The Hunter (Victorian Rebels Book 2)
The Hunter: Chapter 5

Please—don’t hurt my son. The words echoed through the cold, biting February rain as it whipped through the narrow streets of the East End. Argent couldn’t tell whose voice roared against the storm rolling down from the north. Millie LeCour’s? Or his mother’s?

Numbness stole the dexterity from his limbs, though whether the culprit was the freezing temperature or the pounding in his head, he couldn’t be certain. Suddenly he felt as though he’d run several leagues. His ribs tightened around his lungs, inhibiting his breath. His heart tossed itself against its cage, throbbing in his ears, through his muscles, and in the very marrow of his bones.

Was it truly so cold outside? Or could it be the startling contrast between the chill of the evening and the warmth of the flesh he’d had pressed against him only moments ago?

Trying to remember how long he’d been running, he plunged into darker streets, down the most dangerous alleys, with names like Cutthroat Corner or Hang Tree Row. He couldn’t seem to stop. If he stood still his skin might peel away from his body. And with nothing to shield his awareness, he might blow away in the storm.

Objectively, he’d always wondered if the black, cold void in his chest would expand to swallow him whole. Maybe that’s what he was running from. Evisceration. Oblivion.

For as long as he could remember. Since … since the night he’d been left alone in this world, he’d often felt as though he existed outside of his body. That he walked alongside himself, behind his own head, detached, apart, an emotionless observer to the blood he spilled. His body existed as an animated corpse, bone and vein, but bereft of a soul. Of whatever passion that made a being fundamentally human. What caused them to sigh at a poem, or see themselves within a painting. Take offense at their neighbor or start a war out of greed.

He’d thought he lacked this intrinsic element.

He didn’t fear death. Didn’t appreciate life. He was fond of nothing and therefore didn’t fear pain or loss.

So why was he chasing his own body through the streets of predawn London? Why couldn’t he feel his skin? Or the breath in his lungs? Was this trembling a sign that his body was shutting down, or becoming more powerful?

Images transposed themselves over the stormy darkness. A lake of blood the size of a prison cell, growing larger with each lifeless body he tossed into it. Large, lovely marble-black eyes flickering with the last vestiges of life to roaring applause. A small boy, watching his mother die. What had he done? What had he left undone? What was the strategy for his next move?

Please—don’t hurt my son.

His chest tightened so abruptly, he gasped as his hand flew to cover it.

He needed to think. He was too scattered, too caged. How a man could be both detached from his body and imprisoned by it was infuriating. He needed to center himself, needed release, and knew exactly where to replace it.

Veering to the left, he crossed Limehouse Street and turned down what they called “Poplar Alley.” Not for the foliage, but for the small lodgings made of the poplar tree.

The smell of foreign spices, street vendors roasting strange delicacies on spits, penned animals, and raw sewage mixed with things better left to the shadows and fog.

Exotic food was not the only delicacy on display. Petite women with blue-black hair and robes of glimmering silk beckoned from white tents filled with sweet-smelling smoke and bodies limp from one excess or another. Opium, drink, food, sex, any of it was for sale here in the Asian markets, and Argent had tasted it all without developing a taste for any of it.

The markets and back alleys were clogged with too much humanity, even at this time of night, to maintain his jog. Though wherever he walked, people made room. Argent was a tall man in any place he found himself, but here in the Asian quarter, he stood out like a flame-haired beacon in a sea of darkness. Eyes followed him, but he didn’t meet them. Nor did he look down.

He’d always avoided looking directly into anyone’s eyes. He stared through them, or focused on the space between them. He imagined it was because life, itself, resided in the eyes. He’d learned that early on. And if he watched life drain away once, he’d watch it again. Every time he slept. Or sometimes tattooed on the back of his eyelids when he blinked.

The next gaze he met could belong to a potential victim. At first that thought had sickened him, and then it didn’t. It—drew him. Made him feel powerful. Like a god. As he grew older, he realized that the only time he felt alive was when he took a life.

And that came with its own dangers.

There was no shame in taking pleasure in a kill, but for some, it became an obsession, an addiction, and Argent didn’t want to give anything that power over him.

So he used other means with which to fill the void.

“I know you,” a sweet voice crooned from one of the silk tents. “You only want girl on her knees.”

Argent turned, looking down at a small woman with long, long black hair and startlingly red lips painted on a face so white, he could barely distinguish it from the color of the tent.

She was right. He only took women from behind. He didn’t want to look them in the eyes, either.

