Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Charlie was certain he was going to die.
It wasn’t just the three boys chasing him.
It wasn’t the tough man who had watched him weeping as he sucked some depraved old man’s cock in the mouth of the alley, then robbed him of the pennies the bastard had given him.
It wasn’t even the endless nights spent huddling in shadows, praying the thieving gangs or constables wouldn’t find him.
Charlie was certain he was going to die, because everything had happened so fast that he hadn’t been able to brace himself or plan for his tumble into darkness.
He was hungry. It had been more than a day since he’d last eaten.
His brain felt heavy because he hadn’t dared to fall asleep for fear someone would slit his throat in the dark for what little he had left and he’d never wake up.
His body was sore from cold and stone and the callousness of strangers.
He was definitely going to die.
The three bullies who had chased him from the market, where he’d tried to snatch an apple from a cart but had fumbled the basic act, caught up to him and threw him into the muck of yet another dark, damp London street.
He didn’t know where he was, didn’t know what time of day it was, and barely knew himself anymore.
As the largest of the boys sat on him, pummeling him while he shielded his head with his arms and sobbed, the voice that had been getting louder within him for the last week told him he should just give up.
Let them take his shoes. Let them steal his money and his clothes and his dignity. What did he care anymore?
He’d been found out for who he was.
This was the cost of the fire in his soul.
He was a breath away from surrender, holding onto the last shreds of hope with his ragged fingernails. He would never see his mother and sister again anyhow, so why not just give them his last breath and disappear into the muck all around him?
“I’ll call the police if you don’t let him go.”
The wilted and fallen petals of Charlie’s soul suddenly reformed themselves into a bud at the rich, tenor voice somewhere above him.
The pressure on his chest lifted a few seconds later. Charlie didn’t trust it. He didn’t think it could be real. Those boys were out for blood, and they weren’t going to leave until they got it.
Except they went away. His mind was still trying to catch up to how and why, but they were definitely gone.
And then he was there.
“They’re gone,” his savior said, lowering himself by Charlie’s side and touching him. “You’re safe now.”
It couldn’t be. Charlie shook his head and hid. No one in their right mind would do anything to help him. Hadn’t the last month on the streets taught him that? Hadn’t his entire life before that proved it?
“Come on,” the man said, still touching him and looking at him now. “Up you come. Let’s see the damage.”
Charlie could have hidden forever, but the way the man stood and pulled him to his feet brooked no argument.
And that felt good, like an anchor in a storm.
Like a fiery beacon leading him inexorably through the rain to dash him against the rocks before he reached the shore.
He could smell the man above the stench of the street refuse and his own, shameful body odor. He smelled of soap and fine cloth and everything Charlie liked. He had a steady presence and a strength that radiated from him, too.
When he grasped Charlie’s chin and forced him to look up and meet his eyes, Charlie knew.
The fire within him roared to life.
He couldn’t breathe for a moment. He could only stare.
Warm, clever eyes. Neat, soft brown hair. Lips that could do wonderful, terrible things. A small mole near the back of his jaw on the left side. A spot on his neck where he might have cut himself shaving several days ago.
Sadness and tension.
Arousal.
Charlie couldn’t look away, and not just because the man still held his chin like he wouldn’t ever let go.
He couldn’t look away because the man didn’t belong where he was.
He didn’t belong any more than Charlie did, and that was more than Charlie’s exhausted, defeated heart could puzzle out at the moment.
“I have a proposition for you,” the man said. Charlie couldn’t recall whether he’d said something else since helping him to his feet and didn’t know if he’d embarrassed himself by just gaping at the man. Until he asked, “Have you ever had your photograph taken?”
It took a second for the words to string together and make sense in his mind. It took even longer for him to make the question make sense.
Once it did, he shook his head, even though that wasn’t an honest answer.
“Would you like to?” the man asked.
Charlie knew what it was to have a photograph taken, of course. His father had had two taken of their family in the past few years. The most recent one sat in a frame in the parlor at home.
