In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,7

as stingy with its sun as it was with its charity. Nay, as an orphan who’d spent his earliest days in the streets, Hugh had never been given a choice. Not truly.

As such, he’d done what every last man, woman, and child in the rookeries did: he’d survived.

From when he was a boy scrabbling with other boys and girls and whomever his handlers had him face in the ring, to when he’d become a young man marching across the Continent to face down Boney’s forces, fighting was all he’d ever known.

And it was all he’d ever know.

A swell of cries went up as the men around Savage’s Fight Society surged to their feet, crowding about as the current fight neared a crescendo. “Get him! Get him!”

When Hugh had first started with the arena, those shouts had ravaged him.

In time, however, he had taught himself the skill of, if not blocking out, managing to mute those shouts. In those earliest days here, when the memories had been crispest, he’d struggled to disentwine the feral sounds of this place from those of different fields of carnage.

Nay, he’d learned very early in both the roughest corners of East London and the fields of the Peninsular War, and then Waterloo, nothing good came from waging war.

Lands were torched. Lives lost. And in the end, the ones left standing bore the imprints of battle as scars on their skin, and the intangible sickness that couldn’t be seen in their ravaged minds.

In the midst of the pandemonium unfurling in the fighting ring, which was more warehouse than arena, Hugh caught a flash of brown fabric that whipped ever so slightly outside the back window before it went still.

He narrowed his eyes.

What soldiers did walk away from battle were left with heightened senses. He could hear the crunch of brush, crushed under footfalls that weren’t silent enough. The squelch of mud. The softest whisper.

And there also came an amplified sense of sight: the ability to be face-forward but also watching out of the corner of one’s eye at the same time.

A burnt-umber hue—a shade of brown so near a perfect match to the mud-spattered windows that anyone else would have missed it.

Homing his gaze on that whisper of cloth, he stared, unblinking . . . until a spring breeze gave that fabric life again, and it flapped and fluttered in the night.

The article may as well have been a calling card announcing the person who failed so mightily at stealth.

“Rip ’is goddamned ’ead off.” The high-pitched cry sounded above the din.

Motionless, Hugh waited. All the while his gaze was on that window and his quarry, he surveyed the area around him. Be it on the battlefields of Europe or the streets of Covent Garden, a man who didn’t manage to keep at least five paces ahead of his enemies ultimately succumbed.

The two proprietors, Griffin Maynard and Samuel Bragger, who were engrossed in talking, gave no indication that they were aware of anything but the business they discussed. Throughout the warehouse, the boys they employed from the streets hurried around them, collecting bets still being tossed down on the two fighters.

Just then, Maynard quit the arena, and Bragger started over to Hugh.

Child fighters together, Maynard and Bragger had been the ones who’d given Hugh his work here. He owed them in ways no man wished to be indebted. But as a soldier learned in the heat of battle, survival came first, pride a distant second to that most important task.

If it hadn’t been for the pair of them, he’d have been like every last member of the king’s regiment, who’d returned to all-too-brief, empty praise and hungry bellies. After all, in the same way grand parades didn’t provide shelter at night, accolades didn’t stave off hunger. They’d given him shelter and food, and then more importantly . . . work.

Hugh did another sweep.

Gone.

He may as well have imagined that flash of fabric at the back window, and yet neither was he so naive as to fail to trust what he’d seen.

Bragger stepped between Hugh and that window.

“I think we might have company,” Hugh said the moment his partner joined him.

“You’re right,” Bragger shouted over another swell of noise from the crowd.

Hugh’s senses went on alert.

Bragger grinned. “We’ve got ’im.”

The voyeur briefly forgotten, Hugh was incapable of focusing on anything beyond those three words: We’ve got him.

There could be any number of men Bragger spoke of. And yet Hugh knew. The past was about to be resurrected, and Hugh