Page 97 of The Business of Blood
But he could have changed all that.
“You’re the Ripper?” To scream both a question and an accusation made the most ludicrous sound, but I did it. My chest expelled the words with all the fervency of a poisoned purge. Heaving the tortured conclusion into the air.
I kicked a few candles aside in my enraged advance around the altar. I was lucky my skirt didn’t catch on fire. I was so hot, so inflamed with fury, I might not have noticed imminent immolation until my flesh began melting away. “Did you murder those prostitutes? Did you butcher them? Did you kill Comstock? For me? Because so help me, Aidan, I’ll—”
“No!” He actually backed away from my wrath. Something in my frenzy reached him, and he was again the hapless youth who’d been caught keeping watch as my brothers slipped worms into my stockings. He shielded himself with spread palms as though they would protect him from my onslaught. “God, Fiona. How could you think that of me? Those women, the victims of the Ripper, are like the Magdalene. They needed mercy. Not brutality.”
I thumped his chest as I’d done all my life when displeased with him. “Don’t lie to me, Aidan!”
He grasped my shoulders, then. His fingers bruising with a strength I’d forgotten he hid behind the long, black cassock. How could it have taken me so long to be afraid of him? All my life, I’d taken Aidan’s goodness for granted. Until the moment I realized he could—hemight—kill me if he wanted to.
But he didn’t. He merely brought his forehead close to mine until his doe-brown eyes became my entire world. “Fiona.” He shook me softly. “Do you really think I’d hurt Mary?”
My every breath was a shaking mess. “Up until today, I never thought you’d hurtanyone.”
To my utter shock, he pressed a fond kiss to my forehead. “Bless you, Fi, but you’ve never been so wrong in both your estimations of me. I am a warrior of God. And, therefore, I am unquestionablynotJack the Ripper. He is a servant of the devil.” His hands on my shoulders turned me to face Jorah.
“Who else could it be but the Hammer?” Aidan whispered in my ear.
“The Hammer…” Jorah David Roth. “Jack the Ripper?” I blinked down at the man beneath me. Like a bear in a trap. I felt pity and a strange sense of disappointment. How did someone so canny, so clever to the point of devious, fall prey to a priest? It was difficult to see someone so powerful bound and helpless.
More difficult for him than I, I was sure.
An animalistic fierceness blazed from the gangster. His lips curled back from his sharp eyeteeth in a wolfish growl. His hazel eyes raged at me with silent demand. With threats and promises of retribution.
If he survived this, I’d have yet one more reason to be afraid.
“Everyone knew the Ripper was a Jew, and the Hammer is the perfect suspect,” Aidan continued from behind me. “What’s another dead whore to him? Less competition. He’s a snake, Fiona. A serpent. And the devil makes him do unspeakably evil things. He’s coerced you to commit egregious sins. Sins for which you’d hang. You said so, yourself.”
For a moment, the Ripper had a face. A beautiful, exotic visage. He cut women open for sport with those deft fingers I so admired. He dominated them. Penetrated them. Took disgusting little trophies he might keep in a hidden golden Shiloh room, gleefully gloating how he’d outsmarted us all. That he ruled us all.
People not only feared his name. They feared his shadow, too.
He’d shrugged his shoulders when we blithely discussed our dealings. The bodies he gave me were only men.
Did he leave his women in the streets with their throats slit and their legs open? Did he hate women that much?
“You know that it is notme.” Jorah’s ferocity drained away from him, replaced by a foreign sort of uncertainty. “Don’t you?”
Did I?
I knew it was a bizarrely heady thing, to have the Hammer fearmefor once. To have power over his life where before I’d had none.
I’d suspected him every now and again. Even this evening, when we’d dined together, the worry had whispered to me. Would the “Juwes” be blamed?
Weren’t they always?
It wasn’t fair, I realized. To condemn a man for suspicion. For public outrage. For the general opinions of the populace against his people.
I’d felt his pain as we’d spoken together. I’d commiserated with him about the prejudice of the majority against both of us. The blood that ultimately spilled because of that hatred.
The family we’d each lost.
“He’s…he’s not the Ripper.” I spoke my conclusion with dubious conviction, but the Hammer’s eyes still fluttered with relief. “Jack killed a man today, and Jorah was saving my life when Thaddeus Comstock died.”
“He could have had an accomplice. That heathen with the blade,” Aidan insisted. “I watched this man lust after you, plying you with drink, with charm, like a godless swine. He’s always surrounded by an army of brutes, by his pagan protector, or walled away in his fortress of sin. But not today. ‘Vengeance ismine,’ sayeth the Lord. He presented a path, and I took it.”
I turned in Aidan’s hands, facing a wrath I’d never before witnessed as it clouded his visage. “Aidan, listen to yourself. This is all a lot of malarkey. Your guilt has driven you mad, I think.”
