Chapter 2
Roland Reed had built a career around mitigating threats in dangerous environments, but tonight, the only thing giving him pause was a glinting silver thimble sitting innocuously on the bar of the Tod and Vixen.
It was positioned between the gambling hell’s owner, Thaddeus Beck, and his sister Vix, whose manicured index finger was planted on the thimble’s domed head as she conspired some manner of low-spoken wickedness with her brother, occasionally darting her dark eyes over to where Roland stood with a smirk and a raise of her arched brows.
She’d been lording that stupid thing around for months now but hadn’t yet put it to use.
When, God, was she going to just get it over with?
He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of pulling a face or crossing his arms. He shouldn’t have even made eye contact.
She’d feast on that for the next hour at least. He silently rebuked himself for the misstep and began to scan the room, taking in the early patrons of the establishment as they settled into their favored tables and ordered their particular drinks.
It was only on the returning swivel of his head that his gaze met his employer’s and he was summoned over into their company.
And the bloody thimble’s.
He did not sigh.
Which is to say, he did not sigh in an audible or visible way.
The Beck siblings looked up as he crossed the room, a certain smugness radiating from them as he drew near.
“I’ve just come from Clerkenwell,” Vix said by way of greeting.
“Well, by way of Clerkenwell. I went home first. I’ve a baby, you know.
I wanted to see him, even though Ambrose dotes more than the nursemaid and I’m barely needed.
Anyway, I came here straight after that.
There have been some distressing developments at the clinic of late. Isn’t that right, Teddy?”
Her brother frowned. “Hannah has said the same,” he agreed, craning his neck from one side to the other. “It seems like all the press and attention has had both beneficial outcomes and some negative ones as well.”
“Isn’t that always the way of things?” Roland said, raising his brows. “What’s it got to do with me?”
“Oh, Roland,” Vix purred, tipping the thimble onto its side with a little clack so that his eyes would be drawn down to it. “I’m so glad you asked.”
This time he did sigh. Both audibly and visibly.
The thimble was a relic of their childhood, a game of dares that by no account should have survived this far into adulthood.
Whomsoever held the thimble had the ultimate power to dare any of the others—in this case, Roland himself, Vix and Tod Beck, and their friend Matthew, who was now a vicar and still somehow not exempt from this nonsense—anything at all, and it must be done.
The reward, of course, was that the one forced into doing the dare now got the thimble, and so the cycle could continue.
Vix had won the thing from Matthew back in the autumn and had made it exceedingly clear on multiple occasions that she was only biding her time until she found the exact and perfect way to deploy it against Roland, specifically, for purposes of matchmaking.
Somehow, she’d gotten it into her wicked head that he was besotted with her friend the healer, Mae Casper.
He did not know how.
He did not know why.
He had never confirmed nor denied her suspicions. He hadn’t acknowledged them at all.
“You know as soon as you give me that,” he said darkly, “I am chucking it into the Thames and ending this misery forever.”
“Oh, Roland, stop being dramatic,” Vix said with a click of her tongue. “Look at Teddy. He broods with dignity.”
“I do?” Tod responded, furrowing his brow.
“You do,” his sister confirmed. “And anyway, the thimble isn’t for you, because I know very well that you cannot be trusted with it. That is what I’ve been pondering these last months. How to get around your very clever nonsense.”
“That is what you’ve been pondering?” Roland marveled. “Not your new son? Your husband? Your scholarship charity? Your newborn niece?”
“Oh, Roland,” Vix said sympathetically. “Did you know that some people can think about two or three or even four and more things, all at once? Did you know that?”
“Did you know, Vix,” he replied, saccharine sweet and smiling, “that some people concern themselves only with their own business, and are perfectly content to do so?”
She scoffed. “Sounds dreadfully boring. Anyhow, the clinic. We’re being harassed.”
“We,” repeated her brother, a tint of amusement in his usually even tone. “Are you back to teaching tally classes again?”
“No,” she said, batting her lashes at him. “Rosalind is fully restored and has returned to that matter, but I am and have ever been invested from my own vantage, Teddy. Do not disparage my input. If not for me, the whole affair would still have no curtains.”
