The Iron Duke Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’d witnessed it personally. Blast. Mina firmed her lips.
    As if interpreting her frustration, St. John added, “The footman is alone in the study, however. His Grace told him to remain there. He hasn’t spoken with anyone else since Mrs. Lavery told His Grace.”
    The footman had been taken into the study and asked nothing? “But he has talked to the duke?”
    The answer came from behind her, from a voice that could carry his commands across a ship. “He has, inspector.”
    She turned to find a man as big as his voice. Oh, damn the newssheets. They hadn’t been kind to him —they’d been kind to their readers, protecting them from the effect of this man. A hollow fear shivered within her, much like the first time she’d run into a razor-clawed ratcatcher in an alley—the instinctive knowledge that she faced something dangerous and that she didn’t wholly understand.
    Not that he looked strange, or mutated as those ratcatchers were. He was just as hard and as handsome as the caricatures had portrayed—altogether dark and forbidding, with a gaze as pointed and as guarded as the fence that was his namesake. The Iron Duke wasn’t as tall as his statue, but still taller than any man had a right to be, and as broad through the shoulders as Newberry, but without the spare flesh.
    But it was not his size that made her wary. And for the first time, she could see why his crew might follow him through kraken-infested waters or into Horde territory, then follow him back onto shore and remain with him. When he leveled that cold, detached gaze at them, as if he couldn’t care less whether they dropped dead in front of him, they would be too terrified to do anything else. He leveled it at Mina now, and the message in his eyes was clear.
    He didn’t want her here.
    Because of her bloodline or her occupation? Mina couldn’t decide. It hardly mattered, anyway—she was here now.
    She glanced at the man standing beside him: tall, brown-haired, his expression bored. Mina didn’t recognize him. Like the Iron Duke, he wore a fashionable black overcoat, breeches, and boots. A red waistcoat buckled like armor over a white shirt with a simple collar reminiscent of the Horde’s tunic collar. Perhaps a bounder and, if so, probably an aristocrat—and he likely expected to be treated as one.
    Bully for him.
    She looked to the duke again. Though she’d never been introduced to someone of his standing before, she’d seen Superintendent Hale meet a marquess without a single gesture to acknowledge that he ranked above her. Mina followed that example and offered a short nod before addressing him.
    “Your Grace, I understand that you did not witness this man die.”
    “No.”
    “And your companion . . . ?”
    “Also saw nothing,” the other man answered.
    She’d been right; his accent marked him as a bounder. Yet she had to revise her opinion of him. He wasn’t bored by death—just too familiar with it to be excited by yet another. She couldn’t understand that. The more death she saw, the more the injustice of each one touched her. “Your name, sir?”
    His smile seemed just at the edge of a laugh. “Mr. Smith.”
    A joker. How fun.
    She thought a flicker of irritation crossed the duke’s expression. But when he didn’t offer his companion’s true name, she let it go. One of the staff would know.
    “Mr. St. John has told me that no one has identified the body, and only your footman saw his fall.”
    “Yes.”
    “Did your footman relate anything else to you?”
    “Only that he didn’t scream.”
    No scream? Either the man had been drunk, asleep, or already dead. She would soon find out which it was.
    “If you’ll pardon me.” With a nod, she turned toward the steps, where Newberry adjusted the camera’s thermite flash. She heard the Iron Duke and his companion follow her. As long as they did not touch the body or try to help her examine it, she did not care.
    Mina looked down at her hands. She would touch the