upon my word,” she exclaimed from behind mountains of silk. “I’m frightfully sorry! Are you hurt?”
Morley opened his mouth to assure her he was unharmed, but she didn’t wait for a reply.
Her next sentence was spoken in one breath. “I’m forever ungainly, clumsy, my sisters call me, and in a place such as this it’s rather impossible not to look everywhere at once and I was honestly attempting to look nowhere at all and you’re rather dark—” She finally crested her skirts and wrestled them beneath her arms to look at him. She took a breath to amend… “No, not dark. Dazzling.”
Morley blinked down at her, suddenly wishing he’d ever thought to steal a moment from crime reports and newspapers to crack the spine on a book of verse.
Because the woman in his arms was a poem, and he hadn’t the words to describe her.
His hold of her became suddenly very careful. Delicate, like one would hold a teacup in a lady’s parlor rather than the tin mugs at the Yard.
“Oh,” she said breathlessly, as if discovering clarity. “It’s you. You’re who I’ve come looking for.”
Even through his building confusion, some strange part of him was as glad she’d—quite literally—stumbled upon him as she seemed to be.
He shook his head, trying to dislodge the sensation.
As Morley always did when out about his nocturnal business, he adopted a bit of his childhood cockney accent. “Do I know you?”
The lanterns painted the shadows of her ridiculously long eyelashes across cheeks that could have been chiseled from the whitest of Roman marble. Those lashes fringed wide, dark eyes two sizes too