Page 75 of Rules for Ruin

“Mannering shouldn’t have brought you to such a display,” he said.

“He wasn’t to know what would happen.”

“What do you imagine becomes of wire dancers, sweetheart? They inevitably fall. It’s a danger of the job.”

She murmured something in reply. Gabriel couldn’t fully hear it—her voice was muffled against his chest—but it sounded as though she’d said, “I feel as though it was me who fell.”

His jaw tightened, recalling her face as she’d watched Galezzo take his first steps out onto the wire. “You should never have been here in the first place,” he said. “What madness compelled you to accept Mannering’s invitation?”

“I promised Miss Compton I’d include her the next time he invited me anywhere.”

A frown darkened Gabriel’s brow. “You and your scheming. Look where it’s ended you.”

She didn’t reply, only slipped her arm around his midsection.

His heart contracted painfully. Still scowling, he enfolded her in a fierce embrace. Soft tremors were coursing through her body in waves. “You require a new cloak,” he said crossly.

She nestled closer in response.

He tucked her head under his chin. One of her ever-present glass dragonfly pins scraped his jaw. His scowl deepened. “And someone must buy you proper jewels for your hair.”

She didn’t inquire as to who that someone might be. “These are proper jewels.”

“Glass,” he scoffed. “You should have diamonds.”

“The man I bought them from in Paris said that dragonflies symbolize transformation. He told me they’d bring me luck.”

“Bad luck. Where I come from, they’re called the devil’s darning needles. Parents warn their children that, if they tell lies, a dragonfly will sew their mouth shut.”

Effie glanced up at him with concern through her tear-damp lashes. “Did your parents tell you that?”

“I had no parents,” he said. “None who would take the trouble to tell me fairy stories.”

“Your mother and father—”

“Just a father, and only in name. He drowned in the cut before I left Birmingham.”

“Oh, Gabriel.” Her arm tightened around him. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I—that he didn’t die sooner. I’d have been vastly better off.”

She stilled in his arms. “How can one be better off with no parents? Without them…where do you belong? You have no home. No true connection.”

“You have what you make.”

“It isn’t the same.”

His brows notched. He remembered Lady Belwood saying something about having been close friends with Effie’s guardian. But what of Effie’s mother and father? Had they gone the way of Gabriel’s own parents?

“You speak as though you’re familiar with the condition,” he said.

She fell quiet. “No,” she replied at length. “But I read things. I feel things. It seems to me—”

“I’ve lived it, love,” he said. “There’s no use mourning the loss of something you never had. If you want to survive you have to keep moving.”

Effie again lapsed into silence. And then: “Don’t you ever look backward?”

“I don’t care about that part of my past.” He gazed down at her. “Your past, on the other hand…”