“We’ve rooms for things like that, you know,” Dahlia added.

Devil’s beautiful lips flattened into a straight line. “Bugger off.” He leaned in and kissed Felicity again, quick and thorough, leaving her breathless when he lifted his head and said, “Come with me.”

As though she could do anything but that.

They climbed the stairs, one flight, and the next. He didn’t hesitate—didn’t slow his pace, not even when Felicity craned to see down the beautiful, mysterious hallways that promised adventure and sin. Instead, he led her higher and higher, Felicity’s heart pounding harder and harder until he stopped in an almost pitch-black narrow stairwell, with nowhere else to go.

He released her then and set his hands to the ceiling, rings gleaming in the darkness mere inches above his head, and pushed open an inlaid door, lifting himself up and out, leaving Felicity gaping at his beautiful body, silhouetted against the starlit sky.

When he reached back and offered her a hand, she did not hesitate, and he pulled her out into the night, where he reigned.






Chapter Twenty-Two

He took her to the rooftops.

He knew he shouldn’t. He knew he should pack her into a hack and return her to Mayfair—untouched, to the home that had been in her family for generations. He knew he was wrong to bring her to this world that was all his and nothing of hers, that would do nothing but soil her with it.

But if Felicity’s sin was want, so was Devil’s. And Christ, he wanted her.

He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything, and Devil had spent much of his youth hungry and cold, poor and angry. He might have been able to resist his desire—but then she’d confessed her own: I want you. I want to be your flame . . . but I fear I am your moth instead.

And all Devil wished was to take her somewhere so they might burn together.

He closed the door after he pulled her up onto the roof of Grace’s club—rising from the task to discover her staring out into the night, the city below and the stars above, as clear as his view of the future.

The one he would spend without her.

But tonight, he would share this world with her, even as he knew he would regret it forever. How could he resist?

Especially when she reached up and removed the mask she’d been given inside, revealing herself to the warm night. She turned in a slow circle, eyes wide as she took it in. And then she raised her gaze to his, and the breathless smile on her face threatened to send him to his knees. “This is magnificent.”

“It is,” he said, his own breath coming harshly.

She shook her head. “I never think of the rooftops.”

He extended his hand to her. “They are the best way to travel.” She settled her hand in his, giving her trust over to him before he led her from one building to the next, down a long, curving city street, up and over the roofs, from ridge to ridge, around chimneys and over broken tiles.

“Where are we going?”

“Away,” he said.

She stilled at the words, releasing his hand. When he looked to her, she was facing away from him, toward the city. As he watched, she spread her arms wide and turned her face to the sky, breathing in the night, a small smile playing over her lips.

Devil froze, unable to keep his eyes from her, from the joy in her eyes, the wash of excited color on her cheeks, the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hips, her hair gleaming silver in the moonlight. For a heartbeat, she was Cardea, unseen by all the world except him—the beginning and the end, the past and the future. The present.

As beautiful as the night sky.

“I love this,” she said, the words strong and full of passion. “I love the freedom of it. I love that no one knows we are here, secrets in the darkness.”

“You like the darkness,” he said, the words coming out graveled, like wheels on the cobblestones below.

She looked to him, a twinkle in her eye. “I do. I like it because you wrap yourself in it. I like it because you so clearly love it.”

He tightened his grip on his walking stick, tapped it twice against the toe of his boot. “I don’t love it, as a matter of fact.”

Her brows rose and she lowered her arms to her sides. “I find that difficult to believe, as you reign over it.”

He climbed to the peak of the roof, making a show of considering the drop to the next one, so that he did not have to look at her when he said, “I feared the dark as a child.”

