on his part a reminder that he was as much a traitor now as he’d been then.
For everything in their pasts and in their histories said Hugh should want this moment as much as Maynard and Bragger had salivated for it. That he should relish the blood of their enemies running upon their hands.
“Please,” the gentleman whimpered, looking up. His once broad, powerful Roman nose, now crooked and broken, poured blood still, turning his puce-colored waistcoat black.
Funny, as a boy fighting like a cock or a stray dog, how much bigger and older Dooley had seemed to Hugh.
The rapidly brightening bruises marring the older man’s cheeks stood out in stark, vivid splotches as all the blood left his face. Only, he wasn’t old. Not really. Though just ten or so years older than Hugh, the other man had always seemed older. Frailer. Back when he’d been using young boys on the streets as ruthless fighters for the perverse pleasures of wealthy lords and merchants, Dooley and the still unidentified man who’d turned boy on boy. Making them into killers, all in the name of entertainment for twisted clients with aberrant tastes.
Silently, Hugh pushed the panel closed behind him and his partners, and made himself say something. “Dooley.” Ultimately, he’d managed nothing more than a name.
Hope shone through the battered man’s pain-glazed eyes. “S-Savage.”
“Ah, looking for ’elp, are ya?” Bragger made a tsking sound. “I’d say you’ve quite placed your hopes in the wrong people. Ain’t that roight?” he asked.
Their other partner, Maynard, a bear of a man, nearly two stone bigger than either Hugh or Bragger, answered for the pair. “Quite so.”
“Jesus,” the older man whispered, looking like one facing Death himself. And no one said the cruel weren’t clever, for Dooley was wise enough to know death was precisely what the trio before him represented. They’d been out for his blood since boyhood, and had brought him home to feast.
“I never took you for a godly man, Dooley,” Hugh said quietly.
“I’m sorry.” Dooley’s lower lip quivered. “I’m s-so sorry.”
“No,” Hugh said, coming closer to the trio in the middle of the room. “You’re not. That is, not sorry for what you did.” He stopped over the sprawled handler, and despite himself, he couldn’t resist the wave of pity at the state in which the man now found himself. And the fate he was about to meet.
“And not sorry enough to end yar ways,” Bragger said coolly.
Deaf in his left ear from too many blows to the head, Griffin Maynard called out too loudly, “Forgive me for gettin’ started without the both of ya.”
Bragger propped a shoulder against the door. “Worry not, mate. Plenty of Dooley to go ’round.” He cracked his knuckles. “Plenty of flesh to go ’round.”
The greying gent whimpered and buried his head in his hands, the shaking digits immediately washed red with blood.
Maynard grinned widely, displaying a bottom row of uneven teeth, and again set to work beating Dooley.
Hugh’s stomach roiled.
There was no end . . . not to this. There would never be an end. After they’d dealt with Dooley, there’d only be another to be brought forward in the name of vengeance. And then when they had their revenge, those linked to Dooley and his cohorts would come for them. On and on it would go.
Forcing a casualness he didn’t feel, Hugh grabbed a sturdy oak chair and seated himself close to their prey on the floor.
Maynard paused to wipe sweat from his brow. “We’ve been looking for ya,” he said conversationally, as if he didn’t even now wear the other man’s blood on his knuckles.
“Not just ’im,” Bragger pointed out.
A study in false contemplativeness, Maynard rubbed at his chin, leaving a streak of crimson in his wake. “No, that’s true.”
Burrowing his face into the hardwood floor, Dooley whimpered, the high-pitched sounds better suited to a wounded beast.
Or a child forced to fight another child . . . a child broken and battered from too many fists and knocks to the temple.
Hugh tightened his jaw. “You’ve done an impressive job of hiding.” So why had he come out now? Why? he silently railed. “Was the fortune you made off our backs”—and souls—“not enough?”
Bragger joined Hugh and Maynard so they formed a circle around their former tormentor. “Rats always come scurrying from their hiding places,” Maynard said from his place at Dooley’s head.
The handler looked up at the giant of a man towering over him and squeezed his eyes shut.
“I wanted to h-help you,” Dooley