Much Ado About Rogues. Kasey Michaels

years is a long time,” he agreed. “A lifetime, when you’re carrying what I’ve carried with me, knowing what I know.”

      “René,” she said quietly.

      It was time they had this out. “Yes, René, he’s a major part of it. I changed the plan, altering it to include you and include your brother. For that I am guilty, and I’ll never forgive myself for not excluding both of you, which is what I should have done. I knew he was hot to please Sinjon, hot to impress him, prove himself.”

      “Not just Papa. He wanted you to be proud of him. He worshipped you.”

      “Then he was a fool. But still, there should have been another way, and I should have found it. That’s my sin, Tess, and I admit to it. But there was more, and you know that now.”

      “Papa risked René to get the Gypsy.”

      Jack laughed ruefully. “That’s it? That’s all you think can be put at Sinjon’s door? My God, you’re still blind, aren’t you?”

      Tess’s expression closed. “I’d like to be shown to my chamber now.”

      “What was the plan?” Jack shouted to her departing back. “Think, Tess. What was the plan!”

      Her shoulders slumped and she turned to him, tears standing in her eyes. “I was to be the stalking horse, the decoy, the distraction,” she said quietly. “I was to stand in the glow of the streetlamp outside Covent Garden, clutching the satchel supposedly holding the money to be exchanged for Bonaparte’s next battle plan. Reveal myself, draw the man’s attention, divert him, make him in turn reveal himself so that you and Papa could take him down once he’d taken possession of the satchel.”

      “Thank you,” Jack said, his voice dripping venom. “You, not René. Out in the open, not in a Whitechapel alleyway. With only Sinjon knowing that the mission was not what we thought it was, with only Sinjon knowing we weren’t going up against some inferior French traitor, but drawing out the Gypsy, the monster he’d taught every trick he ever knew.”

      Tess wet her lips as she nodded. “He would have known, yes. Papa’s used the same ploy before.”

      Jack gave a quick thought to Dickie Carstairs. “And I’ve used it since, to great effect, I admit that. Making it easy for the Gypsy to recognize it and form a counter-plan of his own,” he told her, approaching her slowly so that possibly she wouldn’t bolt, run away from the truth. He spoke quietly now. “So why not put one of my children—it didn’t matter which one—out there as a decoy, and then I’d wait for the Gypsy to ignore the obvious ploy. I’d wait for him to come out of the shadows just where he knew I’d be hiding, ready to strike. Except that didn’t happen, did it? Sinjon wasn’t even looking in René’s direction when the monster cut him down.”

      Tess was standing with her arms tightly wrapped around her middle, rocking back and forth as tears rolled down her cheeks. She hadn’t been there, she hadn’t seen it, the quick savagery.

      But Jack had been watching. He’d been in place, ready to move, when a blur of black, hooded cloak moved across the alleyway, barely hesitating in front of René before disappearing through a narrow door previously unnoticed by anyone. René hadn’t even hit the cobblestones before the door had closed, the hooded figure gone.

      Jack had run to the boy, not even remembering how he had leapt over the barrels that had concealed his position, arriving long seconds before Sinjon, who promptly knelt down, his ear close to his son’s mouth. René grabbed his father’s arm, said something Jack couldn’t make out, and then his hand fell away. He was dead, the knife in his chest to the hilt, a strange black calling card with a golden eye at its center half-tucked into his waistcoat pocket.

      The Gypsy had come to that alley not to sell French secrets to the Crown, as Jack had been told, but expressly to kill. But not to kill Sinjon. René’s murder was a warning. Tess’s death would have delivered that same warning had she been the one standing in the alley.

      “He thought I’d—he thought René would be safely out of it.”

      “Which is where you both should have been, damn it. This wasn’t for Crown and country, Tess. This was private, one man against the other. And for what, Tess? For that damn collection.”

      “You should have told me then—the secret room, the collection, all of it. You shouldn’t have let me blame you. Papa said—”

      “I know what he told you. That I froze. That I didn’t move fast enough. I was closer, I should have been able to stop it. My most important mission, and I’d botched it. And I had, Tess. I should have put a stop to it all before we ever went into that alley.”

      “You didn’t know then that our quarry was the Gypsy.” She put her hand on his arm. “René’s dead. We can’t either of us change that. I wish you had told me. I wish I could believe I’d have been ready to listen. Everything would have been so… different.”

      Jack slipped his arms around her, pulling her close against his chest. “This time he dies, Tess. I promise you that.”

      She stepped back to look at him, to watch his reaction to her next words, he was sure. “And this time I’ll be there to see him die.”

      All right. Now it was his turn to look at her, watch her. “And Sinjon? What about him?”

      “I don’t know, Jack. I just don’t know.”

      TESS THANKED THE maid who’d helped her into her nightrail and dismissed her, already looking longingly at the turned-down bed across the large chamber. She’d been upstairs to see that Jacques was sound asleep, tucked up in a cot shaped like a swan, of all things, and that Emilie was snoring loudly in the next room, the door open between them.

      Only a little more than a single day and night, and everything in Tess’s life had changed. For the first time in her life she knew what it meant to not know if one was on her head or her heels.