Mission: Improper: London Steampunk: The Blue Blood Conspiracy (9 page)

She'd never needed anyone to watch her back, but she'd never felt more out of her depth.
Debney had been correct.
Being verwulfen in this place marked her as lesser, and though she could handle herself, she was still outnumbered.
Somehow, they knew what she was.

"There you are," Debney said, making his way through a veritable crush of silk and feathers.
"Lord Ulbricht is interested in an introduction."

"Lead on then, darling."
She accepted his arm, playing her part.

Up close, Ulbricht was even more imposing than he'd first seemed.
He eyed her with a flinty up-and-down, taking a considerable pause at her mask, as though trying to see her irises through the eyeholes.
Or was that just her imagination?

"Ulbricht, may I introduce you to Mrs.
Inga Miller?"
Debney purred, sweeping her forward as though she were a precious gem to display.
"Mrs.
Miller is a
very
good friend of mine."

Ingrid graced Ulbricht with her most pleasant smile, flashing her teeth.
He reminded her of Lord Balfour a little, the man who had bought her as a child and locked her in a cage.
Perhaps it was the thin, supercilious smile he returned, or the sneer in his dark eyes, as though she were nothing to him.
"A pleasure, my lord."
The words were breathy and unctuous, and Ingrid extended her hand for him to greet, forcing him to accept it.

Ulbricht eyed her glove, distaste rampant on his face, but he took it.
That enormous hand lifted hers to his lips, his sleeve sliding down, revealing a dark tattoo on the inside of his wrist.
"The pleasure is mine, Mrs.
Miller."

"What an interesting tattoo, my lord."
As he moved to withdraw his hand, she kept hold of it.
"What is it meant to represent?"

Ulbricht's lips thinned, but Ingrid could see better now.
The shape was that of a rising sun.
"Something that interested me, Mrs.
Miller."
This time, he was more insistent upon withdrawing his hand.
"If you will?
I have guests to entertain."

S
ince Ulbricht's earlier cut
, most of the Echelon lords seemed to be taking their cues from him and ignoring the pair of them.
Girls came and went from the ballroom, vanishing into private parlors with blue blood vultures.
Ingrid watched the clock, waiting for time to tick around to her appointed meeting with Byrnes, but she couldn't stop herself from making sure each girl returned.

"The first time I received an invitation to one of these events, I was thrilled," Debney murmured, staring across the room at Ulbricht in a way that she couldn't quite define.
"A chance to restore life as I knew it—one where finances weren't quite strained and a man couldn't find himself in trouble for something he'd always done.
The balance would be restored.
Smashing, I said.
And I came, and I watched as they partied, and it was horrible in a way that it had never been before."

"What did they do?"

"There were girls there.
'Do as you wish,' Ulbricht said, as they circled among us.
They'd been promised good money for the event, you see.
But...
telling a blue blood lord to do as he wished meant that her life lay in his hands.
Those who remembered what it was once like...
they were insatiable.
Men who I knew before the revolution who had never raised a hand against their thralls in the past, or some who even disdained the taking of blood-slaves as a necessary evil, were suddenly men that I didn't know.
For three years there have been limits to bloodletting, and punishments for those who stepped over the line, and it were as if Ulbricht took our leashes off for the one night and something emerged that wasn’t pleasant."

"The Echelon were always like that.
It wasn't as if you didn't know."

"I had changed.
For the first time I realized what Caleb saw when he looked at me."
Debney’s gaze dipped beneath gold-fringed lashes.
"A disgrace."

"And what happened to the girl they'd given you?"

"I got her out, of course."

Something didn't quite add up.
"Earlier, you said that you'd come to three of these events, and yet they disgust you."

Embarrassment flashed over Debney's face.
"I-I....
He made me come again."

"Who?
Ulbricht?"
It was the first time that Debney had proffered any hint of excuse for his behavior, and it rankled.
Or perhaps that was the presence of a pair of young blue bloods forcing one of the 'blood-slaves' into a private curtained alcove of the ballroom, despite the flash of fear that crossed her face.
"Did he force you into a carriage by chance?
Abduct you at gunpoint?"
Ingrid swished away through the crowd before her emotions got the better of her.
She was struggling to stand there and watch that poor girl be molested.

And how is this any better than what Debney did?
Walking away, because it offends you....
After all, she had no plans to get that girl to safety, even if her instincts seethed within her to do so.
Malloryn had even predicted such a conflict when he offered her this job, knowing her nature as he did.

“Ingrid, can you do this?”
Malloryn had asked.
“
Can you pretend to turn the other cheek for the sake of the greater good?
Can you look the other way?
For that is the type of work I'm offering you.”

She was verwulfen, and always prey to her heated emotions.
In her ignorance—or arrogance, perhaps—she'd shrugged, and claimed that it was what she had always done in her role with the humanists.

This was not the same.
Then she'd been in the shadows, spying for Rosa and using her strength to run brief skirmishes, but she'd never played an acting role.
She'd always been herself, unabashed in her defiance of the very lords and culture she walked among now.
It was one thing to lead humanists against the Echelon, quite another to slip through its ranks and pretend to be something she was not.

"Ingrid, wait!"
Debney snagged her elbow, and because she had promised Malloryn she went with him, even though she was feeling a rather violent itch to push Debney over the rail.

