Page 68 of The Hunter
“Start with who gave birth to the boy down the hall.”
Millie nodded, her heart feeling very close to the surface of her chest, as though calling to anything sharp that would pierce it. It would take very little to break her at the moment, and she hoped that he couldn’t tell. The ruthless man leaning against the basin could do it without a thought.
Without remorse.
“My name is Millicent Karolina Lapinski,” she told his arm with an unblinking stare. “Agnes, Jakub’s birth mother, was my best friend in the world. She was born Agnes Mertenskya and she lived on the Polish side of Ripen Street in Whitechapel with me. We had strangely similar upbringings. My father died when I was young, hers abandoned them. My mother drank herself to death, hers took opium. We both had a handful of brothers, but she had two sisters, as well.”
Agnes’s face surfaced from the murky depths of the past, a ghost unavenged but not forgotten.
“We both left Whitechapel as soon as we could, and I forced her to join an acting company with me, even though she was painfully shy. We changed our names. I picked something I thought sounded Parisian and sophisticated. Agnes changed her last name to Miller, after the first man she fell in love with, who was the first of many to break her heart.”
Millie finally looked up into Argent’s enigmatic features. She’d never wished more fervently than she did now that she could see into someone’s heart. Read their thoughts. He gave her nothing, as usual. “You see, Mr. Argent, that is where Agnes and I differed. All she wanted was the love of a good man. And all I wanted was the love of the entire British empire, and I knew that I could not have both. I couldn’t allow myself liberties, or pregnancies, or marriages. So I never did. I remained unattainable, and I knew that would make me a star.”
A mirthless sound escaped her throat. “Compared to the struggle of fighting for my son’s life, I realize how trite all of that seems now. But… Jakub has changed everything.
“Agnes never told me who Jakub’s father was. Only that she loved him, and was convinced that he loved her. She said there were circumstances, ones she would never share with me, that kept them apart. I knew when she would go and meet with him because she would leave Jakub with me for the evening, and then she was melancholy for days after.
“One afternoon, when Jakub was four years old, she gave me a letter and asked me not to read it, but to keep it safe. She told me the letter was from Jakub’s father, that he finally was leaving his childless wife and legitimizing Jakub as his heir. I’d never seen her so happy, so delirious with hope. She kissed Jakub and me, and left him with me for the evening. She told me that she and his father were meeting to plan their future, that she would tell me everything when she returned but…” A catch of emotion broke her voice.
“She never came back.” Argent said what she could not.
Millie could feel her face crumple and hid it in her hands. “I was so angry with her that day because she’d taken my favorite pair of gloves. But I got them back when Chief Inspector Morley brought them to me, covered in… in her… blood. The gloves had my initials in them. They never found her body, only parts. Only… one part. Her womb. The place she’d carried dear Jakub for all those precious months. Cut out of her, like an animal. That’s when… when I knew he was in danger. I switched acting companies and made Jakub mine.” Her chest hitched on a few sobs, and her fingers caught a wave of tears. She thought she’d finished mourning for Agnes, but the pain and fear of losing her friend, the subsequent stress of five years of bringing up a child when she had no idea how to do so, broke upon her with the force of a building caving in. The weight was compounded by the near attack on Jakub this evening, her exhaustion, and the fact that she’d just given her virginity to a man and not three seconds later she was sobbing in front of him. Like a ninny.
“What if he’d been hurt tonight?” she wailed. “What if I’d been killed and he’d been taken God knows where? Who would have kept him safe? Who would have loved him if I was gone?”
Big hands cupped her elbows and lifted her to stand. “Stop this.” A cold but gentle command. “I—I don’t like to see your pain.”
She knew that about him, and her humiliation seemed to make her cry harder. “I can’t,” she said between hiccupping bursts of grief and fear.
“You and your son survived the night. I will ensure the safety of you both, as I vowed to do. Every threat to you will be decimated, I swear it.”
Giving in to a reckless impulse, Millie surged against him, throwing her arms around his torso and burying her tears in his chest. For every few that fell, one or two were tears of relief, of gratitude, of wonderment that a man would come into their lives to destroy it, and become their savior instead.
She’d expected him to be cold. To be still and frozen, or worse, rebuke her. But Millie didn’t care, she’d do enough holding for them both. She just needed to lean on something, onsomeoneheavier and stronger than she was. If only for a moment, she needed to put the weight pressing her into the earth on someone else’s shoulders. And his were so large, so impossibly wide. Couldn’t they support her for just a moment?
At first he stiffened, his arms flaring up from his sides in surprise, and still she clung to him, her sobs already beginning to lose the strength of a tempest. Against her damp cheek and ear, a stirring began that turned into a thrum. The thrum became a beat, an ever-increasing rhythm, and listening to it soothed her, somehow.
Maybe because she’d truly believed him a man without a heart. And here was evidence of it, right beneath her ear.
Then he did something extraordinary. His fingers twined in her hair once again, but he didn’t draw her away. Instead he pressed her close, closer, cupping her head against his now racing heart. His other hand inched across the expanse of velvet covering her back. Were he anyone else, she’d call his movements tentative, hesitant. But Christopher Argent never hesitated. He was afraid of nothing, not even death. He’d said as much. So it bemused Millie when he couldn’t seem to decide on the correct place to rest his hand on her back.
His breaths were heavy, but measured, as though he controlled them. She could hear his lungs fill in the cavern of his ribs. Her breath began to coordinate with his. Short, deep inhales, hers interrupted by hiccups. Long, smooth exhales, each one releasing more and more tension from her shoulders.
Lord, but he was firm. Hard. A monolith of strength and power. She knew she could strike him, scream at him, push him and rail at him and he would weather it, unfazed. Unaltered. Unmoved. So she didn’t. She sank into him instead. And he stood there, silent and still, letting her fingers cling to the muscle of his back and her tears soak his shirtfront. He gave no meaningless words of comfort. No platitudes or humor to distract her from her feelings. Just silence, and breath, and an infinite patience she hadn’t known any man alive could cultivate.
He was so different from the beast who’d pressed her bent body into the bed a dozen or so minutes ago. Something had softened within him, as well. She could feel it. A tension was missing from his muscles, a fervency from his manner.
He seemed… relaxed. Like a bear in his den, drinking in the silence, reveling in the darkness.
He’d forgiven her lie.
Millie didn’t know how long they stood there like that, but her crying had ceased eventually and she was reduced to a few sniffles. It surprised her how much better she felt, and though she was embarrassed, she still didn’t want to let him go.
“Forgive my hysterics,” she ventured. “I think the events of this night have left me rather overwhelmed. Every time I think of poor Jakub alone with that man… he must have been so frightened.” Tears clogged her throat again, and she forced them aside. She was done with that.
“For such a young lad, your son was very brave.” Millie could hear Argent’s words in two ways, released into the room, and rumbling in his chest. She liked his voice like this, the way it sounded from the inside.
“Was he?” She let out a rueful breath. “I never thought of him as brave.”
