A prostitute.

Murdered.

In Whitechapel.

Inspector Grayson Croft had spoken the only concoction of words with the power to thwart the confession perched on the edge of my lips. One moment it had been waiting to dive into the cozy darkness between us, shattering the life I’d built for myself.

Until he’d interjected—as men like Croft were wont to do—and I swallowed the incriminating admission so quickly, I nearly choked whilst forcing it past the lump of emotion in my throat.

To be fair, his entire sentence had been “I’ve come to accept that if a prostitute is murdered in Whitechapel, there’s nothing I can do to keep you from the investigation, short of locking you up and losing the key.”

However, I only marked the important bits of this statement.

I knew Amelia Croft, a woman I’d never met, was his sister. Indeed, I knew more about her than I wished to.

Secrets that would tear this tidy home down to its foundations.

I’d come here to do that, I supposed. Not purposely, but I was swiftly realizing that if I made my confessions to Croft, one of them would devastate this little family of his.

Blast, but it was easier to think of Croft as an adversary before I’d sat by his fireplace in this masculine study next to stately bookcases whilst sipping strong, sweet tea he’d prepared to my liking without even consulting me first.

I couldn’t remember ever telling him how I took my tea.

He was a detective, after all. I supposed it was his job to pay attention to details.

I took a sip, then another, buying myself time to process these new deaths. To consider how they changed everything about what I was going to do next. “I’ve not read anything new in the paper,” I said breathlessly. Surely two murdered women in Whitechapel would create a stir.

“I’m unsure of how long we’ll be able to keep it from the press.” His lip lifted in a semblance of a snarl. There was no love lost between Croft and journalists.

“How is your sister mixed up in this?” I asked.

“Did she not mention in her letter?”

I made a negative gesture. I’d never received a letter. I’d come here on my own business, but I’d be damned if I allowed Croft that information before I gleaned what I could from him about this timely bit of news.

“She knew the victims.” He studied the hemmed cuffs of his trousers as his hard jaw worked over something that might have looked like shame on features less brutal than his. “From earlier days.”

The inspector’s mossy gaze did its best to lock me into the chair he’d placed next to the fire in his study upon my arrival. I’d been grateful for it at the time, as I’d traveled from Chelsea to Lambeth through the frigid early London morning to unburden myself.

Feather-sized snowflakes had begun to collect coal dust from the January air, dispelling a bit of the post-holiday gloom with a mist cold enough to freeze your lungs to the bones of your ribs.

The cozy, golden-hued Croft residence had been a welcome sanctuary from the pall of grey.

Leaning forward, if only to prove that I could beneath the intensity of his regard, I returned his flinty glower with one of my own. “Tell me everything.”

At my command, Croft hesitated.

Though he’d been glaring at me since I arrived, he finally took a fraught moment to truly assess me. And because I detested his penchant for mercurial appraisals and monosyllabic answers, I returned the dubious favor by raking him with my own rude stare.

But for green eyes, we shared exactly zero physical traits.

If God made man of clay and earth, he picked the most stubborn stone from which to chisel Grayson Croft. Something abrasive and volcanic like a pumice, constantly grating at the fibers of my nerves.

He was too large to be graceful. Too square-shaped to be elegant. Too hard-used and disgruntled to be considered handsome, at least by my standards. Though he secured his inky-dark hair back with pomade and a fine-toothed comb, his undignified jaw always wanted a shave.

Sometimes I itched to pin him down and do it myself, if only to know what he’d look like without a perpetual shadow. Though a razor wouldn’t quell the ones in his deep-set eyes. Those shades were created by something far more sinister than time and neglect.

“You look terrible,” was his eventual verdict.

“I meant, tell me something useful and relevant, you adle pate.” I pushed myself from my seat and turned my back on him, stalking to the bookshelves that dominated his walls.

Were I a hedgehog, my quills would have stood on end, and I did everything in my power to advertise that I was prickly with impatience and not self-consciousness.

I crossed my arms over my tender middle and gave his enviable collection of fiction undue examination.

Croft and I had been at odds ever since he’d held me captive, spitting and screaming, as I discovered the mutilated corpse of my dearest childhood friend, Mary Kelly. He’d objected heartily when the landlord offered me money to clean Mary’s blood and offal from the anemic, moldy rooms off Dorset Street once her body had been carted away by the coroner.

And he’d renewed those objections as I built my career doing that very thing for so much of the greater London area for nearly three years now.

The dead often left a terrible mess behind… and I could get blood out of just about anything