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СКАЧАТЬ had fallen asleep on the pile of furry things. Holding a rose.”

      Natalya sighed. “Poor thing. But someone admires her besides you, it seems.”

      Her sly remark hit home and Semyon knew she was aware of it. “Yes, well, that is neither here nor there,” he said briskly. “I found my coat myself and left our sleeping beauty to the footman.”

      “Will you see her again?” Natalya asked innocently.

      Semyon wanted to make some equally sly response but found to his surprise that he did not have the heart to do so. He looked straight into Natalya’s wide questioning eyes and said only one word.

      “Yes.”

      Chapter 2

      The same night…

      Angelica awoke at last, but not where she had been. The curtain-draped room in the Congreve house, its walls and furnishings, the cloaks and furs given into her keeping, all of it had vanished in a swirl as utterly as if she had dreamed every detail.

      Someone had come in to that place—a man—but who? She tried to think. Her mind was as blurry as her vision for some reason and she lifted her head to look around. She was lying on a bare wood floor, a cuff of cold iron around her ankle, a chain rattling from it to a bolt set into a beam in the wall. A feeble light came from a candle in the far corner, throwing circles of shadows upon the walls.

      Who had brought her here? Not the handsome fellow with the foreign name who’d given her his coat. Not the footman Jack, who’d come and gone with armloads of women’s things.

      No. Someone different. An older man, someone she had taken for a guest at the party, lost, as Semyon had seemed to be.

      She clenched her fist and something sharp pricked her palm. Angelica lifted her hand and saw that she was holding a long-stemmed red rose. Then it came back to her in bits and pieces.

      The older man had come in shortly after Simon—Semyon, she corrected herself. His name had been Semyon Taruskin and she had written it down on a piece of paper and put it in the pocket of his coat. Just in case some other man was to come by with a similar coat…she vaguely remembered telling him something like that.

      She had spelled his name correctly and he’d seemed surprised but she had heard of him. Semyon had a rakish reputation that men envied, and women sighed over.

      Several more layers of blur seemed to fall away as she held on to the rose, letting it prick her palm to aid her memory, not minding the thin trickle of blood from the first inadvertent wound or caring about the white dress that was tangled about her aching body.

      Semyon’s sudden appearance had startled her in the extreme. By the time the second man, the older one, came through the curtains, she had been less wary.

      The rose in her hand…yes, he, the one who’d come after Semyon had been and gone, had given her that, a gesture that had puzzled her at the time as he’d said nothing about it. But she’d supposed he only meant her to hold it while he struggled out of his coat.

      She had taken the rose politely, not inquiring as to whether it was to be presented to a sweetheart, or if he wanted its stem clipped and the bud fastened to his lapel, expecting him to tell her.

      The older man had not said anything about it, just remained oddly quiet once he was out of his coat, holding that close to his body, as if he was waiting for her to do something. But what had he wanted? She still could not think clearly.

      He had seemed reluctant to hand the coat to her, beginning to fiddle with the waistband of his breeches while she averted her eyes. She’d listened absently to the distant strains of music from the crowded ballroom, noticing how it and the dancers seemed to thunder in unison as the gathering became more and more boisterous.

      He’d murmured a no when she’d finally asked if he needed a button sewn, praying that he would not. He just stood there, red in the face and sweating hard—his shirt was soaked with it and not clean to begin with.

      In fact, he seemed to emanate foul smells from all over his body that she could not name, but decay was the strongest.

      Angelica’s nose had wrinkled and without thinking, she’d brought the rose she’d been holding to her face and smelled its sweet fragrance, liking its extraordinary freshness. Ignoring the unpleasant man, she’d touched a finger to its tightly furled petals, separating them and found that the heart of the rose was drenched with a curious, crystalline dew.

      Longing to taste it, avoiding the man’s gaze and his revolting appearance, she had ventured to sample the dew, putting a fingertip first in it and then to her lips…and…and…she had fallen, knocking over a small dressing table and the book she’d used to write upon that lay atop it.

      Gasping, terrified, she’d pulled herself up by the lapels of Semyon’s coat somehow, unable to stand. The masculine smell of it had given her a jolt of strength that soon dissolved—she had let go and fallen again, to her knees. The other man had laughed at her, his voice coarse, a mongrel’s bark.

      She’d tried to crawl away, escape the shadowy chamber and the strange intruder who had tricked her, holding on to the stem of the rose. It had seemed to grow thick in her hand, as thick as a young tree, and the bud had become as big as a human head.

      Then her other hand had touched the fallen book and she tried to tear out a page, thinking wildly of leaving a note for someone to find. The man had kicked the book away before she could. Sobbing, she flung the rose away from herself, but the man forced it back into her hand, curling her limp fingers around it and squeezing painfully hard with his hand until its thorns pierced her skin.

      She remembered no more after that.

      Angelica looked with horror at the rose she still clutched. The innocent-seeming petals had held a potent and dangerous drug. She threw it into a corner and curled up in a ball when she heard footsteps approach.

      Two people. Men, judging by the tread.

      They stopped by her head. One bent down to test the chain attached to the cuff around her ankle, seeming to find it sound. Through her hair, she saw the heavy boots of the man doing that, boots with round, scuffed toes and a split sole on the left one that had been mended, not well. The other pair were far more elegant—they were riding boots that had cost a small fortune and were polished to a high shine. She could almost see her face in them—a tear-swollen, dirty face, she knew that, half covered with matted hair.

      “Hello, Angelica,” the owner of the boots said. “Pity, seeing you in such a disreputable state. You always prided yourself on your beauty, didn’t you, my dear?”

      The tip of one of the boots pressed into her cheek. Icy terror gripped her heart and her breath stopped in her lungs. She had known that voice all her life. Angelica looked up into the face of her stepbrother and fainted dead away at his feet.

      Semyon was unable to sleep and left his bed, peeling off his nightshirt and dressing again, rather carelessly. But who would see or care in the dark streets of London as he roamed through them? He was thinking of Angelica all the while, slipping out and away from the Pack’s house with such stealth that he awakened no one.

      His preternaturally long strides took him first to a marketplace, already stirring in the hours before СКАЧАТЬ