“And without curtains, however would the place function?” Roland asked, leaning over the bar and taking up a bottle of port. “Hand me a glass, would you?”
“I would not,” Tod said, frowning as Vix flicked her own empty cup to Roland and he grinned, taking it up and pouring himself a portion of the syrupy-sweet brew. “Weren’t you just implying that you were the most matured amongst us?”
“Me?” Roland mumbled through his sip of port.
Vix sighed. “I am giving the thimble to Teddy,” she announced, “because he is in charge of you. And then he will give it back to me when I have the power to manipulate you further. Perhaps we’ll use Matthew as well. Don’t you see? It is perfect.”
Roland frowned at her through the rim of his glass and then tipped the remainder of the drink into his mouth and forced a swallow. “No.”
“No, you don’t see?” she asked, pursing her lips. “Or no, it is not perfect?”
“No,” he said again, and then narrowed his eyes at Tod. “Why are you playing along with this?”
“Because it amuses me,” Tod answered in the most monotone, disaffected voice imaginable. “And because that clinic is a personal project of mine and my wife’s and it is actually in tangible danger. We would have needed your aid with or without Vix’s odd fixation on your romantic avoidance.”
“My what?” he repeated, aghast.
“Oh, please, Roland,” Vix tutted. “If both you and Mae were any more obvious exchanging heavy, heated glances at one another and refusing to speak for years on end now, all of our furniture would have char marks. The entire sanctuary at Holy Comfort would be a sooty ruin. It is funny, but it is also exhausting.”
“Then go and bother her!” he exclaimed, reaching out for the bottle again, which Tod immediately slid farther down the bar and out of reach without comment. “Dammit!”
She gave a long, bored sigh.
From the faro table in the left corner of the gaming room, a small scuffle seemed to be breaking out, with a gentleman standing and accusing the dealer of some manner of subterfuge. It was routine, some refrain of the same old song, titled I Can’t Possibly Lose That Many Times in a Row.
Roland grinned. “Duty calls.”
“Oh, go on, then,” Vix said, raising her brows. “Don’t think that’s stopping the discussion. It’ll just have fewer interruptions while you’re mothering degenerates.”
He walked around her, gripped one of her glossy ringlets, and gave it a firm tug as he passed by, smiling wider at her cry and gasp of outrage as he skipped along to break up the brewing fisticuffs.
If she was going to meddle in his life like a child, he would give as good as he got. As he always had.
It was, mercifully, a night full of jackassery throughout the gaming floors, which was standard fare during the High Season, and a perfect distraction during any visit where Vix had chosen Roland as her victim rather than someone more entertaining: namely, absolutely anyone else.
He was kept busy. He enjoyed his work. He especially enjoyed the skeptical smirks and looming postures of underestimation sizing up his lean build and gentle features as he approached, before a man who’d had too much to drink or a lifetime of picking on people smaller than him took a misguided lunge or swing.
He had learned where to hit and exactly how hard very young.
First from the enforcers at the brothel where he’d been born and spent his childhood, then from the other boys when he’d started working as a linkboy.
However, he’d really become a force to be reckoned with when he’d befriended Thaddeus Beck, whose father was a boxer by trade.
Tod himself had little interest in the fights, but Roland had sneaked off from his linkboy duties more than once to both watch and to beg to be taught.
He had offered to assist the medic who patched up the fighters when he was still so young that his long, strawberry-blond hair and big turquoise eyes, paired with a voice that hadn’t yet dropped, had oft gotten him confused for a girl.
He’d learned a lot about how to hurt a man from watching that medic patch them back up.
He’d learned where the kidneys are. Where the air pipes run. How easy it is to break a nose. Where the skin is the thinnest.
You did not need to be built like a trebuchet to fling another person around like one. You just had to know where to put your leverage.
And, being small and pretty and working in the dark of night with all manner of gentlemen, Roland had found plenty of cause to use this knowledge from the first instant of coming into contact with it.
He had navigated those years of lighting paths for drunken rich men in the dark alleys of London, had dodged their grabbing hands and leering breath.
And the one time he had been caught, the one time it had almost gone too far, there had been a large, strong boy in the shadows who’d stepped between Roland and the gentleman, and gotten a slash through his shoulder and a threat of imprisonment for his trouble.