Nemesis Unlimited [1] Sweet Revenge (36 page)

He studied them. “It’s what we took from the whorehouse.”

“Duplicates,” Marco said. “Forgeries, actually.”

“I ain’t an expert,” Jack murmured, examining the papers, “but they look exactly the same.”

Marco smirked. “One of my specialties when I was still in her majesty’s employ. A good forgery can be worth more than the original.”

“That’s what Rockley will be given,” Eva explained.

“Someone gets the real things,” Jack deduced.

Simon revealed, “I’ve high-up contacts within the government. Men who haven’t been touched by Rockley’s influence. By midnight tonight, they will be in possession of the real evidence.”

Taking the forgeries back from Jack, Eva said, “His treachery will be revealed. Tomorrow morning, everyone shall know about his perfidy. He’ll be utterly ruined.”

“But he won’t know that when we do the swap,” Jack said. “We bilk him out of ten thousand quid, and still get to destroy the son of a bitch.” He looked around the room with a vicious smile. “I think I like you Nemesis lot.” His gaze lit on her, the cold light of retribution warming to something much more personal.

She could get far too comfortable seeing that heat and intimacy. She could start to crave things she shouldn’t have, and leave herself open to immeasurable pain.

Yet her bones, her heart—they ached with wanting him. In the midst of all this madness, the flame of her need burned even brighter.

She busied herself putting away the forged documents, striving for the control that had served her so well for most of her life. The only time she truly lost control was with him. A hazardous thing.

“Now isn’t the opportune moment for celebrating,” she said briskly. “It’s almost certain that if Rockley agrees to the exchange, he’ll try something. We’ve got him cornered, and that makes him dangerous. Today at Miss Jones’s was proof. This juncture is critical, so we cannot let our guard down.”

Jack said, “I don’t get … what’s the word…”

“Complacent,” Eva filled in.

“Yeah. Nobody complacent survives Bethnal Green.”

“Or escapes from prison,” added Harriet.

“Or ascertains the patterns in seemingly random vagaries in a man’s schedule,” Marco threw in.

“Or fights his way in and out of a heavily guarded brothel,” Simon said.

Jack tipped his head in acknowledgment. It warmed her to think how, when first she’d met him, he hadn’t given much value to his intelligence, and neither had the others in Nemesis. A radical evolution had transpired.

Simon headed for the door. “I’ll use our usual means of obfuscation to have this note delivered to Rockley. I won’t wait for a reply, but there will be no way for him to trace the note back to our location.”

“How will we know if he agrees to the drop?” asked Harriet.

“He’ll go for it,” Jack said with certainty. “He won’t play by the rules, but if he thinks he’s got a way to take us out, he’ll grab any chance. Make sure he knows that I’ll be the one doing the drop. That’ll definitely bring him out, not just his thugs. He’ll want to see with his own eyes that it’s been taken care of.”

Nodding, Simon slipped out the door. Harriet, Lazarus, and Marco tried to fill the time by discussing a mining town under the thumb of despotic owners and managers, but all of them were tense, distracted. Her mind spinning with dozens, hundreds of possible outcomes for tonight, Eva couldn’t join in with her colleagues’ talk. Through it all, Jack stood off to the side, massaging his hands in preparation for a fight, his expression distant and brooding.

Needing some way to occupy herself, Eva said to him, “Show me how you escaped from here without anyone knowing.”

He considered it for a moment, seeming to debate whether or not it was a good idea to reveal his secret to her and to Nemesis. Then, “Awright.”

Yet instead of going up to his room, he went downstairs, with Eva following. They walked through the chemist’s shop. He stepped outside, and she trailed after him as he went through the narrow space that ran alongside the building. They emerged in the little yard behind the structure. Their breath steamed in the cold night air, as though she and Jack had become half dragon.

He pointed up to his room. “Just opened the window, climbed out and down. Simple.”

“Not so simple.” She stared up at the thirty-foot climb. “There isn’t much to hold on to, and if you’d fallen, you could have broken something. A leg, or your neck.”

He shrugged. “Something any housebreaker worth his picks knows how to do.”

Rolling her eyes, she said, “Let me be impressed, damn it. For a man with so much braggadocio, you can be ridiculously modest sometimes.”

