More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
His mother cried sometimes for those who marched to the gallows, but Christopher never did. A dead prisoner often meant new shoes or a belt.
She was pale, and her eyes were red from crying, but she was still his mother. His tall, beautiful, sturdy mother. The woman who gave him everything, from strong bones, good teeth, and hair the color of rust on the ancient iron hinges, to the last morsel of her meal and a smile that was the only beautiful thing in their gray world.
Christopher didn’t want to be a man, he thought glumly. Not if they turned into rutting brutes like Treadwell, or old leathery fools like Master Ping. He just wanted to be held.
“I have three unequivocal policies that my clients must be aware of.” Argent ticked them off on his fingers, beginning with his trigger finger. “The first, I don’t intimidate, maim, rape, or torture, I execute. Secondary, I leave no messages, clues, or taunts behind for the police or anyone else, handwritten or otherwise. And tertiary, I don’t kill children.”
His heart quickened its pace along with his breath. A pressure exerted itself against his heavy ribs and squeezed. At first he’d considered apoplexy. Now he was altogether convinced it was something else, entirely.
According to Dashforth, Millie LeCour was a liar and blackmailer. A charismatic narcissist dancing with a death sentence. A mark with private rooms above Bow Street. It was all Argent needed to know. Wasn’t it? So … why was he here prowling amongst the crowds of common people like a serpent in a container of mice? Oh yes. Reconnaissance. He’d do well to remember that.
Of all the jewels on display at the Sapphire Room, she gleamed the brightest. Christopher had marked the tired cliché that men would often tell their female companions. They would say that a woman lit up a room. In the past, it confounded him that such a sentiment would occur to either party as a compliment. But now …
He lunged for her, reaching for her throat. One twist. One snap. He’d done it dozens of times. Hundreds. But … his hands. They weren’t obeying. Instead of twisting they were grasping. Instead of dropping they were pulling. Instead of killing, they were—holding? What?
And then she stood. For a moment he couldn’t draw breath. He opened his mouth and took a gulp of air, and drowned in humidity and desire instead. Never in his life had Argent known that one could be paralyzed by lust.
Three days he’d prepared for this. He was a man of ultimate patience and discipline. He wasn’t brave, he was fearless. His will wasn’t strong, it was iron. He’d been burned, whipped, stabbed, and beaten without so much as a moan of pain. So why did the sight of Millie LeCour’s glorious ass have him swallowing a whimper?
The kiss was brutal. Or, at least, Millie was certain he’d meant it to be. But for a man with such a stern mouth, his lips were surprisingly full against hers.
The two oldest professions for hire. The two greatest sins. Fornication and murder.
“I will keep your black-eyed woman and her son alive and untouched by the filthy, godless hands of any who would wish harm upon them,” the Mussulman promised. Leaving his carriage to convey Millie to retrieve her son from his school and then to deposit her at Covent Garden for her performance, Argent strode away, confident that the only filthy, godless hands to touch her would be his own.
Of all the employees of the New London Metropolitan Police currently housed at Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley was Dorian Blackwell’s least favorite. No, that was putting it lightly. He despised the man.
Dorian was not a superstitious man, despite his Highland heritage, but how the unmistakable auburn head of Argent appeared on his terrace in that very moment, as though conjured by conversations of assassins, Blackwell would never know.
It was an olive branch. Or, more aptly, an olive leaf, but it was the most Morley could expect from him.
“I can’t kill her.” Dorian let out a mirthless bark of laughter. “I suppose that’s more than some can say.” “I’ve tried, Blackwell.” Argent looked at the space between them. “My hands were around her neck and then … I kissed her.” Blackwell gaped, struck dumb.
“Maybe you’re half a giant,” Jakub assessed. “Like your father could have been one.” Argent peered down at the child as though examining a queer sort of oddity. “I very much doubt it.” “But you don’t know that he wasn’t, if you never met him.” The assassin paused. “I suppose there’s a certain logic to that.”
“Most of us merely like to be kissed by danger or violence or death. Maybe even let it kiss us, upon occasion. We like to make it a spectacle at which to gasp and laugh, or cry. Though it is only the thrill we want to take home with us, not the reality. We still desire to return to our warm beds, all safe and sound, when the night is over.”
It is an easy thing to commit a sin and say that ‘the devil made me do it,’ and then cast that sin on him. But this life has taught me that we make ourselves into the monsters that we are.
“Telling anyone wouldn’t do you any good,” he informed them dryly. “St. Vincent is within his rights as a husband to treat her how he likes.” “And I’m within my rights as a woman to kick him in the—” She looked down at her son, whose eyes drooped with weariness. “The shins,” she finished, deciding he’d heard enough vulgarity for one night.
A man who didn’t lie. Who didn’t flatter, or seduce, or elaborate. Did such a man really exist?
