Page 31 of Greed: The Savage
Thornwick caught the mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Had they ever sparkled so? They certainly hadn’t for him.
She let Thornwick off by answering, “Dynevor rescued me some years back, brought me here, and—”
He latched onto that. “Rescued?”
“Aye,” she said, gruff and reluctant. Addien glanced at the surface of the wood table. Absently, she traced a line left in the wood by some careless diner’s fork, following its path to a slight dent it faded into. “Got it into my head to sneak an apple and got a constable’s caning for it. Dynevor put a stop to it and brought me here.”
His jaw locked hard enough it strained the muscles, but he felt nothing outside of the fury of a predator hungry for prey.
No wonder she idolized Dynevor.
That sat sour in his stomach.
“And…where were you before Dynevor’s gallant rescue?”
The slight frown on the corners of her lips indicated this time she’d picked up on his peevishness.
Her expression went dark. “Foundling hospital,” she said, her voice hollow.
She was holding something back. Thornwick had been armed with ways of extracting secrets from the reluctant and could have easily steered the answers he sought from her lips.
But for some reason, he didn’t want her secrets that way.
Catching his stare, Addien curled her lip. “Are we going to keep pretending that it wasn’t part of your job to research the backgrounds of every member of the staff and that you know exactly what I was—?” Her voice fell to a ragged whisper. “Who I worked for?”
Nightmares ravaged her eyes and managed to wreak that same danger on his chest.
“I know you were in Diggory’s employ.” If possible, even more color leeched from her face when Thornwick spoke the dead gang leader’s name, leaving Addien a sickly shade of white.
Addien swipedThe Book of Mannersfrom the table, no doubt to give her fingers something to do.
Sure enough, she fanned those pages that were faded yellow. That fluttering left a small cool breeze that ended when she’d reached the end. Addien started the process over.
“Employ?” she said bitterly. “Is that what you’d call it?”
“What wouldyou?”
The eyes she raised to his were haunted. “Hell,” she whispered.
She set the book that’d brought them to this point tonight onto the table and studied it like the cover alone could save her from the hauntings in her head.
He knew everything there was to know about Diggory. Part of Thornwick’s work at the Home Office had been to hunt the ruthless gang leader and locate the lost heirs and noble daughters whom he’d abducted for his twisted noble children army.
But he didn’t know what had Addien endured, and he’d not ask her to relive past traumas because he had an insatiable curiosity about the minx.
Thornwick lay a hand over hers. “You got out, Addien,” he said quietly.
His reminder bolstered her. Addien’s slender shoulders straightened, her back proud once more. When she lifted her gaze, her eyes, twin pools of violet fire, caught and held his. “Aye.”
In the years he’d known her, everything he’d learned about her had come in the course of a single day.
And all of her intrigued him more than was safe.
He snatched his hand back from hers. “You should steal some sleep, Addien,” he said. “We both should.”
Addien didn’t fight him.
Climbing to her feet, she nodded. Addien lingered a moment, and he tensed, waiting for her to speak.
