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stepped into the room after Fitzhugh, keeping close to him. Not because she wanted to be close to him. He was holding the lamp, and she didn’t relish the thought of standing in the dark, empty building by herself.
    The walls of the room were black silk, as were the draperies and all of the furnishings. Except the bed. That was covered in a blood-red silk coverlet. Or at least it had been. Someone had ransacked the room and overturned the bed. It appeared the coverlet had been thrown over the bed as an afterthought. It looked very much like a splash of blood.
    â€œI’ve never been here before,” she said. And she didn’t want to come back. “I assume it’s Lucifer’s private room.”
    â€œNot exactly to your taste,” Fitzhugh said, strolling about, lifting objects here and there as though he was unaffected by the eerie style of furnishing. Perhaps he wasn’t. She knew very little about him. If Juliette and Pelham hadn’t been away from Town, she would have gone to her friend’s husband immediately and asked him for more information on Fitzhugh. The two were said to be friends.
    But Fallon wondered if a man like Fitzhugh—a man who stole others’ secrets—didn’t have a few of his own. And as she well knew, when one had secrets, it was next to impossible to have any close friends. Juliette and Lily had their own secrets, and they never questioned Fallon about her past. But most people were hopelessly nosy.
    â€œYou’ve been inside my bedchamber.” He’d been in her bed. “You know my taste.” She watched him move about the room. He moved easily, comfortable in his skin and with who he was. He was unself-conscious, which made her all the more fascinated by him. She was always conscious of her every move, of her every word. She often felt she didn’t know who she was—Margaret, Maggie, Fallon, the Marchioness of Mystery? She could be all of them or none of them on any given day.
    Fallon had spent a great deal of time watching others. She’d been trained from an early age to observe others. One didn’t prosper as a pickpocket if one didn’t learn to pick out the best marks and find their weaknesses. As she grew older, she watched people for other reasons. One could tell so much about the interior lives of others by observing how they behaved, how they interacted with others, how they acted when they didn’t know they were being watched.
    Sometimes she even made up stories about the people she saw—that woman was rushing to meet a lover. That man was angry with his solicitor. That little girl wanted a new hat but was too polite to say so.
    She couldn’t read Warrick Fitzhugh quite so easily. He had thoughts and emotions—of that she was certain—but he didn’t betray them by his actions. The one trait she could identify was confidence. He spoke, moved, and acted confidently. He was a man who expected to be followed and obeyed. She wouldn’t have expected so much certainty from him. After all, he wasn’t his father’s heir. He wasn’t even the second son. He had a domineering mother, who’d bullied her other children into prestigious matches. She knew at least one of the matches was not a happy one. The husband of one of Fitzhugh’s sisters had sent Fallon jewelry and gifts aplenty last year in an effort to woo her.
    Most interesting, Fitzhugh was not handsome. Handsome men—men like Kwirley—were always confident. It was probably bred into them from an early age. She knew from experience that attractive people often got what they wanted. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d used her looks to achieve some aim or other. But Fitzhugh was an exception. He wasn’t ugly. His face was interesting—the broken nose, the scar near his eye…
    The eyes. When he’d pulled her close a moment ago, she’d gotten a clear view of them. They were