Page 102 of Greed: The Savage
His fist flew before the filthy words could finish.
Thornwick silenced the rest of that profanity with a swift uppercut to the stupid fellow’s chin, crumpling him in a single blow. Before his equally inept counterpoint had a chance to curl a fist, Thornwick caught him with an elbow to his neck.
The man’s eyes rolled to the back of his head.
He slid to join his friend in a heap.
Thornwick stepped over the prone bodies he’d laid low.
He should have stormed the place to begin with.
As anticipated, the moment Thornwick’s feet touched the pavement outside Forbidden Pleasures, a pair of big, bulkier brutes were there to greet them.
In not sending their biggest weights first, it’d revealed the ineptness of Argyll, Rutherford, and Cadogan. Thornwick expected more—of at least the Home Office man Cadogan once had been.
Neither side spoke and Thornwick let them take him by the arms and take him inside.
Thornwick took it all in as he walked. Back when he’d been a young buck employed at the Home Office, Thornwick kept membership at both the Hell and Sin Club and Forbidden Pleasures. He’d been inside this house of sin many times before. Many,many.
Now, as he was marched through the club with curious eyes on him, Thornwick didn’t evaluate the changes that’d been made since his younger years. As the goons on either side of him marched him through the smoke-threaded gaming hell, he took in the names and faces of people present. From the men positioned around the leather-padded hazard tables to the gleaming oval and round loo tables, with their every carved mahogany side chair occupied, Thornwick missed no one.
They, for their part, remained ensnared by the beauties on their laps and the cards in their hands to pay Thornwick’s slow march through their playground any notice.
The same pall that’d hung over the Devil’s Den didn’t exist in this place. Maybe because the more elevated members of Arygle’s hell had already discussed ad nauseum the early morn murder of one of them. Maybe they’d imbibed so much that grim thoughts weren’t the ones on their slurring, drunken lips.
Either way, they drank, they laughed, they tossed their dice, never knowing they were already carcasses at Diggory’s feast.
When he and the two guards reached the far back of the club, two additional men, even bigger and fiercer than the ones on either side of Thornwick, opened the double doors.
The guards gave him a hard shove at his back, propelling Thornwick through.
They released him quick. That combined with the powerful push sent him stumbling.
Thornwick found his footing. For a moment he contemplated disarming these two, but he knew if he did, it would only further delay him from getting to Addien. His gaze climbed the cream-carpeted, broad ceremonial staircase, as fine and as wide as the one in Thornwick’s future ducal townhouse.
The private suites.
His gut clenched; breath locked in his chest.
Of course, any woman who fled the Devil’s Den and stumbled into Forbidden Pleasures would be delivered to the master’s quarters—questioned, toyed with, and…used.
But this was not any woman.
This was Addien.
“Get climbing. His Grace is waiting for you in his private suites.”
Thornwick allowed himself to be led. Gladly. Willingly. Without resistance, resentment, or pride.
They would bring him to her.
If Argyll had laid claim to her, if he had taken her when she was vulnerable, it would wreck Thornwick, leave him broken beyond repair.
But if Addien gave herself to Thornwick freely, trusted him with her life, her love, she would not only save him, she would make him more than he had ever been.
At last, they arrived at where his meeting with Argyll was to take place, because it was as certain as fact that it wouldn’t be Cadogan. It wouldn’t be Rutherford. Both those two men were notoriously in love with their lives.
Now, the question remained: would it be Argyll alone?