Reaching for him, she placed a demure hand on his jacket. “I get on my knees for you,” she offered in a husky voice. “I not afraid like the other girls.”

She said that now …

“Some other time, perhaps.” He brushed her off.

It was a different vice he searched for tonight. A different woman he wanted on her knees …

God, what that image did to him. Millie LeCour bent over for him, her creamy skin bared and her body accepting his.

Christ, he needed some kind of release or he’d immolate there in the frigid London night.

When a door opened and two men dragged a half-naked body to bleed into the gutter, Argent knew he’d found the right place. Nodding to one of the house employees he’d known for years, he caught the gleam of greed in the man’s eyes. “You going to give me time to place my bets?” the man asked, dumping his charge and wiping filthy hands on his trousers.

“Only if you place mine, I’ll give you six percent of the winnings.” Retrieving his clip of notes from his pocket, Argent tossed the entire thing to the man, Wei Ping was his name, and mounted the rickety stairs into the unmarked building.

Three flights down into the bowels of the earth the sound became so deafening, it drowned out the storm. Men. Hundreds of them. Some in white-tie finery and others in tatters and rags, all screaming, sweating, and swearing at the fighter upon whom they’d risked their money.

Ducking below the door frame, Argent nodded to the corpulent Chinese, Pan Lee, who leased the building from Dorian Blackwell who took a commission from the business. The man held up two fingers, raising a questioning eyebrow.

Argent held up three.

Receiving a nod from Pan Lee, Argent strode toward the pit. His jacket hit the filth that covered the floor. Then his tie, his waistcoat, and finally his shirt.

People always gasped when he removed his shirt. He’d stopped noticing years ago.

Rainwater and sweat dropped from his hair and ran down his spine. His muscles were warm from his run. He was ready.

He was like water.

Pandemonium spread through the crowd when they saw him. Christopher Argent. Last student of the Wing Chun Kung Fu master Wu Ping. The weapon of the Blackheart Brothers of Newgate Prison. The youngest, highest-earning pit fighter of the previous decade. The Blackheart of Ben More’s master assassin.

The coldest, deadliest man in all London.

He knew what they saw when he removed his fine shoes at the side of the pit, certain that even in this den of thieves, no one would dare to swipe them.

Please—don’t hurt my son.

Those words had followed him around for two decades.

They’d hurt him plenty in the years after his mother died. The guards. The prisoners. Even his allies. In a world like Newgate Prison, pain was how one communicated, it was the only language they all understood. And once they’d hanged Wu Ping a couple years later, pain had become Argent’s new teacher.

His torso was a large, pale record of lessons learned, of lashes he’d returned and pain he’d answered in kind. Of brutish strength gained through forced labor, disciplined training, and pits like these in the early days, when he’d followed Dorian Blackwell into the hells of the East End. They’d each done what they had to do to earn money. Unspeakable things.

Like the cavern carved through time by a single trickle of water, Argent had honed himself into a sharp-hewn weapon, an instrument of death. And he’d never failed to deal the fatal blow.

Until tonight.

The question remained … Why?

Three men filtered into the round pit, a hole in the ground, really, the depth of a grave and the width of a small bedroom. Once you entered Pan Lee’s pit, you left broken or victorious. There was no in-between.

And no one had ever broken him.

Argent studied his opponents. Size never counted in his calculations, though only the large African outweighed him. It was skill he looked for, and only two of them had it. The dark man with Anglo features dressed in nothing but a dingy wrap about his waist. East Indian, Argent guessed. And more skilled with a weapon than his bare hands.

Though weapons weren’t allowed in the pit, that didn’t stop some, as the consequences weren’t enough to deter a dirty trick every now and again, as long as it pleased the crowds. Though where the Indian man would hide any weapon was beyond imagining.

The African was heavy-fisted and strong-jawed. Argent knew he’d better outmaneuver this one and avoid going to the ground.

And finally, the sharp-boned Spaniard was the least of his worries. More swagger than skill, and obviously overcompensating with bravado, loud threats, and crowd pandering.

He’d asked for three opponents, not two and a half. He had a great deal of thinking to do.

The gong had barely sounded before the first punch was thrown.

His opponents thought because he didn’t dance or weave, because he rooted himself to the earth and found his center line, that he would be an easy target.

Apparently, they were not locals.

He allowed the Indian to land the first blow to his jaw. Argent’s cheek ground against his teeth, his mouth filled with the metallic tang of blood. The pain pulled him back inside his body. Centered his awareness where it belonged, behind his eyes. It opened the cold void within his chest, and also filled its yawning mouth.

Argent had known it would.

