Chapter Five
They’d made it back to the Lyon’s Den through the servant’s entrance, past the kitchens where Marta was already kneading dough for the morning shift. One look at Rosine’s torn hem and Sander’s scraped knuckles, and the kitchen maid had pressed her lips together and asked no questions. Smart woman.
One floor up, the alley door to Sander’s chamber was three doors down—close enough to Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s office, but far enough for propriety—or what passed for it when dogs chased one through Mayfair gardens.
Moments later, with the dogs’ breath still raw in her memory, Rosine stood in Sander’s narrow chamber and tried to steady the shake in her hands.
This was Sander’s—she could tell: spare coat on the peg, boots set heel-to-heel, a chess set, and a small Hebrew prayer book on the table.
Mrs. Dove-Lyon kept her women under her own roof, but not all her wolves—propriety on one side of the wall, watchfulness on the other.
The door had shut on the alley and its teeth. The room held a chipped table, an iron bed, and a neat shelf. On the shelf, one treasure: a brass samovar, polished until it gathered the candlelight and kept it. Her satchel of raisins pressed hard against her ribs. She did not put it down. Not yet.
“Rosine,” he shaped her name as if tasting it, reverent and a little dangerous.
Heat from the run still climbed her throat.
The scent here was soap, tea, and something worn—wool pressed smooth by careful hands.
She saw two of her raisin buns on a plate gone dry with age, two apples mottled from storage. Nothing wasteful. Everything chosen.
She should have thanked him. He had brought her through gates and walls, torn his breeches, and set his body between hers and danger.
I should be grateful. I am furious.
He shields me from the world, but he saved me from the hounds.
“You’ve made this yours,” she said at last, because speech felt safer than the silence that made room for all she could not hold.
“It is rented.” No apology. His gaze moved over her face, then down to her arms, still curved tight around the satchel. “You’re trembling.”
“No.” She was. Fingers aching, she eased them open, inch by inch, and set the satchel on the table as if the leather might bruise.
He touched the latch, so the door stayed a handspan ajar—room to leave, room to breathe—then struck the stumpy candle.
The wick spat and caught. Steam rose as he poured tea; soap, wool, and the faint bite of metal lived in the warm air.
Her eye went to the things that had not left him. “That samovar,” she said softly. “From home?”
“My mother’s,” he answered, resting a palm on the lid, a touch that resembled memory.
“The prayer book—my father’s.” His hand shifted to the slim brown volume on the shelf, then to the chessboard beside it.
“And this was my brother’s. We played winters until the stove went out.
I kept the board when there was nothing else left after they emptied our home.
” He didn’t need to say anything about their family and their belongings; Rosine knew all too well how Jews had been treated in the Pale of Settlement.
Apparently, it was no different so many miles away where she’d been raised in Strasbourg.
“I kept sugar,” she said, surprised by how easily the truth came. “Flour. Not because they were safe, but because they gave answers to my hands when nothing else would. If I worked, something rose at a time when nothing else made sense.”
He slid a bun toward her—dry top, split seam. Her throat tugged tight.
“I dunk them when they dry,” he said, the tension of his expression easing. “Every morning. I like to begin the day thinking of you.”
Heat ran under her skin—startle, pleasure, sense enough to fear them both. He lifted her cup to pass it; his fingers brushed hers and held for the space of a breath, as if the touch itself were a question.
“What do you want in London, Rosine?” he asked. “All of it. Tell me.”
“You know what I want, a lease for my own bakery,” she said. “A blue-on-cream sign with my name above the door. Light in the kitchen, not just heat. Friday nights with peace enough to breathe. A man who sees me and doesn’t ask me to be small. And to keep my faith while I do it.”
She swallowed. The room felt very narrow and very kind. “I called you a fox,” she said at last, the words warming as they left her.
“Why?” he asked, spoon stirring once through the tea, watching her rather than the cup.
“Because when other men bare teeth, you do not. You think first and wait. You choose the gate no one sees, and you’re there before danger knows it’s moved.
” Her fingers curled around the cup. Steam kissed her wrist. “You read a chessboard the way you read danger—three moves ahead. That is how you keep breath in your chest when dogs run after you.”
