“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he snapped. “I’m not a boy anymore.”
“I know.” It was all she could think to say.
“You shouldn’t have gone to see him. Do you know what they call him?”
She raised her brows. “They call him that because of me.”
“It doesn’t mean he hasn’t come to deserve it. I don’t want you near him again.”
Too late .
“You don’t want?” she said, suddenly irrevocably irritated. “You haven’t a choice. The man holds all our money and all the cards. And I’ve done what I can to save the home.”
Kit scowled. “It’s always the home. Always the boys.”
Of course it was. They were the important part. They were what she’d done right. They were her good.
But it wasn’t worth fighting Kit. “How did you even know he was here?”
He narrowed his gaze on her. “Do you think I am an idiot? I pay the whore in the street good money to look out for you.”
“To look out for me? Or to keep track of me?”
“She saw the Killer Duke. Sent word to me.”
Anger flared at the idea that her brother would spy on her. “I don’t need protection.”
“Of course you do. You always have.”
She bit back the retort—that she’d faced more demons than he had, for years. Alone. And returned to the matter at hand. “Kit—” She stopped. Reframed. “Christopher, I went to him because we needed it. You . . .” She hesitated, not knowing quite how to say the words. Spreading her hands wide, she tried again. “You lost everything .”
Christopher pushed his fingers through his hair once more, the move violent and unsettling. “You think I don’t know that ? Christ, Mara!” His tone was raised, and she was instantly, keenly aware of where they were—of the name he’d used. She looked to the door, confirming it was closed.
He did not care. “Of course I know it! I lost everything he left me.”
Everything of hers as well. Scraped together and stupidly entrusted to his keeping. But all that was nothing compared to the funds that had been set aside to run the orphanage. Every cent the men had left with their sons.
He’d told her his bank would protect the funds. Grow them, perhaps. But she was a woman and without proof of her marriage or her husband’s death, and so her brother had made the deposits.
Her brother, who couldn’t stop gaming.
Anger flared, even as she wished it wouldn’t. Even as she wished she were sixteen again, able to comfort her younger, gentler, sweeter brother, without hating the man he’d become. Without judging his transgressions.
“You don’t know what it was like to live in his shadow,” he said.
Their father. The man who had unwittingly set them all on this path. Rich as Croesus and never satisfied. He’d always wanted more. Always better. He’d wanted a son smarter and bolder and braver and cleverer.
He’d wanted a duchess for a daughter.
And he’d received neither.
Kit laughed, bitterly. “He’s no doubt watching from his perch in Hell, devastatingly disappointed.”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t own us any longer.”
Her brother’s gaze met hers. “Of course he does. Without him, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t have run. I wouldn’t have gamed. I wouldn’t have lost.” He raised a long arm, pointed in the direction of the street. “You wouldn’t live among waifs and whores—” He stopped. Took a breath. “Why did you go to him?”
“He holds our debt.”
Kit’s gaze narrowed. “What did he say?”
She hesitated. He wouldn’t like it.
“What did you agree to?” he pressed. She heard the irritation in his tone. The frustration.
“What do you think I agreed to?”
“You sold yourself.”
If only it had been so simple. “I told him I would show myself. Return him to society.”
He considered the words, and for a moment, she thought he might protest. But she had forgotten that desperate men turned mercenary. “And I get my money back?”
She heard the pronouns. Hated them. “It’s not only your money.”
He scoffed. “What was yours was minimal.”
“What was the orphanage’s was enough to run the place for a year. Maybe longer.”
“I’ve a great deal to worry about, Mara. I’m not about to worry over your whelps, too.”
“They’re children! They rely upon me for everything!”
He sighed, clearly through with her. “Did you get my money back or not?”
It did not matter to him that she would lose everything. This life she’d built. This place that had kept her safe. Given her purpose. He didn’t care, as long as his money was returned.
And so she did what she was so good at.
She lied.
“Not.”
Fury crossed his handsome face. “You made a deal with the devil and you get nothing in return? What good are you? What good was this?” His lips twisted in irritation as he paced the room. “You’ve ruined everything!”
Her gaze narrowed on her brother. “I did what had to be done. He isn’t going to fight you, Kit. Now, at least, he will leave you alone.”
Kit turned and tossed a chair out of the way, the furniture crashing against the wall and splintering into a dozen pieces. Mara stilled.
The anger was familiar.
In all senses of the word.
She stepped behind her desk, pressing her knuckles to the desktop, hiding the shaking of her hands.
She was losing control of the situation.
Perhaps she deserved it. Perhaps this was what happened to women who tried to take fate into their own hands. She’d done just that, changed her future. Changed her life. Lived it for twelve years.
But now it was time to let Kit live his. “This is the deal we struck. Your only chance at honor is my agreeing to admit what I did. I brought the man to my room. I drugged him. I bloodied the damn sheets.” She shook her head. “ I ran. It is I who require forgiveness. I who can give him retribution. And he knows it.”
“And what of me?”
“He is not interested in you.”
Christopher went to the window and looked out on the cold November afternoon. He was quiet for a long moment before whispering, “He should be. He doesn’t know what I could do.”
The sun sinking into the western sky turned his brown locks gold, and Mara recalled a long-ago afternoon at their childhood home in Bristol, Kit laughing and running along the edge of a little pond near their house, pulling a new toy boat behind him.
He’d tripped on a tree root and fallen, releasing the string attached to the boat to catch himself, and the high wind had carried the boat out to the middle of the pond, where it promptly capsized and sank.
They’d been beaten for their transgressions, then sent to bed without supper—Kit, because he hadn’t seen fit to rescue the boat, which had cost their father money, and Mara, because she’d had the gall to remind their father that neither of his children was able to swim.
It was not the first time Kit had been unlucky, nor was it the first time she had tried to protect him from their father’s scorn.
It was also not the last.
But today, she was not protecting him. Today, she was protecting something much more important. And she did not trust him to be a part of her plan. “You remain free of this.”