Page 43 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
He was a beast on a short leash tonight.His wedding night.He’d used every ounce of civility he could feign on this difficult, exhausting day and now he could set free his wrath on the dregs of the city. Tonight, he was on the hunt for a singular criminal. A particular crime.
And he knew just where to find it.
He passed plenty of illegal acts. Bordellos, gambling hells, gin peddlers, thieves, and all sorts up to every kind of sin.
This was his genesis, and might very well be his end. This putrid place where the shadows were full of danger and the pallid streetlamps only illuminated unpleasant truths. He slid between them like a cat, avoiding detection as even desperate, waifish fiends and daring prostitutes shrank from his shade.
He heard the name whispered behind his back upon occasion.
Is that him? The Knight of Shadows?
The police beat was easy to avoid, he’d been doing it for decades. He knew their routes, and their times.
Hell, he knew most of their names.
What he needed to discover, was which ones sold cocaine to the innocent and weak.
The deeper he drove himself into the squalid darkness of Dorset Street, the more layers of himself peeled away. He shucked off Carlton Morley. His stringent mannerisms and his staunch courteousness. He even yearned to be rid of the ridiculous mask and moniker of the vigilante.
Tonight, he felt like someone else. Someone he thought he’d buried long ago.
Cutter.
As he lurked through the thoroughfares he’d once owned as Cutter ‘Deadeye’ Morley, he felt a piece of his puzzle click into place.
For three bloody months he’d been turning a problem over in his mind, chewing it with as much success as he would a rock. Breaking against it. Grinding himself down.
Who was the man who’d made the ballocks decision to fuck a stranger in a garden?
Carlton Morley? Or the Knight of Shadows?
He’d needed to come here to find the answer.
It all made perfect sense now. He’d been so visceral that night. So raw and filled with every emotion he’d never allowed himself. Anger and lust and need and pain. He’d been so fucking hungry. Hungry for a kind of sustenance he’d never had.
He’d been…
Cutter.
Cutterhad fucked her because he wanted to. Because she was a bit of beauty and warmth he’d never allowed himself. The thief who’d never had parents to speak of, who’d learned his morals from whores and cutpurses. Who’d committed murder for the sake of revenge.
And reveled in it.
He covered up the murder in his past, and if he found out that she’d been the woman to stick that dagger into the Earl of Sutherland’s throat…he’d be tempted to cover that up too.
Because despite everything she may or may not be… he still wanted her.
Could she sense it, somehow?
Was it because they had killing in common? Like begets like, after all, and if Prudence Goode was the woman he feared she was, had she selected him because her dark soul recognized his?
Even as the suspicion lanced him with horror, his gut violently rejected it. She was a stranger, an enigma to him, but his instinct was to believe her.
To trust her!
Trust was not an emotion with which he was familiar.
What did he know about her, really? That she was both bold and amenable. Her eyes were kind and her mouth wicked. She’d a temper, but was as levelheaded as anyone could expect under the circumstances. She succumbed to logic just as easily as lust.
