sputtered.
Bragger laughed, a cold, deadened chuckle that none would ever dare confuse with any real amusement. “’elp us? ’elp us?” There was a slightly desperate pitch to that word echo.
Dooley scrambled onto his arse and sought to back away from the ring they formed. “You were begging for scraps. Pleading for coin.”
Aye, they had been. Part of Mac Diggory’s gang of boys, they’d stolen and begged for the Dials’ most ruthless man. In the end, they’d been sold to Dooley and dragged to another part of London, where they’d been robbed of far more than food or monies. They’d had their very souls ripped from them. It was why, when he’d had the chance, Hugh had grasped the only way out for boys in these parts—serving King and Crown.
In the name of respectability, honor, and a new beginning . . .
His gaze locked on a point over Dooley’s head.
What a naive fool he’d been. When the erroneous assumption was that a man from the streets was wholly incapable of naivete or innocence.
“Ya bought us. Made us slaves,” Bragger was saying. Fire and fury blazed from his eyes. “Didn’t even get to keep a coin. Kept us locked up, ya did. Boys.” The other man’s throat worked in an unexpected crack in his armor. “Girls.”
Of their trio, Bragger remained the one most trapped in that shared part of their past, and hell-bent on revenge at all costs. But then he was the only one of their trio with any blood family: a sister who’d been a fighter and then disappeared. Had he a family, perhaps Hugh would have felt the way the other man did.
“They were orphans, too,” Dooley whined, lifting his hands up beseechingly.
As though it had been a privilege . . . And Hugh proved that savage part of his soul couldn’t be disentwined from who he was, from a primal hungering to take the other man apart . . .
“Yar going to pay for it,” Maynard snarled, surging forward.
Dooley shot a hand out. “N-not all w-was bad, though. You must say that. W-why, you’ve built a liiiiiiiife,” he cried out, and eyed the wrist Bragger had snapped with a single well-placed slash of his hand.
Writhing and twisting, Dooley rolled onto his enormous stomach and sobbed and screamed incoherently. The raucous cheers from the patrons below melded that bloodthirsty revelry with his cries of agony.
Hugh made himself stare at the pathetic heap rolling around the floor. To acknowledge that suffering. For even as Dooley’s crimes merited punishment, evil only begets more evil. Until a person found oneself drowning in violence.
As though he’d identified his mark, the weakest of the group surrounding him, Dooley stretched his untouched hand out. “Please h-help me, Savage . . . Heeeelp . . .”
Hugh’s stomach knotted.
“Oh, sir, pray don’t kill him . . . Help me . . . Won’t you heeeelll—ahhh . . . ?” The blast of a close-range musket blew away the remainder of that distant entreaty.
“Savage? Savage?” It took a moment for Maynard’s voice to penetrate through the echoes of gunfire in his mind.
Hugh forced back the distant sounds from a different battle and concentrated on the one before him.
“Ya all right?” his partner asked.
Had any of them ever been all right?
“Fine,” he said tightly.
When Dooley’s screams dissolved into quiet, shuddery sobs, Hugh curled his hands. Wanting to end this. Needing to. “We want the name of the ringleader.”
So they could have their revenge. His partners, however, had failed to realize a truth Hugh had come to long ago: they’d never be free. They’d always be haunted, and then after Dooley and the final person, the mastermind, was found and dealt justice, there’d only be more blood on their hands.
Dooley squeezed his eyes shut, and his enormous Adam’s apple jumped. “I can’t.”
Hugh and his partners shared a look.
“Ya can’t?” Bragger pressed. “Or ya won’t?”
“B-both. I cannot give you a name because I don’t h-have it. Do you truly believe a fine one from the ton would deal with a plebeian like me?”
Leaning down, Bragger caught the other man by his shirtfront and dragged him up so that their noses touched. “And . . . what of Val?”
“Val?” Dooley echoed.
“Valerie,” Bragger repeated.
Memories of Bragger’s sister, the fourth of their group, merged with the stranger who’d darkened the back entrance of his club.
Another person he’d betrayed and failed. When he’d been caged with the other children, Hugh had seen them protected. And when he’d gone? Val had disappeared. An all-too-familiar guilt swirled