Page 11 of Seducing a Stranger
Even the air was sweeter here, whispering of lilacs and gardenias rather than the singular smells of the city. The garden sparkled like the very stars might visit to watch the debauchery. It was a dream crafted by honey-hued lighting and fluttering fabrics.
Of all the bastardly bacchanalian bullshit.
Morley retreated to a borderline pornographic fountain and crouched behind a hedgerow, grateful that the sound of the water covered the thinly veiled noises of carnal revelry.
A small mercy that, because his body was beginning to forget how exhausted he was and respond to the wickedness of the atmosphere.
It was how they got you, these places. Inundated one with sex and fantasy until instinct took over and a man forgot who he was. Became a needful, terrible creature, one led around by his cock rather than his reason, until he found his pocketbook emptied by his own weaknesses.
A brothel. He grimaced. He’d broken into a brothel of all places whilst searching for a killer. He must have taken a very wrong direction, or he’d stumbled upon another humungous clue.
Either way, he couldn’t exactly begin an interrogation at—he looked at his watch—half one in the morning. Tucking the watch away, he scrubbed at his face with both hands before adjusting the mask over his eyes.
God’s blood but he was tired.
He’d been waylaid on his way here by a contingent of the High Street Gang, who’d taken one look at his darkly elegant attire and decided he was an easy mark.
He’d kicked nine shades of shit out of four men and had left them tied to the corner for the next copper on his beat to find.
With a note, of course, as was courteous.
He’d broken up a domestic brawl that’d spilled out onto the streets, and gave a boy on the cusp of manhood a pence to sleep beneath a different roof than his ham-fisted father.
A man on Wapping High Street had mistaken a charwoman for a nightwalker and had been about to force his attentions upon her when Morley had picked up a palm-sized stone, and made a spinning slingshot of his cravat. The rock to the temple had felled the attacker, and Morley didn’t stay to check if he was even alive. He’d shrugged off the woman’s cries of gratitude and had been on his way.
He was no hero. These were just things he did, sweeping up small crimes while he chased nightmares through the night.
Back when he’d attempted to sleep, he’d been tortured by them. Eventually, those nightmares had seeped into the daylight, following him from the dark until they filled every corner of every room. Shades and specters. The ghosts of those he’d killed, of those who’d endeavored to kill him. Of the souls he’d failed to save and the monsters who’d escaped justice.
For decades they’d haunted him, tormented him endlessly each time he dared close his eyes. Until he’d done something about it.
Hebecamethe thing from which nightmares ran.
He rid the night of monsters, so he could continue to be the man he was during the day without sinking into a miasma of slow and indelible madness. He was both the system of justice and the shadow of it.
Because the shadow could do what the system could not.
Because he still had a dead-eye, sharp fists, and even sharper blades.
Because he’d sold his soul to a demon for justice years ago, and every subsequent sin merely deepened the fathomless pit into which he’d been thrown.
Every time he’d thought he’d hit the bottom, he realized he was still falling.
That the depths could always be deeper. That the night could always be darker. That the world could always be colder.
That honor didn’t seem to mean much anymore, and he continued to fight a war that might have always been lost and for a cause that was nothing more than an illusion.
He’d been fighting for so long. For so many endless years, and for what? These days, every victory felt as though it made as much difference as a teardrop to the Thames.
And still he hunted, because what else could he do? Collect a wage until the inevitable forages of time and regret came for him as they did for everyone else?
A snap of a whip and a snarl came from the glasshouse covered in ivy. Morley squinted over at it, watching the shadows take shape, illuminated by one dim lantern inside.
If he wasn’t mistaken, a woman rode a man, but not his hips…Morley squinted…his face. Her pleasure sounds filtered through the fountain to him, hot and demanding.
They reverberated down his spine and landed in his loins.
God, it had been too long since he—
