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his smile was foreign and incomprehensible, but she felt a piercing kinship at the self-derision in his eyes. “I always thought—I’d know if anything happened to him. I’d feel it. But that was rot. I had no idea. I was laughing or eating and he was dead. He bled in the dirt all alone.”
    Serena had no idea what to do.
I’m very sorry for your loss
, she thought, dredging the polite courtesy up from God knew where. But she couldn’t say it, didn’t know how to make her tongue form the words. She was more helpless before his simple, ordinary need than she would have been before any display of mastery. For long, painful moments, the only sound was the rain on the roof and the cobblestones.
    “How on earth did you end up at Mme Deveraux’s?” he asked, finally.
    “I slept with the footman,” she told him, angrily conscious of her own failure.
    “And your father kicked you out?” He shot a sharp, frowning glance at the door Lord Blackthorne had just walked out of.
    There, he was doing it already. Trying to make her an abused innocent, searching for the heart of gold among her brass. “No, I left,” she said with a false, brilliant smile. “I became a whore to spite him.” It was about half true. She had left to go after Harry,the footman; she’d intended to marry him. Harry, however, had had no such intention. When she’d gone to the address he’d given her, he hadn’t been there, and his friends had refused to give her any information about his whereabouts at all.
    She’d been starving by the time Mme Deveraux’s procurer approached her in the street. But it hadn’t only been desperation; she had signed her contract with a flourish, feeling hot and triumphant at the thought of what her father would say. She’d been an idiot.
    Solomon didn’t say anything; he looked as if he saw through the smile. He was doing it again,
seeing
her, and she hated it. She was afraid of what he would see—and worse, that he wouldn’t like it. “I bought back my contract with your money,” she told him. “But I didn’t stop. I was the most expensive whore in London for a year, and no matter how high my rates were, there was always someone willing to offer more. I couldn’t have done it without you. How do you feel about that?”
    He swallowed. “Lady—” He stopped, evidently realizing how stupid it was to speak formally after the conversation they’d just had. “Serena, I don’t know what you want me to say.”
    She didn’t either. “I suppose I want you to know what to say.” Stupid, but true. “Fit for Bedlam, aren’t I?”
    Black fear rose, then, from where it had been waiting. Her father could do it. He could really do it, and no sweet drunk boy would save her from that. Why now? He’d left her alone for years. She’d thought she was free of him, and instead he was like some deus ex machina who could walk in and out of her life whenever he pleased, handing down ultimatums and commands with no forewarning and no hope of escape.
    She pressed her fist to her mouth. “I—I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, quite calmly, and left the room.
    Solomon woke at eight o’clock, not at all refreshed. Serena, he knew, must be already awake and dealing with business, and hewanted to see how she was. He wanted to see
her
. Within twenty minutes he was dressed and hurrying down the back corridor to her office.
    In his haste, he ran straight into a tall man in obviously Parisian tailoring. Annoyed at his own gracelessness—but making a mental note to experiment further with gilt thread and pocketflap shapes—he apologized and tried to move past.
    To his surprise, the stranger’s dark eyes lit up and he embraced Solomon enthusiastically, talking in rapid French. “
Thierry! Comme ça me fait plaisir de te revoir! Mais où est-ce que t’es parti, hein? Je m’inquiétais tant quand t’as disparu
—”
    Solomon disengaged himself and stood stock-still. Once, he’d been used to this—being approached by