“Whispers are hovering all over South London that they’s looking for someone. That someone ain’t likely to be anyone but me.” She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “If my family finds me, either I have to go back to that life or I’m dead where I stand.”

Her eyes met his once more, and it wasn’t weariness or mere concern he saw there. She was afraid. He held his arms out, hoping she would accept the offering. That she did so without hesitation proved both a relief and a worry.

“My job ain’t terribly far from Southwark. I cain’t be too close to that area of town. It’s where the Kincaids all still live.”

He rubbed a slow circle over her back. “You could—You don’t have to—” He’d not gotten tongue-tied until now. How was it that she still managed to upend him sometimes? “We’ll find you something else, Gemma. Something nowhere near Southwark.”

He felt her sigh against him. “That could take time, though. I cain’t make my next start without coin in my pocket.”

That dropped like a weight on his heart. He’d always known she’d leave again, but he’d held out hope that she’d stay long enough to find a means of making things work. She had to have been deeply unhappy to want to leave a safe place when she was in such danger.

“What did you do, Baz, when you were younger and you were in trouble, but you couldn’t go back to where your mother was . . . working, and you had nowhere else to go? What did you do when you didn’t have nowhere else to hide?”

She was the only person he’d ever told about the terror he’d felt when, at only six years old, he’d been tossed out on the street. The cruel woman who’d run the bordello where his mother had been trapped had declared he was too old to stay, that he was costing the woman business and money—no matter that his mother had provided ample coin for the food he ate, coin he’d supplemented himself by his efforts on the streets each day. When at the house run by that unfeeling woman, he’d kept to the attics, out of sight, out of the way. There’d been no reason to toss him out other than cruelty.

“There was safety in not being alone. I kept to crowds during the day and the urchins’ hovels at night.”

“But what did you do when you were full spent and hadn’t a day’s worth of survival left in you?”

He closed his eyes, better able to remember without agony while she was in his arms that way. “I met my mother every morning at the back wall of that house. I’d get to see her and talk to her, and that helped.”