Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel Page 10
“Nothing is guaranteed. ‘Tis Bainbridge you must worry about. Did anyone touch the body?”
“No. I bolted the room after it happened.”
He’d trained this one well. “Take the key straight over to Parker at Scotland Yard and tell him everything you told me. If he has any questions, have him send me a missive. At worst, I’ll have Finkle clean it up. Anything else?”
Quincy eyed him. “Elizabeth sends her warmest regards. In those exact words.”
Ridley opted to say nothing. There was a darkness within Elizabeth that brought out the darkness in others. A woman whose unending strength and intelligence had once awed him.
Until their sensual relationship of leather and rope turned abusive.
She crossed too many lines.
Always accusing him of not being the sort of man she needed. Always accusing him of wearing his gloves to cover his ring. Always accusing him of fucking other women whilst she shoved him into walls and gouged him with objects, trying to get him to do what he, as an overlord, refused to do: snap.
For she only ever wanted to meet the real Ridley.
The one who came out when pummeling criminals.
There was a reason he burrowed deep into his own mind and rarely left it. He refused to tap into that dangerous place called passion.
It was what made a man crack.
It was what made a man resort to picking up an ax and swinging.
And he knew he was capable of that and more. For one didn’t crawl into the minds of criminals and leave unaffected. Their grime continued to smear itself onto the brain like mold spreading over aged cheese looking for blood.
Elizabeth had always tried to get him to push their relationship past the ropes and into barbed whips and beatings. Beating a woman had never been his calling. It withered his cock and insulted his level of intelligence.
So she attempted to rile him into wanting to do exactly that.
He never did which only riled her, in turn.
Whilst he forgave her everything, given her tragic history, his fist hit a brick wall when she started fucking other men in the hopes that he would sail over the edge and kill them all.
He almost did.
After which, he filed for divorce. He’d endured enough mental stitches in his lifetime to have scars on the inside his skull and didn’t need to start cracking past the bone.
Ridley eyed Quincy who was still casually crunching through a mint. “Must be nice having a mind like yours. Why the hell are you still here? Aren’t we done?”
“Elizabeth was hoping you might call on her at Sérail this week.”
Thus began her need to dominate the one and only person she never could: him.
The last time he had attempted to have a civil conversation with her at Sérail, his shirt had been soaked from the contents of a chamber pot tossed by a client of hers named ‘Pincher’. She’d told Pincher to do it and so poor Pincher met Ridley’s fist full of knuckles, earning Pincher a new nickname of ‘Punched’.
It’s what happened to bondmen who didn’t think for themselves and let their birch mistresses control them too much. “Nevermore. I rather like my linen shirts, given I import them from France.” Ridley leaned toward him across the desk. “If she has something to say, have her send a missive and sign it in blood. If it isn’t written in blood, I won’t read it, because I stacked her twenty-seven trunks on the doorstep for a reason.”
“Yet you continue to help her whenever she asks for it.” Quincy heaved out a breath. “In my not-so-humble opinion, and I’m not one to comment on what either of you shared given I think everyone at Sérail is deranged…you’re enabling her.”
Ridley pointed. “If I treated her in the way I really wanted to, I’d be arrested. Unlike her, I’ll always be what she never was to me: civil. Because I’m around enough delinquents and hardly need to start leading them all by example. Feel free to write that down and tuck it into her cleavage. Or her cunt. You decide.”
Quincy held out a hand. “She needs a stack of forty. Her supplier died.”
Jesus Christ.
If only he didn’t feel the guilt at having failed her as an overlord.
Agitated, Ridley yanked open a drawer, bottles tinkering against each other and opened a large mahogany box revealing a compressed stack of dried coca leaves. His fingers gripped a smaller stack than requested, which he snapped out. “Have her gauge the intake. They aren’t chocolate truffles rolled in walnuts.”
Quincy grabbed it. “Do you have any limestone to go with it?”
