a draught of something disgusting, and he had an obsession with cleanliness that Covent Garden had never seen. Whit and Devil had lured him away from a small northern village two years earlier, after he’d reportedly saved a young marchioness from a gunshot wound on the Great North Road with a curious combination of tinctures and tonics.
A man with a skill for defeating bullets was worth his weight in gold, as far as Whit was concerned—and the doctor had proven him right, saving more than he’d lost since arriving in the Rookery.
Today, he might save another.
Whit turned back to Jamie. Watched him in the silence of the afternoon.
“I’ll send someone to fetch you when he wakes,” the doctor said. “The moment he wakes.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
A pause. “Then I shall send someone to fetch you when he doesn’t.”
Whit grunted, logic telling him that there was nothing to be done. That fate would come, and this boy would live or die by it.
“I fucking hate this place.” Whit couldn’t stay still anymore. He went to the end of the room, to the exterior wall of the building, built by the best masons the Bastards’ money could buy. Without hesitation, he put his fist into it.
Pain shot through his hand and up his arm, and he welcomed it. A punishment.
The doctor’s chair creaked when he turned back to Whit. “Are you bleeding?”
He looked down at his knuckles. They’d seen worse. He grunted his denial, shaking out the limb. The doctor nodded and turned back to his work.
Good. Whit was in no mood for conversation, a fact rendered irrelevant when the door to the room opened and his brother and sister-in-law entered, and behind them, Annika, the Bastards’ brilliant Norwegian lieutenant, who could move a hold full of contraband in broad daylight like a sorceress.
“We came as soon as we heard.” Devil went straight to the bed, looking down at Jamie. “Fuck.” He looked up, the six-inch-long scar that ran the length of his right cheek now white with anger.
“We’re looking for his sister,” Nik said as she moved to the other side of the bed, her hand settling gently on the boy’s. “She’ll be here soon, Jamie.” Something tightened impossibly further in Whit’s chest; Nik loved the men and women who worked for them like she was decades older than her twenty-three years, and they her children.
And he couldn’t keep them safe.
Devil cleared his throat. “And the bullet?”
“Side. Clean through,” the doctor answered.
“I almost had ’im. Left a knife in ’im,” Whit added. “Aim was true.”
“Good. I hope you cut off his bollocks,” Devil said, tapping his silver-tipped walking stick on the floor twice—a sign of his desire to unsheathe the wicked blade from within and run someone through.
“Wait,” Whit’s sister-in-law, Felicity, said, coming to face him, forcing him to look down at her. “You almost had him?”
Shame ran through Whit, hot and inescapable. “Someone knocked me out before I could finish the deed.”
Nik whispered a curse as Felicity took Whit’s hands in her own, squeezing them tightly. “Are you well?” She turned to the doctor. “Is he well?”
“Seems so to me.”
Felicity narrowed her gaze on the other man. “Your keen interest in medicine never fails to impress, Doctor.”
The doctor removed his spectacles and cleaned them. “The man is upright before you, is he not?”
She sighed. “I suppose so.”
“Well, then,” he said, and he left the room.
“Such an odd man.” Felicity turned back to Whit. “What happened?”
Whit ignored the question, instead catching Nik’s gaze across the room. “And Dinuka?” The second outrider. Whit had sent the young man for cavalry. “He’s safe?”
Nik nodded. “Got off a shot, but doesn’t think it landed. Did as he was told. Came running for cavalry.”
“Good man,” Whit said. “Cargo?”
She shook her head. “Lost before we could track it.”
Whit ran a hand over his chest, where his knife holster was missing. “Along with my knives.”
Devil turned to him. “Who?”
Whit met his brother’s eyes. “I can’t be certain.”
Devil didn’t hesitate. “But you’ve a wager.”
“All I have says it’s Ewan.”
He didn’t use the name anymore, Ewan was now Robert, Duke of Marwick, their half brother and Felicity’s once-fiancé. He’d left Devil for dead three months earlier and disappeared, sending Grace into hiding until he was found. There’d been a break in hijackings after Ewan had vanished, but Whit couldn’t shake the feeling that he was back. And responsible for Jamie.
Except . . . “Ewan wouldn’t have left you unconscious,” Devil said. “He’d have done much worse.”