NINE
The town hall bell tolled eleven times as Aly unlocked the door to her flat.
Wan sunlight illuminated the corridor as she stepped inside, the sound of her boots muffled by the thick rug.
She rubbed her wrists, still stinging from where the manacles had chafed at them, then reached for the buckle of her weapons belt.
She hadn’t expected DI Erskine to agree to return them, given she was carrying them illegally, but he’d passed them back to her alongside her other belongings without a word, his hand sending a flush up her arm as it brushed hers.
Aly’s grip tightened on the leather as she pulled the belt off. A vicious crime lord was bad enough, but a copper? But there had been something in Erskine’s expression when he questioned her, something that made her think he was different from the others.
She shook her head, dropping her knives on the hall table with a clatter. He was still a copper. Anything else he might be came secondary to that.
The flat was, mercifully, warm, a welcome change from the chill outside.
Aly stiffened, snatching up her knives and buckling the belt around her waist again.
If the flat was warm, that meant Grant was there.
Grant never visited during the day. She let her hands fall to her sides, sliding her coat open in a casual gesture to keep her knives accessible.
Her heartbeat echoed in her ears as she stepped into the sitting room. Grant sat in the wingback chair in the back corner, his face so far from the window it was cast in shadow.
“Where have you been?”
Aly tensed at the sound of his voice. “Out.”
Grant’s lip curled. “Obviously ‘out’. ‘Out’ where?” He twisted in his chair to look at her. “At the police station, perhaps?”
Aly froze. Getting herself arrested like that was a sign of a failure in a deputy, and if he learnt what she’d agreed to in order to walk free, the punishment would be severe.
She swallowed. Grant didn’t seem angry, but that didn’t always mean much; his moods changed as swiftly as the sea.
Calm and still one moment, violent and vicious the next.
She decided to act as though she’d done nothing wrong and was simply relieved to return home to Grant. It was partly the truth, anyway.
“Word travels fast,” she said, picking up the tumbler of whisky on the table next to Grant’s chair and downing it.
It wasn’t yet midday, but that had never meant much to Grant, and didn’t mean much to her today, either, not after the morning she’d had.
The liquid burned on the way down, warming her from within.
“How did you know?” She set the glass back on the table with a thud, letting her hand fall to Grant’s head, her fingers winding in the ringlets at his nape.
“I heard whispers that the guards had picked you up.” He tilted his head back to meet Aly’s gaze.
“And I knew it would take something serious indeed to make you late when you’d agreed to meet me.
” The words were innocent enough, but his tone turned Aly’s blood to ice water in her veins, the implied threat beneath them—that if she didn’t prioritise him and his desires, he’d make her pay—all too clear.
She cursed herself inwardly for forgetting she was supposed to meet him that morning, his instructions erased by her arrest. Her hand stilled in his hair, her body tensing like a rabbit prepared for flight, but then he smiled, reaching up to tug her into his lap, his hands warm at her waist.
“How did you get out?” he asked, his fingertips running up and down the outside of her arm.
“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t do what they accused me of?
” Aly nestled into the circle of his arms, resting her head on his shoulder.
At times like this she could almost forget what he was, forget the brutal way he’d risen to the top of the criminal underworld, the harsh way he treated his employees and the abject cruelty with which he treated his foes.
Right now, he wasn’t the man who’d broken her ribs when she’d defied him, or who’d taken out a rival’s kneecaps for encroaching on his territory, but the man who had shown Aly kindness when she’d been alone and hungry and convinced she wouldn’t live through another winter, who had offered her a home and a job and had seen something of worth in her when even her own mother hadn’t been able to.
The man who still saw value in her, even when she didn’t always see it herself.
And that, she knew, only made him all the more dangerous.
Grant pressed a kiss behind her ear. “I might, depending on what they accused you of.” Another kiss, this time at the base of her neck.
Aly shivered, heat flooding her. “But would I believe they’d take the word of a street rat over whatever bullshit they’ve already decided to be the truth?
