owned as Cutter ‘Deadeye’ Morley, he felt a piece of his puzzle click into place.
For three bloody months he’d been turning a problem over in his mind, chewing it with as much success as he would a rock. Breaking against it. Grinding himself down.
Who was the man who’d made the ballocks decision to fuck a stranger in a garden?
Carlton Morley? Or the Knight of Shadows?
He’d needed to come here to find the answer.
It all made perfect sense now. He’d been so visceral that night. So raw and filled with every emotion he’d never allowed himself. Anger and lust and need and pain. He’d been so fucking hungry. Hungry for a kind of sustenance he’d never had.
He’d been…
Cutter.
Cutter had fucked her because he wanted to. Because she was a bit of beauty and warmth he’d never allowed himself. The thief who’d never had parents to speak of, who’d learned his morals from whores and cutpurses. Who’d committed murder for the sake of revenge.
And reveled in it.
He covered up the murder in his past, and if he found out that she’d been the woman to stick that dagger into the Earl of Sutherland’s throat…he’d be tempted to cover that up too.
Because despite everything she may or may not be… he still wanted her.
Could she sense it, somehow?
Was it because they had killing in common? Like begets like, after all, and if Prudence Goode was the woman he feared she was, had she selected him because her dark soul recognized his?
Even as the suspicion lanced him with horror, his gut violently rejected it. She was a stranger, an enigma to him, but his instinct was to believe her.
To trust her!
Trust was not an emotion with which he was familiar.
What did he know about her, really? That she was both bold and amenable. Her eyes were kind and her mouth wicked. She’d a temper, but was as levelheaded as anyone could expect under the circumstances. She succumbed to logic just as easily as lust.
She might have killed a man in cold blood.
What sort of mother would a woman like that make?
A rueful sound echoed off the damp walls of a dank alley he all but slithered down. The irony of his hypocrisy both irritated and amused him.
The father of this child was Cutter fucking Morley.
And that was both why he’d married her and why he hadn’t touched her. No matter how her shape enticed him. Regardless of how the memories of her creamy thighs and silken intimate flesh tormented him. Despite the urge he had to throw caution to the wind and plunge his hands into her luxuriant hair and trail his mouth over every delectable inch of her—sampling summer berries and soft flesh…
His leather gloves creaked against the tightening of his fists.
He. Couldn’t. Touch. Her. Not until he found out if she’d innocent blood on her hands.
There were reasons to kill. He kept reminding her of that because if she was found to be guilty, he wanted—he needed—a reason to save her.
Because the life inside her womb was innocent. Pure and untainted by the ugliness of this world. Of these streets. And he’d be goddamned if he wouldn’t do everything in his mortal power to keep it that way.
Six months. He had six months to investigate the death of Sutherland and the shipments of illicit substances sweeping the streets.
He felt like a man standing before a tryptic of mirrors, seeing a separate reflection in each. One, the methodical Chief Inspector. The next, a vengeful vigilante. And the third… a boy with a terrible secret and a broken heart.
To reconcile himself. He needed to shatter the third mirror.
Two shades broke from the lamplight of a rotten pub moving toward the alley in between, stealing his focus. Morley trailed them, melting from shadow to shadow like death, himself.
He moved when they moved. Waited when they waited, pressing himself against the corner of a building, listening to their excitement. Catching it with rampant kicks of his heart in his chest as the blue uniform of a London Metropolitan Policeman absorbed the light as he strode toward them, waving a walking stick.
This was what he’d come to see. An exchange of illicit substances. This… was where his trail to the very source began.
Morley waited for the men to pass the Copper his money. He waited until they checked the purity of the substance he handed back to them. He waited until they damned themselves.
Moving slowly, he cracked his fingers and reveled in what was to come. Three