“Bragga—”

“It means swagger, confidence. Arrogance.”

He snorted. “Yeah, I’ve got that. But I don’t see the point in talking up something that anyone can do.”

“Not anyone.” She glanced around the yard, dark and bare. “Desmond—he’s on assignment, so you haven’t met him yet—he tried to start a garden out here. A vegetable patch and some flowers.”

Jack scraped the toe of his boot through the dirt. “You couldn’t grow rocks out here.”

“For a year, Des kept at it. We’d find him out here at all hours, digging in the dirt, muttering over seeds and soil composition.” She nudged a dried, twisted root with her shoe. “But nothing took. Drove him half mad.”

“My ma said her grandda could grow anything anywhere. He’d drop a pebble into the dust and a whole cabbage would spring up, or so she told us.”

“Did you know him?”

Jack stuffed his hands into his pockets and scuffed around in the dirt. “He was long dead by the time me and Edith came around. And Ma hadn’t seen or spoken to her kin since she was a girl. She came to London looking for work.” He made a low sardonic sound. “Turned out right dandy for her. Wasn’t no more than six and twenty when she died.”

A long life, by Bethnal Green standards. Daily, Eva had evidence of the cruelty of humanity, yet it never failed to pierce her whenever she confronted it again. Was it any wonder she fought so hard to keep herself protected?

Looking over at Jack as he moodily contemplated the barren soil, that same piercing sensation struck her. She was too vulnerable to him—yet she couldn’t stop herself from wanting him.

They both turned at the sound of footsteps. Lazarus appeared at the edge of the yard. “Oi, you two. Simon’s back.”

Upstairs, they found Simon surrounded by the others. He was keen as a knife about to be thrown. “It’s done. We’re meeting Rockley at two in the morning, at the Tower Bridge construction site. No one will be there at that hour, so there’s less chance of a passerby getting caught in the crossfire.”

Nobody disputed that there
would
be crossfire.

The clock on the mantel showed the hour to be several minutes past ten. Fortifying themselves with coffee, the members of Nemesis and Jack gathered around the table to discuss strategy. Lazarus drew up a map of the construction site, and they used this to plot out their positions and tactics. Every eventuality was considered—but no one had the gift of precognition. Situations might arise that no one could foresee. The consolation was that everyone had enough training to handle the unexpected.

By midnight, the air had grown thick with strategies and possibility, dense as the smoke from Lazarus’s pipe.

Simon leaned back in his chair, his fingers laced behind his head. “The only chance we have to ensure the success of this mission is if everyone acts in accordance with the plan.” He looked pointedly at Jack.

As much as they’d grown to trust Jack, he was still the wild card. He’d be within striking distance of the man who killed his sister. Such an opportunity might be too difficult to pass up.

“I know my part, gov,” Jack muttered. “Didn’t come this far just to botch it within spitting distance of the end.”

“You’ve done all right by us, Dalton,” Lazarus said.

“It wasn’t your welfare that interested me,” answered Jack.

Blunt as always. One of the things she liked about him.

“But yours does.” Jack nodded at Eva. “I don’t like the idea of you coming to the drop.”

“Pity,” she said, “because I am.”

“It’ll be sodding dangerous.”

“But the rest of this mission has been safe as a nursery.” When he scowled, she continued. “Gilling surely told Rockley about me, and the thug that attacked us at Miss Jones’s house saw me, too. Rockley knows I’m part of this operation. I need to be there at the exchange. If I’m not at the drop as your backup, he’ll know that you’ll have people stashed out of sight. He’ll see you standing by yourself and then call off the exchange.”

“Then have Simon in plain sight,” Jack countered.

“I have to be there,” she insisted. “I’ve worked on this mission from the beginning, and I’m not crawling away to hide now that we’re almost at the end. The decision isn’t yours to make, but I need you to have faith in me.”

“I’ve got plenty of faith in you,” he said. “It’s Rockley and his men I don’t trust.”

“Me, either.” She lowered her voice. “And that’s why I need to be there to make certain you’re safe. No one I trust with your safety more than me.” She glanced at Marco and Simon. “No insult intended.”

