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back. Sinclair would find the young woman and take it away from her, even if he had to chase her to the ends of the earth.



Chapter 2

    Basher McBride was coming after her. Bertie had twigged he was much too smart not to notice if she lifted his timepiece, but she’d told herself not to be a coward. Now she knew her folly, because he was chasing her, and he’d have her nicked in a heartbeat. She should have stuck with taking his handkerchief and been done.
    But she’d wanted Mr. McBride to look at her. To see those eyes, gray like the sky before dawn, to hear his rumbling voice. She’d warmed all over when the syllables had poured onto her—
Easy now, lass.
    She’d lingered too long to admire him, and now he was coming. Bertie picked up her pace and dashed around another corner. She knew London better than most, and she could lead him on a merry chase. And if Bertie couldn’t shake him . . . well, she’d know where to run.
    She scooted into the backstreets behind the grim walls of Newgate, ducking into the warrens and winding streets, lanes so narrow they blotted out the last streaks of light in the sky.
    These passages were filled with trash, rats, and layabouts. A few of the men lolling in their gin-soaked stupor tried to grab Bertie’s skirts as she went by, but Bertie expertly twitched away from them and kept on running.
    Bertie risked a dash across Aldersgate Street and back into the narrower lanes beyond. She jumped over a vagrant who looked to be far gone on opium, her bootheels clicking on the hard-packed street.
    And wasn’t it just her luck? The Scottish bloke was keeping up with her. A swift glance behind her as she rounded a corner showed McBride running after her, his body moving with athletic competence as he ducked and swerved around carts, dung, and vermin, both human and rodent.
    Bertie’s breath was coming fast, her corset too tight to keep this up for long. Blast the man. He should be giving up by now, toddling off to his comfortable home in Mayfair or Belgrave Square or wherever he laid his pristine head to rest.
    She remembered how he’d stood straight and tall in front of the judge, taunting the old misery, turning the verdict around to surprise them all. Basher McBride’s arrogance had rolled off him, with even the judge grudgingly conceding to him.
    But then, as soon as his performance was over, all that arrogance drained out of him, leaving Mr. McBride an empty shell. Until now, of course. His energy was back, focused on chasing Bertie and dragging her off to a constable.
    Not that, never that. Bertie didn’t particularly want to finish her life at the end of a noose. The jury might be sympathetic that Bertie was forced to pickpocket by her father—if they believed her—but that would only mean she’d be transported across the ocean to someplace she knew nothing about or locked up in a grim and terrifying prison.
    She should have been able to slip away from him by now, but Mr. McBride was keeping her in sight, whichever passage she took. Bertie knew she’d have to lure him to The Trap, whether she liked it or not, or she’d never get away from him.
    That’s how she thought of it—
The Trap—
with capital
T
s outlining the jaws of it. No one escaped it, not easily anyway. Mr. McBride was smart—he’d run the other way as soon as he saw what was what, and leave Bertie alone.
    “Oi!” she shouted when she was within three feet of the place. “It’s Bertie! I’m coming in!”
    A door in a squalid wall in a dark alley swung open, and Bertie leapt over the doorsill. She swept up her skirts as she landed, careful not to turn her ankles in the rubble.
    Beyond the door was an empty space where a house had stood, pulled down or fallen down long ago. The lot was surrounded on four sides by other buildings that soared five and six stories to the sky. No windows faced the place, nothing to reveal the secrets of the inner emptiness. The space was lit right now with a fire built in