and she didn’t want to. She couldn’t afford to, not when she needed all the energy she had for herself, simply to get through each moment.
“Why did you do it?” she asked. “Why did you give me the money?” She’d wanted to know for years; she focused on that. If she let herself think of Bedlam—she couldn’t think of it. She couldn’t.
He chewed on his lip. “Because you needed it?”
“Didn’t you?”
He laughed. “Yes, I did. It was my entire allowance for the quarter. But is it not written, ‘He that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich’?”
He said it as if it could be as simple as it seemed. He was a kind young man, and he’d been drunk, and she had needed it. Try as she might, she could not twist it into selfishness or lust, into something she understood; it unsettled her. “Did you regret it?”
“Of course.” He shrugged. “But not—I regretted it, but I didn’t want to change it.” He gave her a rueful half smile. She didn’t say anything, and the smile faded; his eyes dropped and he rubbed his thumb along the edge of his table of equipment. “I do wish I’d borrowed the money to buy my brother Elijah a birthday gift.”
She shrugged. “I’ve never understood the great fuss about birthdays.”
“He only had two more of them after that,” he said, and she felt abruptly cold. “And he gave me just the thing I wanted.”
“On his own birthday—” Halfway through the sentence she understood, but it was too late.
“Sorry, I—we were born on the same day,” he explained. “We were twins.”
She stood, frozen. She should say something. She had to say something. But she couldn’t think of anything. So this was why he’d lost weight, and why his freckles stood out starkly against his pale skin, and why he had that drawn, defeated look she’d steadfastly refused to be concerned about from the moment she’d seen him again.
“And now I’ve got to go on having birthday after birthday without him.” He looked up; the sweetness of his smile was foreign and incomprehensible, but she felt a piercing kinship at the self-derision in his eyes. “I always thought—I’d know if anything happened to him. I’d feel it. But that was rot. I had no idea. I was laughing or eating and he was dead. He bled in the dirt all alone.”
Serena had no idea what to do. I’m very sorry for your loss, she thought, dredging the polite courtesy up from God knew where. But she couldn’t say it, didn’t know how to make her tongue form the words. She was more helpless before his simple, ordinary need than she would have been before any display of mastery. For long, painful moments, the only sound was the rain on the roof and the cobblestones.
“How on earth did you end up at Mme Deveraux’s?” he asked, finally.
“I slept with the footman,” she told him, angrily conscious of her own failure.
“And your father kicked you out?” He shot a sharp, frowning glance at the door Lord Blackthorne had just walked out of.
There, he was doing it already. Trying to make her an abused innocent, searching for the heart of gold among her brass. “No, I left,” she said with a false, brilliant smile. “I became a whore to spite him.” It was about half true. She had left to go after Harry, the footman; she’d intended to marry him. Harry, however, had had no such intention. When she’d gone to the address he’d given her, he hadn’t been there, and his friends had refused to give her any information about his whereabouts at all.
She’d been starving by the time Mme Deveraux’s procurer approached her in the street. But it hadn’t only been desperation; she had signed her contract with a flourish, feeling hot and triumphant at the thought of what her father would say. She’d been an idiot.
Solomon didn’t say anything; he looked as if he saw through the smile. He was doing it again, seeing her, and she hated it. She was afraid of what he would see—and worse, that he wouldn’t like it. “I bought back my contract with your money,” she told him. “But I didn’t stop. I was the most expensive whore in London for a year, and no matter how high my rates were, there was always someone willing to offer more. I couldn’t have done it without you. How do you feel about that?”
He swallowed. “Lady—” He stopped, evidently realizing