An Inconvenient Arrangement

Chapter 1: Rafe

Raphael St. Alexander always thought it to be one of life's greatest ironies that a bastard like him had been named after an angel and a saint. His poor mother always did have high hopes for him. He reached into his pocket and extracted his pocket watch, the golden dented lid swung open to show him the time. Half past three in the morning.

"You're late," Rafe announced to the darkness with some irritation. "Really, I go through all the trouble of doing someone's dirty work and this is what I get? Being left to wait by the Thames in the biting cold of November in London with a rotting corpse."

"So dramatic, Carlisle," came the husky feminine voice as Madame Dumont stepped into view. "I was dealing with some rowdy customers back at the house. And seeing as how Mr. Carwick was alive not three hours ago, I hardly think he's rotting. And I imagine you are not one to get squeamish at the sight of a dead body."

By house, she did not precisely mean her home. Madame Dumont was the proprietress of one of the most notorious brothels in London which catered to a wide range of clientele with an even wider range of unorthodox desires. If you had a fetish, Madame Dumont likely had someone for you. It was why her rates were sky-high. It also made her the keeper of a good deal of secrets and it was her discretion that enabled her to run her business successfully.

That meant if Rafe wanted one of her secrets, he would have to get creative.

Easier said than done; she was ruthless on a good day, impossible on a daily basis. But, lucky for him, even she had her gigantic, glaring weakness; she cared. She cared for the well-being and safety of the people who worked for her. She took special measures and employed heavy security so that nothing underhanded happened to them. And once you cared, all it took was a bastard like him to see it and then you were as good as a marionette in the hands of a puppet master.

The dead man at their feet was the leader of one of the rising powers in the flesh trade and was linked to a ring of smugglers that trafficked people to Turkey and Egypt. Two weeks ago, when Rafe discovered that Madame Dumont had taken in a girl who had managed to escape their clutches and put herself in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people, he just couldn't have let the opportunity slip by. It would have been like looking at a gift horse in the mouth.

A deal was struck; he would make her problem go away and she would tell him what he wanted to know about one of her clients.

It was easy enough to locate Mr. Carwick, Raphael had his own network of spies all throughout London. Beggars, street urchins, whores, dock workers, Bow Street runners, and aristocrats; Raphael had his claws in almost every aspect of London. This was exactly why he was the Home Office's most prized possession. That was also why they were willing to turn their heads in the other direction when Rafe did something a little below board; case in point, when he sent Mr. Carwick into the Thames for an eternal swim and the River Thames Police found him a few days from now, the case files would disappear from their offices. So would the cadaver.

If he wanted, the body would never be found, of course. But that didn't exactly send the message that Madam Dumont wanted to send the people threatening her. Though, now that he considered it, why bother sending a message when a good portion of their organization was going to end up at the gallows after all the evidence Rafe had managed to extract from Mr. Carwick's offices found its way to the relevant authorities? While human trafficking wasn't exactly his purview, Rafe wasn't going to let people suffer for no reason. And it never hurt to wave his worth in front of his superiors to make sure they kept his leash loose and long.

"Satisfied with the service, Madam?" Raphael turned with a friendly smile to the proprietress.

"It's an ugly business, Carlisle. I can't say I'm sorry to see this bastard go. You know I don't care much for the law, but I don't like being involved in this shade of illegal."