Chapter 9
“Y ou shouldn’t fight him.”
Temple did not look up from lacing his boots. “It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think? Half the club is already ringside.”
The Marquess of Bourne, Temple’s oldest friend and co-owner of The Fallen Angel, leaned against the wall to one side of the door to the boxing ring, watching as Temple prepared for the fight. “That’s not what I mean and you know it. Tonight, you are welcome to fight all you like—though if I were a betting man, I’d have twenty quid on Drake falling in the first minute.” He pointed to the low table at the center of the room. “You shouldn’t accept the challenge from Lowe.”
Temple looked to the list of names there. Christopher Lowe at the top, as it had been for weeks. Calling him. Tempting him. Daring him to accept. Evidently, Mara had not told her brother that she’d arranged a deal with the Killer Duke, and that she was earning back their money. Either that, or Lowe wanted to free his sister from ruin—but Temple couldn’t imagine his sister’s reputation had anything to do with the young man’s plans.
Damned if he didn’t want that fight more than anything. Lowe deserved a sound trouncing.
“It would be the fight of the year,” Temple said. “The Angel would make sinful amounts of money.”
“I don’t care if the King and his royal guard sat ringside, with the crown jewels on the match. You shouldn’t fight him.”
Temple stretched against the leather strap hanging from the ceiling of his office, letting his weight loosen his shoulders, preparing him for what was to come. In a half an hour, he would enter the ring and fight, and every man in the audience would fight with him. Some would fight on his side, seeing themselves in the fallen duke who, despite shame and ruin and loathing, could be king here. But most would fight as his opponent, David to Temple’s Goliath. They, too, knew what it was to lose to the Angel. And even as they paid their dues and basked in the glow of the tables above, a small part of them ached for the club’s ruin.
“It is the game,” he said, pretending not to care about the words. “It is what they come for. It is what we agree to give them.”
“Bollocks,” Bourne said. “We agree to take the bastards’ money and give them a fight to watch. We don’t agree to put ourselves on show. And that’s what you would be doing.” He came off the wall toward Temple, lifting Lowe’s file from the table. “It would not be a fight. It would be a hanging. They would think that Lowe is finally getting a chance at retribution for his sister’s death. If you’re even considering fighting him, at least wait until the bitch is revealed. Then the world will be for you.”
Temple’s jaw set at the description, unwelcome. “I don’t care who they are for.”
“What a lie that is.” Bourne huffed a humorless laugh and ran a hand through his hair. “I know better than anyone how you want them to think of you.”
When Temple did not reply, Bourne continued. “I looked at Lowe’s file today. He’s lost everything that wasn’t attached to him by birth, and a fair amount of money that he’d earned, somehow. I’m surprised Chase hasn’t sent Bruno for the clothes from his back. Houses, horses, carriages, businesses. A fucking silver tea set. What the hell do we need with that?”
Temple smirked, working another long strip around his free hand. “Some people like tea.”
Bourne raised a brow and threw the file to the table. “Christopher Lowe is the unluckiest man in Britain, and he either doesn’t see it or doesn’t care. Either way, his dead father is rolling in his grave, willing to make a deal with the devil or worse to rise up and kill the stupid boy himself.”
“You take issue with a man losing everything at the tables? There’s an irony.”
Bourne’s eyes glittered with irritation. “I might have lost it all, but I earned it back. Tenfold. More.”
“Vengeance worked well for you.”
Bourne scowled. “I spent a decade dreaming of retribution, convincing myself that there was nothing in the world that would satisfy me more than destroying the man who robbed me of my inheritance.”
Temple raised a brow. “And you did just that.”
The other man’s voice grew soft and serious. “And I nearly lost the only thing that mattered.”
Temple groaned, and reached for the leather strap that hung from the ceiling of the room, using it to lean into a stretch. “If the men in the room beyond knew how you and Cross go soft every time you speak of your wives, the Angel would lose all power.”
“As we speak, my wife is warm and waiting. The men in the room beyond can hang.” He paused, then added, “Vengeance was my goal, Temple. Never yours.”
Temple met his friend’s gaze. “Goals change.”
“No doubt. But be prepared. Retribution is angry and cold. It makes a man a bastard. I should know.”
“I’m already a bastard,” Temple said.
One side of Bourne’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “You’re a pussy cat.”
“You think so? Tell me that in the ring.”
Bourne ignored the threat. “It won’t end as you think it will.”
It would end precisely as Temple thought it would. Mara might have been the mastermind of his ruin, but her brother had played his part—weeping and wailing and feigning accusation and making all the world, Temple included, believe that he’d been dreadfully wronged.
Memory flared, Temple on the street five years earlier, in broad daylight, all of London giving him a wide berth. No one wished to cross the Killer Duke. No one wished to incite his anger. Christopher Lowe had exited a pub with his debauched friends, pouring out onto the road into Temple, so rarely touched in anything but violence or fear that he started at the contact.
Lowe had looked up at him, drunk and slurring his words, and blustered for the crowd’s approval, “My sister’s killer in the daylight. What a surprise.”
The crowd of idiot drunks had laughed, and Temple had gone cold, believing Lowe’s anger. Believing himself worthy of it.
Believing himself a killer .
He looked to Bourne. “She might have stolen twelve years, but he kept them from me.”
“And both of them should suffer. God knows he deserves a thrashing, and yes, you’ll feel as though you’ve exacted your revenge, and you’ll trot the lady out through London as the second half of your master plan, and she’ll be shamed, and you’ll be welcomed with open arms and chased by marriage-making mamas. But you’ll still be angry.”
Revenge does not always proceed as expected.
The lesson he’d taught her boys.
The one he knew was true. He knew that this moment could not be undone. That it would forever mark him. That it would forever change him.
Bourne sat in a low, leather chair. “I’m simply saying you’ve everything you want. Money, power, a title that is growing dusty from lack of use, but yours nonetheless. And let’s not forget Whitefawn. You may not be there, but the place has made you a fortune in its own right—you’ve been a better master to it than your father ever was. You could take it all. Return to Society. Find yourself a wallflower. Wallflowers love scoundrels.”
Bourne was right. Temple could take it all back. Funds and a sullied title were more than most men had. Someone would have him.