He sat down across from her, the bench complaining, a sound too human for comfort. “Strategy is foresight.” He cupped the clay cup as if he needed to hold on to something.
“And foresight put your arm in front of me,” she said, the truth tripping out before she could smooth it. Her chest tightened around it. “You were—putting yourself in danger because I put myself in danger.” The dogs had been giant. Their growls still hummed in her bones.
He held his cup. “If danger comes too close to you, it shall meet me first. For as long as I breathe, nothing touches you.”
The even way he said it—no flourish, only fact—made her throat sting.
Since Strasbourg, she had not been held by anything but cold and crowds.
Sheltered daughter one night, hunted girl the next; every door she’d opened since, she’d opened alone.
She had taught herself to be iron because there was no one else.
Letting him stand between her and harm felt like surrender—and like rest. Both at once. That was the terror.
He’d left the door ajar. He didn’t crowd.
He looked as if he could see the thin, tired places loneliness leaves and would stand there without pressing.
The way he had moved in the garden had not been performance; it had been practice, exact and ungentle.
She loved him for it and hated that loving felt so frighteningly easy.
She lifted her chin. “Then don’t keep the world from me,” she said. “Come through it with me.”
“Beside you,” he answered, as steady as the promise itself. He set his cup down.
“I’d have to be rather close to you then,” she ventured.
“The closer, the better,” he said, lifting his gaze to hers. He pushed the cup toward the middle of the table, pushed his sleeves up his arms, and over his elbows—muscular, strong arms.
Not only did she hate that she loved him for it, and loved that she hated it, which felt like the beginning of something she could not stop. She was making her heart vulnerable again, for love, family, and loss could tear her apart in ways worse than the hounds.
There, the emotion had a name now and wouldn’t ever vanish again. Love.
“I’ll always keep you safe,” he said.
I do not want a keeper. I like it when this man chooses me.
I want to watch him play chess all night and then bring me home safely in the morning.
I want you.
“You blocked my view today at the Den,” Rosine said.
“You should not have gone to the gambling floor,” he went on, softer now, as if he understood that a scold would break something he did not want broken.
He always spoke as if he’d known her innermost thoughts.
She’d read a book once about soulmates, but didn’t believe the idea more than a romantic farce.
Until now. “I wanted to shield you, but not because you cannot bear it.”
“Then why stand between me and the world?”
“They aren’t our world and may not want us in theirs, which could mean danger,” he said. “They don’t even know the world. In Russia, they pen us into the Pale—districts you cannot leave without papers. When trouble comes, a fence holds you still and makes you a target.”
Her fingers tightened on the cup. “In Strasbourg, there was no fence. They came anyway—windows smashed, shutters ripped, names shouted. The broadsheets called it a ‘disturbance’ and went back to Waterloo and racing. I survived because I hid, but…”
He nodded once. “Austria uses paper for the same work—Familiantenrecht. It’s a threat that’s even found the Lyon’s Den. Under this special law against Jews, a firstborn son may marry; the others are pushed out or wed in secret. Families separated, to fit a rule, by humans, against humans.”
“England is kinder to Jews. We have chances,” she said.
“But even England’s laws keep us from the universities. We can’t own land. Guilds shut their doors. A Jewish merchant’s lease is a favor, not a right.”
But I want a lease for my bakery. I want it and won’t let myself have Sander unless I can be independent.
She needed it the way she needed air—her name on a door that can’t be taken, coin that was hers if she had to run again.
Without those things, she’d be just what she was in Strasbourg: a girl who depended on her father’s roof and her mother’s kitchen, who believed in promises that burned the night the mob came.
I survived because I was small enough to hide and young enough that no one thought I mattered. I won’t be her again—the one who waits for men to decide if she’s allowed to live.
She wanted Sander more than she’d ever wanted anything. But she wouldn’t let herself have him unless she could stand alone first, because if she leaned on him and he fell—or she did—they’d both go down.
I learned that in ash and blood.
Before Rosine found the words to carry on, Sander inhaled to speak. “Mrs. Dove-Lyon writes different rules,” he said. “Wages for work. Locks that hold. A future if we earn it. That’s why I stepped in—so you don’t become a story for men who don’t know your worth.”
Steam lifted between them. She drew a steady breath. “Then be with me,” she said. “Guard the path, not the view.”