Mission: Improper: London Steampunk: The Blue Blood Conspiracy (37 page)

"And Rosa belongs to Lynch," she said with another careless shrug.
"Jeremy's been walking out with young Evelyn, and even Jack's been making calf eyes at Debney."

Byrnes reared back.
"What?"

She rolled her eyes.
"Right under your nose.
You call yourself an investigator."

He frowned.

"I belong to them," she continued in a softer voice.
"And I always will, but it's not the same.
Because they all have that someone else, and I will always remain the interloper."

"No, you're not.
Don't ever stop dreaming of that, Ingrid."
He wanted to curl her in his arms, take away the hurt he saw deep within her.
It became a physical ache in his chest.
"Dream that dream.
You deserve it.”

Ingrid looked up at him, resolve firming in her eyes.
"Then I will.
I want a family of my own.
Just as I suspect you don't."

He shifted.
"It's not that easy."

"I thought we were being honest with each other?"

"I am."
He rolled to the side again, landing flat on his back and staring at the ceiling.
"It's not that I don't want children.
It just...
scares the hell out of me."

Ingrid rolled over him, kissing his shoulder, but she never took her gaze off him.
"Why?"

Why?
He stilled, and knew she felt it.
There was a knot growing hard in his lower abdomen.
A knot of hard emotion, of things felt but never admitted to.
The only person who had ever gotten close to seeing it had been Lynch, and even then the duke had only skimmed the top of it.

He didn't want to speak of it.

But he had promised her honesty.

Byrnes cleared his throat.
"What if I'm terrible with them?"

"What if
I
am?
Sometimes I fear I'll drop poor Phillip on the floor.
He's so...
squirmy."

He looked at her.
Really looked.
"What if I'm a danger to them?"

Ingrid sobered, then the bronze rings around her pupils seemed to intensify, as if she understood what he wasn't saying.
"Why would you think that?"

Another hesitation.
Hell
.
"I'm a bastard, Ingrid.
But if you were to line me up with Debney and my father...
then you'd think
I
was the heir.
I look at myself and see him sometimes."
And there was nothing he hated more.

"You never speak of your father."

"That's because I killed him."

Silence.

He waited—waited for her revulsion, or something else to come.
But Ingrid simply rested her head down upon his shoulder and slid her arm across his chest.
It shook him all the way through and he caught her hand in his and clasped her fingers in silent relief.
Maybe Lynch was right.
Maybe Ingrid was the only woman who could ever handle the darkness within him.

"Did he deserve it?"

"Yes."
That one word nearly overwhelmed him.
All of it began to come back to him.
The hatred, the rage, the shame, and worst of all...
the helplessness.
He swallowed it back down, but it sat like a hot coal in his chest, threatening to choke him.

And she knew.
Another kiss touched his shoulder.
A confirmation.
"What was he like?"

"There was a darkness in him that scared me.
A darkness that was nothing like the hunger of the craving virus, though he was a blue blood.
He liked to hurt people.
He enjoyed it.
I don't know why, but it gave him some sense of power.
H-he's the reason my mother is the way she is.
He hit her one night because he thought he could—she was just a servant in his eyes, just his mistress—but this one time, she fell and hit her head on the fireplace.
And she was never the same.”

Ingrid's hands squeezed his.
"He doesn't sound very much like you at all, Byrnes."

"When I was a little boy, I was terrified of him, but I would have done anything to keep my mother safe.
I could fight and be beaten bloody myself, or I could rage and scream, but nothing helped.
Indeed, it only worsened the situation.
My father would say, 'Are you angry, boy?'
and I would nod, and then he would strike her down, then come back to me and say, 'That is what your anger has earned your mother.'
He would say, 'You made me do this.
Do you want to make me do more?'
If I tried to stop him, or grew angry, he would hurt her again.
And again."
Byrnes took a deep breath, burying his face against Ingrid's abdomen.
Hands slid through his hair, and just that simple touch eased the pressure inside him, the raging emotion that he couldn't quite contain.
"There was nothing that I could do to stop him.
I didn't dare let my anger rule me, or my fear, or sadness.
Eventually I learned to bury all of my emotions so deep, until it felt like they were not there anymore.
And that last time he hit her, I was so numb.
I kept waiting for her to get up.
But she didn't.
If I had stopped him—"

"He sounds like the kind of man who could not be stopped," Ingrid said softly.

Byrnes looked up and fell into the bleeding compassion in her eyes.
Grabbing her hand, he kissed her knuckles.
"But I did stop him in the end.
I killed him," he whispered.
"It just...
happened.
I lost control and I had a knife, and I wanted to kill him.
I wanted him to die for what he'd done.
And I can't remember all of it, but afterwards...
Christ, afterwards I looked up into the reflection in the window, and there he was.
In me.
I thought it was a ghost at first, but then I realized I was covered in blood.
His blood."
He could see it all over again.
Lived it.
"There's a darkness inside me that is capable of anything.
Anything
.”
Emotion washed in upon him.
Byrnes sucked in a breath, but it suddenly felt as though there was not enough oxygen in the room.
"I...
I—"

Warm arms slid around his shoulders.
"Just breathe," Ingrid told him.
"In and out, Byrnes."