Her son was draped limply in her arms, secure in the notion that she, his mother, would protect him. She was all he had in this world, and she had to accept that she didn’t have the skills or the necessary brutality to keep him safe during this nightmare.
“That’s certainly no way to live,” she whispered. Argent shrugged. “It’s an excellent way to not die.”
Up until a few days ago, he’d considered himself nothing more than a machine, a hydraulic contraption with cogs and wheels that required fuel to work, sleep to function, and whores for the release of pressure and the maintenance of equilibrium.
“I could kill you,” he murmured through a tight jaw. Millie blinked, offering him a charming smile, doing her best to diffuse a potentially explosive situation. “A man in your line of work really shouldn’t be joking about that sort of thing.”
The ridiculous notion to kiss her soft mouth awake caused Christopher to swallow profusely. Twice. He didn’t dare move, couldn’t trust himself not to do something idiotic, like curl himself around her body and cradle her against him. To use his own mangled flesh as a shield for her perfection.
Only one word carried through the quiet, still morning and braved the tumultuous storm swirling and screaming inside of him, barely contained by his sinew and skin. Mine.
It was a rare person, indeed, who dared to question him, let alone threaten him. Frozen in place, Christopher found himself at a loss for what to do next. How did one make a recalcitrant woman do what she was told?
Millie’s astonishment bordered on indignation as she made a tight sound. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you two are on about,” she huffed, then turned to peek at them hesitantly. “Am I such a monster in the morning?” “Yes,” both Jakub and Christopher answered at once. “Well.” Her lips tightened.
When she’d first met him, she’d thought his eyes dead and cold and utterly indecipherable. But now, when he looked at her as he was doing, she read volumes in their depths. Beautiful things. Terrible things. Words and desires she dare not indentify, because they would set her entire world aflame. Lord, but this man was dangerous.
“Curses and superstitions don’t hire killers, people do,” Christopher remarked. Loretta’s eyebrow, a dark confession to the pretense of her hair color, climbed her forehead. “Where’d you find this ray of sunshine, a morgue?
She’d do well to not mistake the way her nerves sang when he was close to be anything but a primal warning to her that danger was near. She shouldn’t let it entice and thrill her. Oh, but it did.
Argent. Her silent sentinel. Cold and large as a Roman marble statue, and just as ponderously well crafted. Would that he were chiseled out of something more forgiving. Something less forbidding. If only he were earth and ash, flesh and blood like all the rest of God’s creatures. Instead of shadow and ice.
This was a dominant kiss. A shameless kiss. The kiss of a man who knew his sins and granted himself absolution. This was the kiss of a killer.
Was it testament to her failure as a mother that the first man her son seemed to bond with murdered people for money?
It was certainly surreal to enjoy delicious tea in such an elegant parlor when one’s lover was off killing your child’s father somewhere.
“He is handsome, isn’t he?” Farah asked conspiratorially. “And, despite being a bit phlegmatic, he really is charming at times.” “As charming as a typhus epidemic,” Millie quipped into her teacup. Blackwell’s book seemed to give a strangled snort.
“Argent doesn’t have friends,” Dorian muttered. “He has people he’d find it a little more distasteful to kill.”
She could only give him her heart if he’d hold out his hand to take it. She wasn’t the kind of woman to toss it to someone who didn’t want it.
He’d been her first, her only lover. And he was going to walk away. Because he was afraid. Afraid of her. Afraid of himself. Afraid to hope, to want, and … To feel.
In that lightning flash of a moment, Argent knew two things: That her fierce strength was waning and she might not be able to hold the struggling, bleeding Dorshaw in check long enough to choke him unconscious. And— That he was in love with her.
Christopher Argent, the largest, coldest, deadliest assassin any of them had ever heard of, swept a half-naked Millie LeCour off her feet, and held her to him and said not a word as he carried her out of the London underground and out into the night.
Words didn’t exist to describe what she saw in the depths of his eyes. Possession wasn’t strong enough. Desire didn’t cover the half of it. Vulnerability couldn’t touch the silent, searing profundity of it.
She might not be his first lover, but Millie was sure she was the first woman to ever snuggle with the mercenary Christopher Argent.
If she set her mind to something, she attained it. And her mind, her heart, was now set on the man whose big, naked body she was currently draped across. Now … where to start?
Thomas Bancroft. It gave Christopher dark pleasure to imagine the top five ways in which he’d love to execute the man. Unbeknownst to the playwright, each fantasy became more bloody every time Millie laughed at one of his quips.
Christopher had made it almost a fortnight this time without having to see her. Well, half of a fortnight. Almost half. Five days.
“Men like you and me, we don’t love like other men do. With patience and poetry and gentle deference. Our sort of love is possessive—obsessive even—and passionate and consuming and … well, fucking terrifying sometimes.”
“Ladies tend to be emotional creatures. It’s one of the many things they’re better at than we are.”