As if he was about to doll out death. “No. Coca on its own she can chew until her jaw falls off without any effects. But the limestone is my game. Not hers.” Ridley grabbed a few coca leaves for himself. Using the open tin that had fine shavings of limestone, he pinched a good powdery finger of the gritty white substance into the coca leaves and rolled it, then folded it over. He shoved it into his pocket for later use given he was going to be up for a while.
Slamming the drawer shut, Ridley used his hand like a broom. “No more of this. Time is something I have too little of as it is.”
“Yet you always make time for her and this. Why do you—”
“Because trying to do the right thing sometimes feels wrong, but in the end isn’t. As I said before, I prefer to be civil.” He eased out a breath. “I have to finish these notes by three.”
Quincy veered in. “I saw you carrying in a woman. Is everything all right?”
Damn the man for being a hawk. “I carried in no one.”
A gruff laugh escaped Quincy. “I’ll be sure not to tell Elizabeth or she may roll out the black carpet and tell the woman stories you don’t want her to hear. Like that time you got arrested for bashing the head of her lover through fourteen windows on Regent Street.” He gave him a pointed look. “She said it was the only time in her life you showed her you cared.”
Shifting his jaw, Ridley bit out, “I’m not known to bend. I snap. It rarely happens but when it does, not even death will save the world. You tell her that.”
“Duly noted. So when do I get to meet this enigma you carried into the house in the middle of the night like a vandal?” Quincy smirked, his green eyes dancing. “I’m endlessly curious as to what your taste in women has warped into since the last one.”
That wasn’t funny. “Permit me to emphasize something,” he said in a low tone that hinted he was restraining himself from putting a hand on the pistol that was angled on his desk. “I carried in an assignment who happens to be seven months over the age of eighteen. And her yet-to-be-lived life is hanging by a thread for lack of evidence that has to be delivered to Finkle in less than nine hours. Evidence I don’t think I’ll be able to deliver, which is incredibly stressful to a man who can’t set aside a cigar until it’s done. No one can or should know she is here, because I need every minute of those twelve hours and another forty-eight to get her out of London should things go bad. And they will. Tap your ear and say it with me. No one…can…know. Not Elizabeth. Not Luc. Not James. Especially not James. Not even Paul or John out of the fucking bible. Is that understood?”
Quincy let out a whistle and walked past. “You need to get out more.”
“You need to get out less. Stop killing people and giving me work.”
“If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t get out at all.” Quincy cracked his neck. “I’ll call on Parker before the body starts to rot and brings in the real freaks.”
Ridley puffed out a breath at the thought. “Have him also send out missives so it doesn’t end up in the papers. Above all, keep my name out of it. I don’t need another article written up by another sleazy journalist who keeps telling the public my mother had whored herself to Lord Spencer and that the murder of my ‘real’ father took me to Bedlam.”
“Can you blame the stories? You’re living in a house your father was butchered in while openly inviting every criminal in London to peer through its windows. That to me spells loon.” Grabbing the entire glass bowl of mints fr
om the side table, Quincy walked across the room with it, as if to demonstrate who really owned the house. He paused in the doorway. “Fair warning. Elizabeth is a dog of the worst sort. She’ll smell her and do something crazy: like befriend her.”
“Not if you erase the scent and rub lard with crushed mints on your chest. Maybe then she’ll opt to lick you instead of the girl.”
“To Satan’s ears and into my bed. One day. One. Day.” Quincy disappeared into the corridor and paused. “Where is this girl anyway?” he called, his voice echoing. “Upstairs? Did you and she already…?” He whistled.
Swiping up the pistol from his desk, Ridley jumped over stacks of papers and stalked out after Quincy into the corridor. He aimed his pistol at the glass bowl that was positioned on that hip. A squint, center and…
He pulled the trigger.