And so he did.
Ingrid became his lifeline in a sea of darkness, and as his breathing began to match hers, he realized that although he'd never looked down this road before, suddenly he didn't think he could see himself doing anything else.

She was his future.

She was his meaning in life, the reason to keep on fighting, keep on breathing.
And if she wanted children, then he would stand by her side.
Together they could achieve anything.
He firmly believed that.

"That's how I became a blue blood, actually."
Facts were easier to deal with, than the complex emotions filling him.
"There was so much blood, and that's when Debney found me."
There was a vile taste in his mouth.
"The look on his face—he was shocked.
And I just lost it.
'Why didn't you stop him?'
I screamed.
I told him that it was his fault, because I knew it was mine, and I couldn’t bear to feel that way.”

“It was your father’s fault.
Not yours.
Not Debney’s.
Don’t take your father’s guilt away from him.
He sounds like a monster.
And you’re not him.
I've known monsters in my time, Byrnes, and you're nothing like them.
The fact that you're even worried about it should tell you that."

Byrnes buried his face against her throat and sucked in a long, slow breath.

"I know how you feel," Ingrid whispered.
"Sometimes you make yourself so hard that nothing gets in.
Nothing can hurt anymore, because you know you've reached the limits of what you can endure."
Her hand stroked down his back.
"If you stop caring, then it can't hurt anymore.
It's a shell, something that words and blows just glance off, but something I learned, Byrnes, is that the shell is brittle.
It will break, eventually."

It took a long time to be able to find the voice to answer that.
“You sound as though you speak from experience.”

Ingrid shifted.
“We all have our breaking point.”

“What was yours?”

“My family,” she admitted, tracing small circles on his chest with her finger.

"That didn't sound very hopeful."

"I'm not going to find them, Byrnes."
Ingrid's eyelashes shuttered her eyes when she saw him looking.
"I think I know that, deep inside, but if I'm still trying...."

"Why don't you think you'll find them?"

"Because I've spent years searching for them."
Her fists clenched, frustration flooding through her and tears hovering on the edge of her eyelashes.
"Years, and so much money, and...
nothing.
Going to Norway didn't help.
I've travelled through towns all along the coast, but I could walk past them and not even recognize them.
Last year was my fifth voyage.
I don't remember enough to help me, and Balfour was the only one who kept any records of my sale, and he's dead!
I'm trying to run an investigation with no clues, and no matter how much money I promise, too many girls went missing during those years thanks to English raiders.
I can't stomach it anymore.
The families...
coming to me, hoping that I belong to them and then discovering that I don't.
And worse than that are the people who see the reward I'm offering for information and pretend to be something they're not."
Ingrid covered her face with her hands.

This time it was his turn to drag her into his arms, wrapping them around her as if he could hide her from the world, from her pain.
"Don't cry."

"I'm not crying."

His chest was wet, but he didn't call her on it.

"This one time," she whispered, crying silently against his shoulder, "...there was a couple who seemed so perfect.
Everything fit.
Everything
.
I truly thought that I had done it...
and then the woman slipped up."
A long sigh went through her as her body softened.

"It's all right, Ingrid."
His throat burned with the ache of all she'd lost.
"You're not alone.
Not anymore."

She cried for a long time as Byrnes simply absorbed it.

It took him a long minute to realize that she was asleep, worn out by her grief and her confession.
Byrnes continued to stroke her hair, then looked down at the honey-colored head resting on his chest.

He didn't dare move, just in case he woke her, though he couldn't stop stroking his hand through that mess of hair.
There was a fist lodged somewhere in his chest that felt like something he almost recognized.
A little fist of hurt and worry and protectiveness that wasn't going to shift.

This.
This was what it felt like for the ice around his heart to melt.
It felt like he was taking his first breath in years, through a raw, bloody throat.
It was terrifying and yet exhilarating.
"Ingrid," he whispered almost soundlessly, and that simple name turned the key, unlocking something he'd thought long buried.

He'd spent so many years feeling nothing, or not understanding what he did feel.
Aloof, watching the world around him, fitting together the pieces.
It was what made him such a good investigator, but the lack of those emotions was what stopped him from being truly brilliant.

And a plan formed.

"If there's one thing I don't do—it's give up," he whispered.

Byrnes could find anything.
It was what he did.
The very thought of it made him nervous—this was no simple pledge, and there were stakes here that could rip a woman's heart from her chest.
A woman who had slowly, somehow, curled her own fist around his long-frozen heart.

"I'll find them, Ingrid," he whispered, pressing a kiss to her hair.
"No matter how long it takes me.
I promise I'll find them for you."