Page 10 of An Extraordinary Lord

“Five or fifty—no difference when it comes to losing the woman you love.”

Merritt kept his gaze straight ahead. Unfortunately, that meant looking straight at Veronica. “I think the best way to honor Joanna’s memory is to stop the riots and keep others from being hurt, don’t you?”

“If that’s all you’re doing. But if you’re doing it out of some sort of revenge—”

“I’m not.”

“Ifit’s revenge,” Clayton repeated, “then you need to give it up right now, because you’ll never find it.”

An invisible fist squeezed Merritt’s chest. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to keep the darkness from his face.

“Five years, a mob of people, an accident—” Clayton shook his head. “You’ll never find the people responsible, and even if you did, there’s no way to punish them for it now.”

Oh yes, there was. He currently stood in the center of an armory, for God’s sake, surrounded by a cache of swords and pistols. There were hundreds of ways of punishing the man responsible once Merritt found him.

“Even if you did,” Clayton repeated quietly, as if reading the dark thoughts whipping through Merritt’s mind, “it won’t bring her back.”

He knew that. Christ, how he knew that! He was there when she died, and he’d watched three days later when her coffin was lowered into the churchyard. Two weeks after that, he went to the church on the morning of what would have been their wedding day to stare at the empty and silent nave that should have been filled with family and friends. When he’d left the church, he’d gone straight to purchase an army commission. Bribes were paid to secure one as quickly as possible, and within a sennight—and against his father’s wishes—he was on his way to the Peninsula, haunted by thoughts of Joanna and how he’d been unable to save her.

After five years, he was still haunted by her. Most likely he always would be.

“It isn’t revenge,” he repeated.

No, it was far more than that. But he couldn’t say what he’d truly been doing in recent months. That he’d been out every night not since the riots started but long before, since shortly after returning from the wars. That it wasn’t only the riots that plagued him but all the crimes that needed to be stopped before they happened. That being a barrister wasn’t enough, because he wanted to bring the kind of justice to victims that no courtroom ever could. That he was sick and tired of dealing with criminals only after the crimes were committed, after innocents were harmed.

Yet if he revealed all that, Clayton, Marcus, and the other men of the Armory would try to stop him and start a new fight he certainly didn’t need.

“Despite what you hope,” Clayton warned quietly with a nod at the woman, “you might not be able to convince her to cooperate.”

“She wants a pardon.” He’d never been more certain of anything in his life. “I saw it in her eyes.” The same look he saw in the eyes of desperate men brought before him in court.

“But she also knows about Scepter and what they’re capable of.”

Of course she did. A criminal turned thief-taker who lived among the worst of London by day and prowled through the streets by night—most likely she’d already seen firsthand the evils they’d committed. While Scepter might have moved on from committing crimes to starting a revolution, they’d begun this latest initiative in the crowded rookeries and gin-soaked alleys of the poorest parts of the city. The parts she would have known by heart.

“Leave her to me.” He assured Clayton, “I’ll convince her to work with us.”

“How?”

When she glanced at them, he boldly met her stare full on. “However it takes.”

Three

The undersecretary left with a loud rattle of metal doors that vibrated through the old stone building as hard as Veronica’s heartbeat slammed against her ribs. Merritt Rivers stared at her silently. He waited for the second clang of the outer door in the courtyard to announce the man’s complete departure before approaching her.

He turned the chair around and straddled it, resting his forearms across its back. “So…thief-taker.”

She lifted a brow. “Mrs. Fitzherbert.”

“Merritt,” he corrected.

“Veronica,” she conceded grudgingly.

“There. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

More than he realized. She should never have allowed such familiarity. But they needed each other’s help, and maintaining strict formality between them would only work to keep them at odds. He was sharp enough to realize that, too, which was why he’d just forced it upon her.

“Now that’s been settled,” he said and leaned forward on his forearms, “let’s have a nice little conversation, shall we?”