It shattered, the blasting echo of the shot thundering around them as mints and Quincy scrambled toward the wall. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Ridley tossed the pistol, sending it clattering back toward his study. “If only the good Lord could save you from thinking I would ever buck an eighteen-year-old girl and be entertained by it. Unlike the rest of you pricks squirting seed on the hour, I’m a gentleman first and an overlord second. How is that hand of yours? Hm? I know you can’t feel it, but is it bleeding? If not, stay right where you are. I’ll attempt another shot.”
Quincy glanced at his hand in exasperation and held it up held it up, showing off that it was bleeding from the shattered glass. “There is something wrong with you.”
Resuming his gentlemanly façade, Ridley adjusted his coat. “Says the man who can’t feel pain and works for Elizabeth. You two should buck each other and send me the bill.”
With the roll of eyes, Quincy trudged down the corridor. “I forgive you. Now go take your coca-infused limestone, Ridley, and think about hiring a prostitute, because you’re a fucking loon that needs to be guided through your own madness.” He muttered something and disappeared.
Ridley cracked his knuckles, knowing yet another stack of leaves weighed the inside of his coat pocket which he hoped would get him through more hours.
Hours he never had.
Aside from a lack of time, he held too much self-respect to pay a woman to fuck him.
Which is why he fucked himself. Because no one knew what he liked more than he did.
It kept life pox-free and gave him more hours to do what mattered most: work.
A quick movement from the main stairwell made Ridley jerk toward it, snapping up a fist.
Chapter 5
Releasing the tension of his arm, he dropped it.
Of course.
There she was. There was little Kumar on the last stair holding a massive Oriental vase high above her head, draped in his cashmere robe. Her uneven breaths rose and fell as her arms quaked to hold up the heavy vase.
He eyed her. “Is there a problem?”
Her black braid swayed past her waist as she further tensed. “There was a pistol shot,” she rasped in that heavy accent, searching his face. “A pistol! Did you not hear it?”
How charming.
This one had come to rescue him from a pistol with a vase.
And not any vase. The vase.
“At ease.” He adjusted each cuff. “I can see you’ve already made yourself marvelously comfortable, because there you are wearing my robe and toting my vase. A vase that was the only thing in my father’s room that hadn’t been shattered during the murder twenty years ago. So don’t drop it.”
Her eyes widened.
A ragged breath escaped him. “What are you digging through rooms? You haven’t even been in this house for an hour. What are you doing?”
She carefully lowered the vase and awkwardly set it onto the floor, wedging it toward the wall to ensure it was out of the way. “I only went into your room. The door was open so I decided to make use of your chamber pot given I could not find one in my room at all. I then chalked my teeth using your mouth brush, towel bathed myself given I reeked, and re-braided my hair when…” She rose, turning back toward him and lingered.
A little too much information. “Now that your derriere has formally touched my porcelain and your mouth has christened my toothbrush, permit me to educate you on self-defense. Never go for vases. Ever. It’s only effective once and they shatter. What happens after your only weapon shatters? Bash goes the back of your skull at the hands of your enemy and you’re dead. Learn to grab something you can reuse. Preferably an object that will set as much distance between you and the perpetrator as possible. Like a curtain rod. Or you might as well not grab anything at all. At that point, run, because you’re useless.”
She hesitated, still intently holding his gaze. “Why was there a pistol shot?”
Those overly large upturned eyes were not at all the shape or color any female should have. They weren’t even blue. They were a shocking pale blue verging on flecks of eerie white. Set against that dark gold of her skin, it was like beholding a magnificent medieval painting set in the corridor of a gothic palace.
The sort that a man silently prayed to like the Black Virgin in Cusset.
Her eyes hid nothing and it was fairly obvious they didn’t want to. The bizarre playfulness retained within them, despite everything Dr. Watkins had shared about her life, both awed and annoyed him.
It was as if she refused to feel the slaps of life that enabled better thinking.