Both men held up their hands. “None taken,” said Marco.

Jack was dourly silent for a long moment. Then he muttered, “Goddamn it.”

As acceptance went, his wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. But she didn’t care if he adored the idea of her coming to the exchange. All that mattered was ensuring the success of the mission and protecting Jack.

*   *   *

She glanced once more at the clock. Less than two hours until they met Rockley for the exchange. Despite her assertive words to Jack, her heart rammed against her ribs. In all her missions for Nemesis, none of their adversaries had been as unpredictable, as dangerous as Rockley. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to ensure his security. A wealthy—and desperate—man. He’d already tried to kill them. Anything could happen tonight. Any of them might be wounded. Or worse.

Her gaze lingered on Jack, dark and austere as he moodily stared at the map of the construction site.

She’d faced risk before, but never had the stakes seemed so high. If anything were to happen to him …

The walls of the parlor suffocated, the tick of the clock deafened. She felt herself on the verge of angry recklessness. It beckoned to her with pointed fingers and glassy eyes. No—she needed control of herself. Yet to spend another minute inside would see the fine threads of her reserve snap.

“Where are you going?” Jack and Simon asked in unison as she bolted for the door.

“I’ll be back for the exchange,” she managed to say, “I just—”

And then she was out the door, down the stairs, and out into the night.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jack was a man of instinct. He acted as his gut steered him to do. So when he saw Eva bolt from the room, he immediately went after her without a second thought.

She was a fast one, though. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the door to the chemist’s shop had already swung shut behind her. He was out on the sidewalk a second later, just in time to see her figure disappearing into the shadows at the end of the street.

Calling her name would just wake the neighborhood. Instead, he ran in pursuit, along dark streets barely lit by flickering lamps. He followed the sound of her boots on the pavement, his own heart pounding in time. He kept seeing her face the moment before she’d run from Nemesis headquarters. A kind of wildness and fury he’d not seen in her eyes before. Worry gripped him like a fist around the throat. She seemed capable of anything.

He turned a corner and caught the flash of her skirts in the lamplight. She headed toward a little park dense with trees and shadows.

The hell with it.
“Eva!”

She turned at the sound of his voice. Her eyes were like an animal’s—an animal that would tear your hand off if you tried to feed it. She backed into the park, until the darkness swallowed her.

He sprinted into the park and plunged through the shrubbery, shoving aside branches that scratched at his face, until he emerged in front of a small brick shed surrounded by grass.

Eva paced back and forth in front of the building.

He moved toward her slowly, step by step, the way one might approach a hawk caught in a snare. How was he supposed to get close to her? She seemed ready to bolt at the smallest movement. Some small words, then.

“How many missions have you been on for Nemesis?” he asked.

His question seemed to catch her off guard. “Eight.”

“You always get this nettled before a face-off?” He took another step closer.

She shook her head. “This is the first time.”

“Then what’s got you so riled?”

Her pacing stopped. Fitful light barely pushed through the trees and shrubbery. She looked more shadow than flesh, the details of her blending into darkness. Yet he could feel her, knew all of her—a map carved into his chest. He took one more step toward her.

“I’ve never had so much to lose before,” she said tightly. “You could get hurt. Or you’ll survive, but then you have to leave. Either way, I lose you.”

There was a crashing inside him like a carriage accident, spilling pleasure and fear and anger all out onto the pavement in a heap of confusion.

“I don’t want it to happen,” she went on, “but it will, and it makes me so damn
furious
.”

He was silent. How could he get her to burn that fury out of her? Rage was a dicey thing—it motivated or derailed, and he didn’t want her so distracted by it that she might do something dangerous.

“Hit me,” he said.

“I’m not going to
hit
you,” she said, appalled.

“When anger’s eating me up and got me so I can’t think, best way I know to get rid of it is to hit something. You’d break your hand if you punched a tree or the wall. So, best thing for it is to hit me.” He stood with his arms at his sides, presenting himself as a target.

Still, she hesitated. So he held up his hands, palms out. “Use these. Like sparring pads.”

For another moment, she didn’t move. Then she landed a jab in his palm. He kept his feet, but the strength in her punch came as a surprising certainty.