Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
A Revelation in the Conservatory
She accepted his hand, and everything in me went cold.
I did not know the man. The white mask concealed his features, and nothing in his build or bearing matched anyone in my considerable mental catalogue of London’s powerful, dangerous, or merely problematic.
He was tall. He moved well. He held himself with the controlled stillness of someone accustomed to being watched and entirely unconcerned by it.
None of that told me who he was.
But Rosalynd’s body told me everything.
I knew her well enough to read the language she did not know she spoke.
The set of her shoulders when she was amused—a slight loosening, an ease that made her seem to take up more space.
The angle of her chin when she was irritated—lifted, sharp, prepared for combat.
The way her fingers moved when she was nervous—quick, restless adjustments to gloves, jewelry, the edge of a sleeve.
What I saw now was none of those things. What I saw was control. Deliberate, absolute, and effortful. The kind of control a person deploys when they are managing a threat and cannot afford to show it.
Her spine was rigid. Her smile was fixed—the social mask she wore at its most impenetrable.
Her left hand, resting on the stranger’s shoulder, was perfectly placed and perfectly still, when in any ordinary dance her fingers would have moved, adjusted, responded to the music.
She was holding herself the way a woman holds herself when she does not wish to be touched but cannot refuse.
The waltz turned them through the crowd.
I tracked them from my position near the wall, champagne untouched, every faculty engaged.
The man was speaking. Rosalynd was listening—not with the attentive interest she showed in conversation but with the focused alertness of someone processing a danger.
Her responses were brief. Her expression did not change.
Twice, the man leaned closer. Both times, something tightened in Rosalynd’s jaw.
I set down my glass.
Around me, the masquerade continued in its glittering oblivion. The orchestra played Strauss with admirable feeling. Two hundred guests danced and laughed and flirted behind their masks, performing the rituals of a society that prized surfaces above all else.
None of them saw what I saw. None of them knew that in the centre of this beautiful room, a woman I—
I stopped the thought. Reined it in. Emotion was a luxury I could not afford at this moment. What I needed was information.
The waltz ended. The stranger bowed. Rosalynd stood motionless as he turned and disappeared into the crowd—the white mask visible for a moment, then gone, absorbed into the sea of silk and feathers as though he had never existed.
Rosalynd’s hands were trembling. She clasped them together quickly—but not quickly enough for me not to notice.
I moved toward her. We converged in the middle of the ballroom with the particular urgency of two people who needed very badly to be somewhere they were not.
“The conservatory,” I said. “Now.”
She did not argue.
Upon our arrival, I dismissed the footman who was standing guard and closed the door. The music dimmed to a murmur.
Cosmos’s botanical arrangements had transformed the conservatory into a jungle of ferns, orchids, and trailing vines that screened the glass walls and created the illusion of privacy.
The air was warm and damp, fragrant with earth and green growth, a sharp contrast to the perfumed ballroom we had left behind.
I didn't waste time with pleasantries. "Who was he?"
Rosalynd pulled off her mask. Without it, her face was pale, her blue eyes bright with something I could not immediately name. Not fear—not precisely. Something more complicated. Something held carefully in check.
"I don't know his name," she said. "But I have encountered him before."
"When?"
"During the Thames investigation."
I went very still. The Thames case had taken us into London's darkest corners—young women vanishing from the streets, some from humble origins, a few turning up dead. Rosalynd's involvement had been invaluable. It had also nearly cost her life.
"At the house by the river," I said.
"Yes."
There had to be more than she'd revealed.
I had watched them dance—watched the way he held her, the way he inclined his head toward hers as though they shared a confidence.
"He seemed rather taken with you." The words came out harder than I intended.
Or perhaps exactly as I intended. A cold, precise anger was building in my chest—sharpened by the memory of him leaning close, murmuring something that had made her jaw tighten.
She turned away from me. “He is. I didn’t seek it, don’t desire it. But—”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“I sensed it that night. He said it was inconvenient that he found himself fascinated with me.”
My jaw clenched. “And you didn’t tell me?”
A shadow crossed her eyes. “You had other things to worry about at the time.”
“You could have told me later.”
"I couldn’t. I worried about what he would do to you." Her voice fractured—raw and sudden, the composure she'd held all evening splitting like silk along a seam. The sound of it undid something in me that anger had been holding in place.
The fury drained out of me. I stepped closer, touched her. Her skin was ice cold. "Rosalynd. He would never get the better of me.”
She looked up sharply. "Have you forgotten your bruised ribs? You couldn't walk straight for days."
"That was different." I kept my tone measured, steady. "I walked into that fight deliberately."
“That's what I'm afraid of!" Her voice rose; her hands curled into fists at her sides. "That you'll leap into the fray and end up dead."
I pressed my lips together against the laugh threatening to escape. "I do not leap into frays. I calculate my odds and advance."
She huffed out a breath. "You think you can vanquish anything."