The whispering of hemp ropes clothing every inch of her body in the art form of weaving patterns until no skin showed on her arms or her legs or her breasts or her throat, and then having her regally sit cross legged on a velvet chaise and sipping champagne he drank from her lips whilst fucking her was an image he needed to knock out of his mother-fucking head.
“I was practicing,” he eventually said, keeping his tone cool and flat lest he betray his overlord tendencies. “The walls needed it.”
She lowered her chin. “Whatever did the walls do? Did they mock your level of intelligence?”
That humor needled him. She used it too much. “To clarify, I had an associate call on me.”
She tsked. “Shooting at associates is not advisable. They will cease trusting you.”
Damn her for turning everything into a joke. She was up for murder and had a lusty guardian and was joking. “I suggest you return to your room and tell your jokes there given no one here is laughing.” He swept his finger up the stairs. “Keep the robe, as I have plenty of others, and go to bed. Go.” He was still trying to get the image of her fully clothed in hemp rope out of his head.
She smoothed his robe against herself, tightening the belt around herself to further hide what the calico gown beneath didn’t. “I feel very well rested.”
This one had only slept less than forty minutes. “The shadows beneath your eyes betray you.”
She lingered, her slim fingers sliding back and forth against the fabric of the robe as if waiting for him to command her to do something.
The wrong side of his brain noticed.
Yanking out his already rolled and folded coca leaves, he stuffed them into his mouth, chewing its bitterness and the wincing sharp sweetness of limestone. “I have to work.” The warmth and numbness against the inside of his cheek started as his saliva dampened the dry leaves he needed.
She hesitated, searching his face. “What sort of vegetation did you put into your mouth?”
Vegetation? Hargh. It wasn’t broccoli. “I only chew it when my mind needs to focus and a cigar isn’t enough.”
“That did not answer my question.”
“Coca.” He gestured toward the stairs. “Your inquisitive mind may now depart.”
She squinted. “Only coca?”
He shouldn’t have been surprised she would know the tricks of drawing out its effects. “No. I scraped a little sugar on it.”
Her full lips parted. “You rolled a wad the size of eight coca leaves into your mouth with limestone?”
“
Fourteen with limestone, since you appear to be counting. I get little effect from anything less.”
She gasped. “Are you deranged?”
He slowly chewed to emphasize it. “Some say I spent countless years in an asylum.”
“Your mind is blessed and yet you disrespect it.” Her features tightened. “Spit it out.”
She seemed to forget she was only five feet in height.
Maybe even a fourth of an inch under.
Veering in close, he wordlessly pointed out the sizable one foot and three inch height difference by lowering his chin down.
Her head rolled far back to look up until he saw nothing but those tiny nostrils and a chin.
“Never forget it,” he said. “I never do anything I can’t handle. I’ve experimented with enough to know what my limit is. If you ever see me grabbing a hundred and a whole tin of limestone, stop me.”
She tapped at his chest with a forefinger as if she herself were now on it. “Limestone draws out too much of the toxins from the coca. Do you not understand what that means? It contains benzoylmethylecgonine alkaloids.”
“I contain a hundred percent of I don’t care. Understand that without the coca, there is no Ridley, and without Ridley, all of the cages will be empty and there will be panic on far more than the street. Now be a darling little girl and go to bed.” He patted her small cheek. “Go.”
She pushed away his hand. “I am not a little girl.”
“So says the little girl.” He stepped back, chewing into the leaves for emphasis. “Children whine about being put to bed all the time, too.”
“You sound like a clock in need of winding.”
“Tick-tick. It’s the beauty of coca. It enables me to use every minute I don’t have. Now go to sleep knowing you get to lounge about all day with a pot brimming of tea until eleven tomorrow night. Unlike me. I haven’t lounged in eleven years.”
“I will not retire whilst those leaves remain in your mouth.” Despite being at his shoulder, she bumped herself closer, attempting to tap a brown finger up and against his bottom lip. “Spit. Spit before any more effects take you. Spit, spit.”