"I can do this," she told him flatly.

"I know."
He looked both young and old at the moment, and disappointed with himself.
"You never gave me a chance to explain.
It wasn't...
like that."

Tamping down the sudden fury within her, Ingrid slipped inside one of the very alcoves that the young lords were currently using to their advantage.
She could smell blood nearby as one of them fed.
Soft mewls of discomfort—or something else—mingled with the sound of polite conversation and edged laughter.
"Then explain."

"Ulbricht is aware of...
some private things about me.
He wanted me to invite some of my friends to his gatherings, to enlist them in the SOG, and so he became quite insistent on my attending.
I know everybody, you see.
That was the one thing I was always very good at.
Knowing people, and yet, not really knowing them at all."

With a cough, he continued.
"Nobody else is aware...
not even Caleb, but I was somewhat indiscreet a few years ago with one of Ulbricht's cousins, and when the relationship broke off, he told Ulbricht everything."

He
.
Ingrid stared at him, her mind absolutely blank.

"I have certain proclivities," he hurried to explain, seeing her expression, "that are not widely accepted.
It's the kind of thing some of these men here would kill me for, if Ulbricht didn't see a use for me."

"You have relationships with men."
How had she not noticed?
She was well acquainted with Jack, after all.

"It's actually quite amusing."
Debney seemed relieved that she hadn't immediately cut him, though he was watching her face intently.
"Watching Caleb fret over my attentions to you, as though I pose some kind of threat."

"He does?"
He did?

"Well, yes."
Debney laughed, a little shrilly.
"I've never seen him behave so with a woman.
He avoids emotional entanglements—he always has—so it's quite amusing to see him so tangled up over you."

There was a faint hint of static in her ear, a muttered curse.
Ingrid opened her mouth, then shut it.
Debney would probably faint if she told him that Byrnes could hear everything she could through the communicator.

"May I ask, what precisely
is
your relationship with Byrnes?"
For there was a familiarity there that was beginning to grow quite obvious.

"We're brothers," Debney said, the words spilling out of him as if one confession suddenly unloosed a tide.
"Though he wouldn't call it such."

"
Ingrid,"
Byrnes growled through her earpiece.

"Brothers?"
How fascinating.
"And how did such a thing come about?"

Debney's face brightened.
"Oh, I was three when Nanny came to live with us—or Byrnes's mother, I should s—"

The curtains suddenly wrenched apart and Byrnes stood there.
"Are we keeping an eye on Ulbricht, or gossiping like a bunch of little old ladies?"

"Well, it
is
terribly interesting," Ingrid replied.

"If you want to know something, just ask," Byrnes replied coolly.
"I detest people gossiping about my life as though I'm not living it."

Touché
.
Ingrid tilted her head.
He
was correct: Ulbricht had to be the focus.

At her side, Debney looked like he'd seen a ghost, and made some sort of gasping noise.

Byrnes shot him a disgusted look.
"Christ, Francis.
It's not as if I didn't know.
You followed Christopher Lamb around like a girl with the swoons the summer I turned fifteen.
It was fairly obvious to anyone with eyes.
And I
am
a Nighthawk.
Grant me some credit."

"You never said a word about it," Debney managed to rasp.

"What was there to say?
It was your business, not mine."
Slipping a hand behind Ingrid's back, Byrnes nudged her toward the ballroom, his voice lowering for her ears only.
"Just as my past is
my
business.
Stay out of it.
Five minutes."

That stung, which was her own fault.
She knew better than to develop an interest in him.
Pushing past, she tilted an eyebrow at Debney, "So much for your idea that he saw you as some kind of threat.
I'm going to mingle."

T
he target was
Ulbricht's study.

Leaving Debney in the ballroom—with strict instructions to stay there in plain sight—Ingrid ghosted up the stairs in search of the ladies’ retiring rooms.
After she’d powdered her nose she returned to the hallway, and then darted away from the ballroom deeper into the depths of the manor house.

"Where are you, Byrnes?"

"
Come and find me
," he whispered back.
"
If you can
."

So be it.
Ingrid breathed in deeply.
Blue bloods had no personal scent, but she knew what type of cologne he was wearing tonight, and...
there....
A trace of it.

Shadows darkened the halls.
There were few lights here, merely fireflies of fuzzy goldenness burning at certain distances along the hall.
Ingrid stalked Byrnes's trail, smiling a little with anticipation as the smoky, lemon verbena scent of his cologne grew stronger.

It was darker here and there were no lights at all.
The sounds of the party grew muted.
Ingrid thought she heard a rustle, and then—

A hand darted out of the shadows, curling around her wrist and drawing her into an alcove by the window.
Byrnes snapped the curtains closed with a flick of his hands, pressing her back against the glass of the window.
There were books scattered on the low padded bench, inviting a passer-by to sit and rest for a moment, but there was no resting here.
Something had caught his attention.
Ingrid arched a brow, but he clapped a hand over her mouth, his hard body pressed against hers.
She could feel the whisper of his breath against her cheek, and that old thrill went through her.
That attraction that she simply couldn't fight.
The second he realized she wasn't going to make a noise, he withdrew his hand, pressing one finger against his lips for quiet.