"Not everything." I held her gaze. Something shifted in my chest—not the cold precision of anger but its opposite, warm and ungovernable. "I can't vanquish you."
Her expression softened. The defiance didn't leave her eyes, but something gentler moved beneath it. "I'm not your enemy."
I cupped her cheek in my hand. “Oh, my dear. Of course you are. You threaten my peace with every breath you take.” My thumb traced slowly across her lower lip, settling at the corner of her mouth. “You fear for me? I fear for you.”
Her breath caught. Her eyes closed for an instant—just an instant—and she turned her face into my palm, her lips brushing the heel of my hand. The gesture was so slight, so unguarded, that it nearly broke my resolve.
Beyond the conservatory, the masquerade continued—music and laughter and two hundred guests, any one of whom might wander through the door at any moment. We couldn’t be seen like this. I let my hand fall, slowly, as though the air itself resisted the separation.
“I need to teach you to shoot," I said, my voice rougher than I would have liked. "Properly this time. With your brother's pistol, if you wish."
Her face changed. Something crossed it—surprise, then resignation.
"Cosmos's pistol," she said. "The man in the mask took it from me. At the house by the river."
Her words gutted me. Another piece of her I had not been given. I suspected it would not be the last.
"He reminded me tonight that he still has it. That he's taken good care of it." She met my eyes. "And that we are connected."
Connected. The word struck me like a blade between the ribs.
I turned away from her toward the glass wall.
I needed a moment to master what I was feeling, because what I was feeling was not useful.
Anger was useful—cold, directed, channelled into action.
What churned beneath the anger was fear of a particular kind.
The fear of a man who recognizes obsession when he sees it.
This stranger—whoever he was—had entered her home uninvited, maneuvered her into a dance she could not refuse, and used that proximity to deliver a message designed to demonstrate the extent of his knowledge and the depth of his interest. He possessed a physical object—her brother’s pistol—that served as a permanent tether between them.
And he had called her remarkable.
I knew what this was. I had seen it in other men—the intelligent, patient, proprietary attention that masqueraded as admiration and was, at its core, something far more dangerous. This man was not threatening Rosalynd. He was claiming her.
“Steele.” Her voice, quiet, behind me. “Please say something.”
I turned back. She stood among the ferns, my midnight-blue Rosalynd, her copper hair catching the gaslight, her eyes searching mine for something she needed to find there. Not permission. Not forgiveness. Understanding.
“You should have told me.” My voice was steady. Barely. “All of it, when it happened. You should have told me then.”
“I know.”
“What did he say to you?” I asked. “Tonight. During the dance. And don’t leave anything out.”
She told me. The warning that we were pursuing the wrong thread. The distinction between the mechanism of the fraud and its true purpose. The hint at something “far more personal than financial gain.” The comment about my blindness—trusting the logic of money more than the logic of human motive.
I listened without interruption. Filed each detail. Considered the implications.
“He is well-informed,” I said. “He knows about the royal connection. He knows the direction of our investigation. He knows enough about the consortium’s inner workings to suggest we are missing something fundamental.”
“Which means he is either very close to the conspiracy,” Rosalynd said, “or very close to someone who is.”
“Or he is the conspiracy.”
“No.” Rosalynd shook her head. “He spoke of the people behind the consortium as though they were beneath him. He is something else. Something adjacent.”
She was right. The man’s manner—what I had observed of it—was not that of a conspirator protecting his interests. It was that of a spectator with his own agenda. Which made him more dangerous, not less.
"Regardless of his role in this, you need to learn how to shoot." I held her gaze. "I have a house in Richmond. Grounds large enough for practice, away from London's prying eyes. I'll make arrangements and let you know the day."
She went very still—the stillness she used when she was preparing to fight. "Steele—"
"This is not a request."
Her chin lifted. Her shoulders squared. Her hands, loose at her sides, found the folds of her skirt and closed around them. "I am not one of your tenants or your staff or your brothers. You do not issue commands to me."
"No." I stepped closer. Close enough that the scent of her perfume reached me—rose and something warmer beneath.
"I am asking. Because a masked man who has followed you across two investigations, who has entered your home, who possesses something of your family's, and who has told you plainly that he intends to continue—that man will act.
It is a question of when, not whether. And when he does, I want you to be able to defend yourself. "
She held my gaze. Her jaw was set, her breath shallow and carefully controlled—the breathing of a woman determined not to concede an inch of ground. I had prepared myself, in that moment, to argue the rest of the hour.
Then something shifted. Not surrender—Rosalynd did not surrender—but recognition.
The moment when a person stops refusing a truth she has already understood.
Her hand opened against her skirt. Her shoulders eased, a fraction.
The breath she had been holding released so quietly I would have missed it had I not been watching for it.
"Richmond, then," she said at last. "And shooting lessons."
"This week, Rosalynd."
"If you are insufferable about it, I shall aim at you instead of the targets."
Despite everything—the anger, the fear, the sick awareness of a predator circling the woman I loved—I almost smiled.
"I would expect nothing less."