Marked as a Lyon’s Marchioness (The Lyon’s Den Connected World)

Chapter One

Miss Elizabeth Wainwright drew harsh gasps of fetid night air as she stumbled through the city’s shadows.

Wind rushed through her ears. Her heartbeat clattered against needle-sharp ribs.

Every breath felt like a stab. Still, she tore from patch to patch of pale moonlight, a wraith hell-bent on vengeance.

She refused to dwell on the narrowly circling, predatory dangers, both present and anticipated. Dangers as close as the gusts whipping aside her veil. She would think only of her destination. Her very specific destination.

Thank you, Mama. For once.

At least Eliza hoped she’d soon have reason to be grateful to the parent who’d been reduced to a ghost long before her death. She was gambling everything on a passage found in a hidden packet of letters sent to her mother from an anonymous female friend.

I understand your choice. Please understand mine.

Should you or your girls ever find yourselves in need, go to the blue building at the terminus of Cleveland Row and ask for the owner.

She will do what she can to help. She has made every effort to save my children.

I’m certain she would do the same for yours.

Well, Eliza tonight found herself in need. In need of rescuing herself and her sisters from a lifetime of misery. At present, the address in the letter was her best—and only—option.

A mere three hours ago, taking flight into the night had been unimaginable. She’d been silently tapping one perfect, white slipper with a gloriously sparking buckle against the hallowed, wooden floor of Almack’s—Almack’s—the pinnacle of aspiration for every matrimonially minded miss.

Eliza had not been any more dazzled by the crowd of beturbaned, bejeweled matrons, lords and luminaries in expertly tailored breeches, and proper pastel-clad misses than she had been excited by the prospect of the husband hunt.

After a lifetime of bearing witness to her mother’s struggles, she remained skeptical of her godmother’s assertion that marriage had the magical power to cocoon her and her four younger sisters in perpetual security.

However, from the moment Eliza and her gentle twin sister Cassandra received their coveted vouchers to the vaunted assembly rooms, Cassandra’s eyes had been shining with her long-cherished dream of a love match.

And as usual, whatever Cassandra felt leached silently into Eliza’s consciousness until she could not tell Cassandra’s sentiments apart from her own.

So, as both sisters stood beneath the glittering chandeliers earlier this evening, Cassandra’s brilliant matrimonial future had seemed as certain of fulfillment as the gilt columns holding up the decorated ceiling.

At that same moment, with nothing more than a “You’ll do,” spoken with exquisite precision in a grating voice thick with aristocratic ennui, Cassandra had been yanked from Eliza’s side.

Eliza’s hiss of fresh outrage mingled with the night air.

Unbelievable, but true—an arrogant, thoughtless, too-smug-for-his-stiffly-starched-collar duke (of all things) had broken with propriety and convention and swept Cassandra into a waltz.

A waltz the Patronesses of the establishment had not given her permission to dance.

Eliza had frozen in helpless fury as a cacophonous rush of gasps echoed from person to person throughout the room.

Several gentlemen had raised their quizzing glasses and most of the ladies had turned their backs, sweeping aside their skirts as Eliza and a very red-faced Cassie, the latter struggling to hold back tears, were guided from the room.

Consequences had been as swift as they were imbalanced: Harbury had been sent home for the evening, while the elder Wainwright sisters had their vouchers permanently revoked, with no hope of the younger three ever having a chance to obtain one.

Cassandra’s dream had been dashed, and Eliza was now cold and damp with sweat beneath a stolen—no, borrowed—groomsman’s cloak. Her costly white shoes with buckle clips she’d commissioned were, well, no longer pristine.

Why had Harbury chosen Cassandra?

He hadn’t, he later explained. Cassie had paled when he’d announced he’d no interest at all in “the chit.” He’d only required a distraction. A distraction!

As if every woman in the wide world had been created solely for his entertainment.

She hated Harbury and his ilk.

Feral, he was. Recently come into his title with naught but an older sister to rein him in. He certainly couldn’t count his friend and “sworn brother,” the Marquess of Redver, to keep him in check. From what she’d seen, Redver was equally arrogant.

His name was only ever whispered—always with a knowing glance. And when, on rare occasion and always with Harbury, he showed his face in Society, he never even bothered to dance.