A beat, and then her skirts rustling over the roof tiles as she approached. Without turning, he knew she wished to reach for him. To touch him. And he did not think he could bear her pity, so he kept moving, down to the roof below, and up the iron steps to the next. And all the while, speaking—more than he’d ever said to anyone before—thinking to stop her from touching him. To stop her from ever wanting to touch him again. “Candles were expensive, and so they did not light them at the orphanage,” he said, stilling on the next rooftop, his gaze fixed on a lantern swinging outside a tavern far below. “And in the rookery, we did everything we could to avoid the monsters that lurked in the darkness.”

Still, she advanced, his name like a prayer on her lips.

He tapped his walking stick on the red roof tiles marking the gable of the roof beneath his boot, wanting to turn and face her, to say, Don’t come closer. Don’t care for me.

“It was impossible to keep them safe,” he said to the city beyond.

She stopped. “Your brother and sister are lucky to have you. I’ve seen the way they look at you; whatever you did, you kept them as safe as possible.”

“That’s not true,” he said, harshly.

“You were a child, too, Devon,” she said at his back, the words so soft he nearly didn’t hear his name in them. Lie. Of course he heard it. His name on her lips was like salvation.

One he did not deserve. “Knowing that does not help the regret.”

She reached him then, but did not touch him, miraculously, instead, she sat at his feet on the roof’s peak, staring up at him. “You are too hard on yourself; how much older could you possibly be?”

He should end the conversation there and take her down, through the door inset in the roof below, to his offices. He should send her home. Instead, he sat next to her, facing in the opposite direction. She put her gloved hand to the roof between them. He took it in his own, pulling it into his lap, marveling at the way the moon turned the satin to silver.

When he replied, it was to that silver thread, somehow magically spun in this darkness he loved and hated. “We were born on the same day.”

A beat. “How is that—”

He traced her fingers slowly through the glove. Up and down, like a prayer. “To different women.”

Her fingers twitched beneath the touch. Beneath the words. “But the same man.”

“Not Grace.”

“Grace,” she said, her brow furrowing. “Dahlia.”

He nodded. “She has a different father. Which is likely why she is better than the rest of us combined.” His fingers found the buttons on her glove and began to work at them.

Together, they watched the skin of her wrist revealed, before Felicity said, softly, “I thought you said you did not know your father.”

“I said my father did not wish to claim me when my mother died.”

“But later?”

He nodded, refusing to look at her face, instead removing the satin glove in a long, slow slide that made his mouth water. “Later, we became useful.” He paused. “When he realized Grace was all he would get.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. She wasn’t his daughter.”

“He was married to her mother, though. And willing to accept her as his, so desperate he was for an heir.”

An heir meant . . . “He was titled.”

He nodded.

It took all her energy not to ask him which title they discussed. “But . . . he had sons. Why not wait? Why not try for another? A legitimate one?”

“It wasn’t possible. He’d never get another.”

Confusion flared. “Why?”

She had the most beautiful skin. He turned her palm up and traced circles in it. “Because he couldn’t sire heirs after Grace’s mother shot him.”

Her eyes went wide. “Shot him where?”

He did look to her then. “In a place that made it impossible to sire heirs.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. “And so he was left with a girl. No heir.”

“Most men would have given up,” he said. “Let the line die out. Pass to some distant cousin. But my father was desperate for a legacy.”

Her hand closed around his finger, capturing it with her warmth, making him wish she would stay with him forever and keep the cold at bay. “You and Beast.”

He nodded. “Whit.”

She offered a small smile at Whit’s real name. “I prefer that, if I am honest. Devon and Whit,” she said, releasing his fingers and raising her bare hand to his face. He closed his eyes, knowing what she was thinking before she touched him, letting the soft pads of her fingers trace down the long white scar on his cheek. “And the one who did this.”

“Ewan.” He captured her hand in his, leaning into the touch as he told the story for the first time in his life—at once hating himself for resurrecting the past and taking remarkable pleasure in speaking of it, finally. “I thought I was saved when he turned up at the orphanage—my father.” She nodded, and he went on. “My mother had left a few coins, but the family that took me in while they waited for word from him took room and board.”