Now he could think. Now he could consider the consequences of his actions and formulate a plan.

Spitting the blood into the Indian’s eyes, he used the element of surprise to buckle the man’s leg with a swift kick. Gripping the man’s hair, Argent felt the Indian’s cheekbone break against his knee.

The crowd erupted.

One down.

He never took a contract he didn’t intend to finish. So why could he not finish off Millie LeCour?

He’d killed women before. Mothers, even. One had been contracted by her own son, a desperate ploy by an aristocrat to stop her from signing away his inheritance to her beloved dog. Another had been a midwife, stealing bastard newborns from young, unmarried mothers and selling them to whoever paid the highest price.

He’d allowed Dorian Blackwell to offer a discount for her demise.

Once he’d strangled the madam of a whore he’d bought, who was trying to sell the whore’s twelve-year-old sister.

She’d paid him in trade. A good bargain, that.

Argent squared off with the African, aware that the Spaniard was moving behind to flank him. But really only one danger remained in this pit. He bared his bloodied teeth at his opponent. One of few men in this world he had to look up to see clearly. That’s right, he thought. You think I’m wounded. Cornered. You’ll come at me with all your strength.

It was that strength Argent would use against him.

And why couldn’t he use it against his lovely mark?

He’d like to blame it on the idea that forcing the boy to watch his mother die at Argent’s own hand affected him in a way he’d not expected. And, indeed, it had, quite intensely. However, he’d hesitated to snap Millie LeCour’s lovely neck before the child had been an issue.

And while her words, the exact replica of his own mother’s plea on his behalf all those years ago, pushed him over the edge of his cold, hard sanity, he’d been walking toward that edge since the moment he’d watched her die onstage.

The African lunged, his long arms swinging with wide hooks that would land like a steam engine. Instead of ducking the fists, Argent leaped toward the man, stepping inside his reach and stealing the power of his punch. Blocking one meaty arm with his own, he simultaneously struck his opponent’s throat. Or, rather, punched through his throat, as he’d been instructed all those years ago.

He caught a kidney punch from the Spaniard for his troubles, but it didn’t break his focus, and he leaped atop the falling African and landed two more devastating blows on his way to the ground.

Two down.

What was it about Millie, specifically, that differed from all the rest?

Was it a question of simple chemistry? An unfulfilled lust as primal and animalistic as what happened in this pit?

God knew his body became instantly hard the moment their skin made contact. Hell, he was thickening now just at the thought of it. Touching her was electric. Potent.

And dangerous.

Kissing her … well, that defied description. It was more excruciating than any torture. More exquisite than any memory.

Millie LeCour overflowed with life, with enthusiasm, with emotion and warmth, and while their skin was connected, all that somehow transferred into him.

And for a precious instant he could … feel it.

How was that possible? How did a woman, reportedly a thief, a blackmailer, a greedy social climber with a heart as cold as his, have such a profound effect? The woman he’d seen so selflessly and desperately protecting her child didn’t match the accounts of the woman he’d been hired to murder.

Was her love for the boy in earnest? Was she such a consummate actress that she fooled even him? His mother had been a criminal, a thief, and a whore, and still she’d loved Christopher to distraction. In fact, many cold-blooded killers, criminals, and warmongers were family oriented.

It was their weakness. One he’d often exploited during the Underworld War he and Dorian Blackwell had started against the criminal element of London more than a decade ago.

Argent didn’t like unanswered questions. Didn’t want unknown variables. And at the very least, he couldn’t have Miss LeCour going to the police with his description. He’d never left a witness before, and he and Blackwell had already become too familiar with Chief Inspector Morley in recent years to risk it.

The gasp of the crowd and the gleam of metal warned him to roll away, dodging a knife in the spine. Gaining his feet just in time for the Spaniard to charge at him, knife first, Argent used one arm to lever the inside of the man’s elbow and the other to push the Spaniard’s knife hand toward his own chest.

And so it was decided, Argent thought with satisfaction as the blade, which could have been sharper in his opinion, pierced the chest of the struggling, screaming Spaniard and drove in to the hilt. Dropping the bleeding man, Argent walked to the door of the steps leading out of the pit, which opened upon his approach. The crowd parted for him, and he left the cacophony behind, struck with a singular purpose.

He’d retrieve his winnings later.

What he needed were answers to the many questions tumbling around the flawless form Millie LeCour.

He had to see her again, and this time there must be absolution. He had to logically and objectively analyze this power she had over him. And this time, once he understood the stakes, he’d make the final decision. He’d either kill her …

Or claim her.