Was it better, like Redver, to believe oneself above dancing, or to make a weapon of the gentle pastime as Harbury had?

No matter.

Whether to turn a leg or not to turn a leg wasn’t the question. Her point held—both men had been given too much power. Power they irresponsibly abused. Unless brought to understand, they would continue stumbling through their plump, padded world, heedless of those they harmed.

Ugh.

The Duke of Harbury, Redver, his fellow feral, and every single one of Almack’s haughty Patronesses could go straight to the devil for all she cared, so long as she never had to see Cassandra as her sister had been when Eliza had left the house—face down and weeping uncontrollably into her pillow.

No matter what she had to do, Eliza would make certain Cassandra achieved her dream, and their younger sisters got their chance.

Eliza’s shoe clip caught inside her hem. As a cold, metal streetlamp abruptly halted her tumble, she oomphed aloud. She should have thought to take off her shoe buckles before she’d run out into the night!

Steadying herself, she snapped off the clip and slid it into the coat’s pocket. Immediately, she resumed her flight, not bothering to check her hem for damage. Even if the lamplight’s pale flicker had been emitting enough illumination to see clearly, she dared not pause for long.

Every stop increased her already considerable peril.

Proper young ladies did not walk through London alone. And, alone or not, proper young ladies never raced through the London night.

Then again, she was not a proper young lady anymore, was she?

She—and her sister—had been banished. Sent home. Humiliated.

Harbury, the Patronesses agreed, deserved the greater blame, but they contended, there must have been some reason he’d chosen Cassandra. Some subtle, improper gesture on Cassandra’s part that had drawn his eye.

The very idea that innocent, hopeful Cassandra, was in any way at fault kindled a rush of heat up Eliza’s neck. She practically burned with the need for vengeance. One way or another, she would make Harbury pay, and she would help her sister.

Eliza slapped the back of her hand against her lips, throttling a scream of pure frustration. Briefly, the light, familiar scent of lambskin overwhelmed the less pleasant smells of the street. Then, she hurried on, making her way first onto King Street and then into St. James’s Park.

She’d fled her godmother’s town house in a footman’s cloak and one of Asquith’s beavers. But she hadn’t changed out of her gown. Should a passerby look closely enough, the fichu she’d used as a makeshift veil would mark her as female.

Heavens! She wished she were a man. If she were a man, she could do as she pleased. If she were a man, she’d challenge Harbury to meet her at dawn.

Should this plan fail, she decided on a swift inhale, she would challenge him anyway. The gamekeeper at Willowhurst Manor had taught her to be an excellent shot.

She had to be drawing close to the blue building at the terminus of Cleveland Row by now. Since arriving in London, she’d learned the address described in the letter housed an infamous club known as the Lyon’s Den.

A place of secrets and shadows. A place where lives were made and ruined on the turn of a card. A place where iniquity and decadence met destiny. A place, on the authority of her mother’s letter, where a young woman in desperate circumstances might turn.

While Almack’s was ruled by five ever-watchful Patronesses, the Lyon’s Den was presided over by a single woman—the Black Widow.

But the Black Widow commanded her fiefdom with the same absolute authority as the Patronesses.

And, like Almack’s, Eliza expected the gaming hell to contain a seething hotbed of backstabbing virulence.

At least there, the virulence would not be paper wrapped in pastels, breeches, and demure conversations. There, she could meet her fate without the comfort—or distraction—of illusion.

In choosing the Lyon’s Den, Eliza, not those pudding-faced Patronesses, would be choosing her future, whatever future that may be.

Drunken singing and boyish laughter sounded from somewhere behind her. She inclined her head, adjusted her “veil,” and turned another corner. Finally—finally—the blue building materialized out of the fog, the lower windows glowing like beacons of warmth.

Or heralds of hell.

Two large black doors at the center were the gentleman’s entrance, this much she knew. The ladies’ entrance was to the right.

Would the women who guarded the door allow her to enter, distressed as she was?

She must look mad in a man’s coat and beaver, with a fichu over her face, and muddied white slippers peeking out from beneath.

What if they turned her away?

She couldn’t give up now. Her life—and the lives of her four sisters—depended on her success. She would gain entry by any means necessary, and she would find a way to meet with the Black Widow herself.