Forged by Desire by Bec McMaster Read Free Book Online Page A

opera?”
    Her glare practically incinerated him. “I’ve tried to forget the entire incident.”
    “Did you succeed?” His voice roughened.
    This time she looked away, turning her face to the window and granting him her profile. She was a long time in replying. “Quite.”
    Liar. “Perhaps I should remind you.”
    “Perhaps we should concentrate on the task at hand?”
    A thousand responses leaped to mind, but Garrett said nothing. Simply watched her, reading the clues that he hadn’t noticed until now. How wound up she was. Tight as clockwork.
    Not about him, he was certain. Or she’d have been like this since the opera. No, this was new.
    “This case bothers you,” he said.
    “No more than usual.”
    “You’re always on edge after something like this,” he noted. “But you don’t get quiet. You get angry and you don’t relax until we can get in the training room and you can punch the bag a few times. Or me.”
    “Do you want me to fight with you?”
    “I’d like you to tell me what’s bothering you,” he replied, though he could have taken up the gauntlet.
    Perry’s gaze dropped to her hands. “It’s nothing.”
    “Is it about the case?”
    “I… It’s… I never like seeing young girls like that. They were what? Sixteen? Seventeen? They’ve barely lived.”
    “A lot of them are.” He stared out the window as they passed through the streets. Here in the heart of the city, the cobblestones gleamed and elegant passersby laughed beneath their bonnets and top hats. A far cry from the streets outside the city walls that kept out the rabble, the kind of people that he’d once come from. “It’s the children,” he admitted quietly. “They’re the ones that bother me the most. Them and the whores.”
    “Whores?”
    Garrett shrugged. “They don’t have anyone to protect them. Circumstances force them to do what they must, and most of them die cold, lonely deaths. Do you know why that bothers me so much?” he asked. “It’s because I see my mother. I see her body.” A flash of it swept through his vision. Mary Reed, lying naked and broken in an alley after her night’s shift. Robbed of everything—her clothes, her meager coin purse, her dignity.
    He’d been all of nine and left to fend for himself. Oh yes, he knew how those children and whores died. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen to step away from the gutters and better himself, one of the reasons he’d joined the Nighthawks when it became apparent he had the craving virus. He hadn’t been able to protect his mother, but there were always others.
    He forced the memories away. “Do you see yourself in those young girls?”
    She shook her head abruptly. But the stillness was there in her shoulders.
    “Or is it something else?” He watched the way she took a quick breath and looked away again. “It is. Something else is bothering you.”
    “Garrett, leave it alone.”
    Like hell . But he’d long since learned that if he kept questioning her, she’d obstinately dig her claws in and say nothing more. Perry was possibly the only person he couldn’t eventually wear down.
    “As you wish,” he replied softly.
    Stillness fell between them, broken only by the steady hiss of the steam engine. Garrett stretched his arms out along the back of the seat and watched her stare out the window stubbornly, pretending that she didn’t feel his gaze.
    The silky, black strands of her hair, cut longer in front and shorter at the nape, fell over her forehead. A boyish, careless cut, but one that drew his gaze to the smoothness of her throat and the long line of her nape. He’d pressed a kiss there at the opera. Felt the kick of her pulse against his tongue as he fought the urge to bite her, to mark her as his. It was the first time his demons had ever come close to overruling him.
    “Do you think the verwulfen ambassador will be home?” he asked, mainly to break the thick silence in the carriage. He hated the way silence seemed to