Not home now, his parents’ house.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if his father had yanked that photograph from its frame and ripped him out of it, or tarred over his image in black as if he’d never been part of any family to begin with.
“I am a photographer,” the man said when Charlie took too long to react to him. “I take a very specific kind of photograph that I sell to a unique sort of gentleman. I pay five shillings, I’ll feed you and give you a bath, and you never have to pretend to know me if you see me again.”
Five shillings for a photograph? That was more than he’d been paid at the accountancy office in the six months he’d worked there.
“I photograph nudes,” the man went on. “In particular positions.”
Charlie sucked in a sudden breath. Five shillings for photographs of debauchery.
His debauchery.
The idea of it had his skin prickling and his insides fizzing.
Imagine capturing those moments of transcendence forever.
The man smiled. “So you understand?”
Charlie nodded. His pulse raced and some of the memories he was certain he should forget but didn’t want to sparked in his brain. Lovely, heated memories. Wicked memories.
“Are you interested?” the man asked, the same sort of sparks in his eyes.
The man waited for him, studying him as if he were already framing the photographs and hanging them in a prized place. And then gazing at them as he took himself in hand.
Heat spilled through Charlie, guilty and tempting and sharp. He’d followed that heat before, and look where it’d gotten him.
Then again, he was going to die anyhow. Why not die with a taste of heaven before he ended up eternally in hell?
He nodded.
“Good,” the man said, letting go of his jaw.
Charlie felt the loss of the man’s touch immediately.
The man gestured for Charlie to follow him, but turned back and asked, “Are you older than eighteen?”
A shiver passed through Charlie’s gut, coalescing in his balls. The man must have wanted something beyond the ordinary.
Charlie swallowed, knowing full well what his answer would commit him to, and nodded.
The man smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Follow me. I think this will be an arrangement that we’ll both benefit from.”
Charlie followed. At that point, knowing full well the dangers that reached for him from the shadows all around him, he didn’t think he had any choice.
It was either die at the hands of the next cutpurse who found him huddled between empty crates behind some dank pub or lose himself to the depravities of a man who had dubious plans for him.
Even though he’d been born and raised in London, Charlie wasn’t familiar with all its streets and corners. Most of his life had been lived in Bermondsey. He could count the number of times he’d ventured north of the Thames in his twenty years on one hand.
He’d crossed over the river deliberately when he’d been discovered and his father had thrown him out.
It had seemed poetic and fitting that he should divide his life before being caught with his trousers down and after with an entire river.
Even though it’d only been a month, the two parts of his life felt so different as to be unrecognizable to each other.
The London that his savior walked him through on the north side of the river was worlds away from the south.
The buildings were older and statelier. Oxford Street was a mad, bustling mess, even compared to the factories that had surrounded Charlie in his childhood.
The rows of neat houses and small businesses along Wigmore Street represented an entirely different world to Charlie.
At the same time, he wasn’t at all surprised when they reached a small but neat building with a shingle depicting a camera hanging by its door and thick curtains drawn to conceal its interior.
It was far grander than the crowded, stuffy shop his father had bundled his family off to for their portrait.
The man unlocked the front door with a key he drew from the same pocket where he’d stashed his baton, then held it, arm extended, for Charlie to walk inside.
It wasn’t exactly fear that Charlie felt as he walked into the tidy shopfront with its scent of chemicals and leather.
It was dark with shadowy portraits of nameless people staring at him from the walls, but as soon as the man shut and locked the shop door behind them, he lit a lamp that stood as if waiting for him on a counter near the door.
“It’s not much,” the man said. “At least, it’s not much up front. Come and see the studio.”
Silently, eyes wide as he took in every detail, Charlie followed the man behind a small counter and through a curtain into the back of the shop.
The space behind that curtain was much larger than Charlie expected.
It contained a staged area with a variety of curtains and screens that could be drawn down or across one wall.
A small chaise lounge sat in the middle of the space, and several chairs and a column tall enough to lean on were crowded off to one side.