Not so much.” His hand wrapped round her waist, pulling her closer. “So how did you manage it?”
A chill crept up the back of Aly’s neck.
He’d asked the same thing twice now; this wasn’t just making conversation, it was a direct attempt to get an answer out of her.
His hands roved over her, sending fire across her hips, her breasts, her spine as his lips brushed against the hollow of her throat, his touch a concerted effort to cloud her judgement and make her slip up.
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep her head clear, pulling back to look at him. His eyes darkened, his lips parting.
Aly shrugged, trying to keep the gesture light. “I got out the same way as last time. Do you want a detailed account, or is that sufficient?”
Grant let out a chuckle. “One of these days you’re going to get on the wrong side of a copper who isn’t interested in women, and then where will you be?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Aly scoffed.
“They’re coppers. They’re interested in power above all.
” DI Erskine hadn’t been, though, and it unsettled her.
She knew where she stood with most police officers, but he had upended her expectations and the offer he’d given her—the offer she’d accepted—could be her salvation or her doom.
“Even so,” Grant went on. His fingers tangled in her hair, his thumb massaging her jaw. “They might try to get you to grass on me.”
Aly froze as Grant’s fingers tightened in her hair, sending sharp pinpricks of pain across her scalp.
He jerked her head back, forcing her to look at him.
Her heartbeat thudded in her chest. He knows.
He knows. He knows. The words repeated in her mind in time to her pulse.
If he’d found her out, if he knew what she’d agreed to, she’d be dead by morning. If she was lucky.
It wouldn’t matter that she’d had nothing to do with the murder.
In truth, murdering a burgess would go down better with Grant than what she’d agreed to; her willingness to share any information about the criminal underworld with the police, even without mentioning Grant’s affairs, was the deepest sort of betrayal.
“But you’d never clipe, would you?” he said softly, his grip loosening as his thumb brushed her lips. “You’d never do that to me.”
“Never,” Aly whispered.
Grant released her hair, his fingers trailing down her spine. “Good.” His hand paused at the small of her back. “Did you fence the kilt pin?”
Aly winced. “I tried, but it got—complicated.”
“Complicated how?” Grant’s hand tensed around her waist.
“The police were looking for it—they must have thought the killer had taken it.”
“Do you still have it?” Grant’s hand pressed against the small of her back, making sweat break out on her palms.
Aly shook her head. “The copper took it.”
Grant ran his hand over the hilts of her knives beneath her coat. “But they gave you back your weapons?”
“How do you know he wasn’t just too thick to notice I was wearing them?”
Grant let out a low chuckle, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, I trust that you’ll find my four shillings, as promised.”
She had no answer to that, none that would be accepted besides an of course, and she wasn’t at all certain that was true, so instead kissed him, trying to lose herself in sensation, the taste of whisky on his tongue and the warmth of his hands on her arse, pulling her closer to him.
She let the feel of him overtake her, blotting out her doubts and fears with the softness of his skin against hers, the heat of him pressing into her, until she could no longer wonder if she’d made the right choice or the worst mistake of her life.
Aly worried at the envelope between her fingertips.
A breeze blew down the street, its tendrils curling round her overexposed neck.
Grant had been clear that he’d wanted her to look neat and respectable, and so instead of its usual fuzzy plait, her hair was in a bun, a dozen tiny pins holding the curls in place.
The street looked different during the day, the white pinpricks of the streetlights replaced with the weak golden glow of winter sunlight.
The yellow light made the white stone buildings look dingy, though they still gleamed against the black iron railings and dark grey cobblestones.
The houses here were all new, with sash windows and smooth stone, circled round a glassy pond.
The pond had once been filled with houses, too, before the explosion that had destroyed all the buildings in the area and left a crater in its wake, now perfectly round and dotted with boathouses.
People milled about, richly clad in silks and fine wools, in the aimless strides of folk who had nowhere to be and were simply out for the sake of it.