Green Eyes by Karen Robards

proof against him, even in the absence of the emeralds, was overwhelming. The trial had been speedy, the verdict swift and harsh. At dawn he was to be hanged in Newgate’s small inner courtyard; they were not even going to drag him off to Tyburn and thus offer him one final chance to escape.
    Probing his psyche, Julian decided that his uppermost emotion was anger. Furious anger, which was at least an antidote to fear.
    Anger because he, Julian Chase, had endured the ignominy of being arrested, the pain and humiliation of torture, and finally the dread of hanging, for a theft he had been unsuccessful in committing.
    While that green-eyed little fraud of a witch had endured nothing—and gotten clean away with a fortune in emeralds with no one but himself the wiser.
    A pretty trick. He had to give her that.
    He’d like to give her something else, too, if he ever got the chance. Like the sole of his boot planted hard against her fancy-nancy backside.
    The rattle of keys warned him that a guard was coming. Julian just had time to arrange his face into a hard, blank mask when the lock clicked and the cell door was thrust open. Immediately the dozen or so poor souls with which the cell was filled crowded away from the opening toward the rear, obscuring the corner where he sat.
    This was the cell where the condemned awaited execution, and the visit of a guard at such an unusual hour brought primal terror. More than one of their number had been taken in just such a way, without warning, never to return. To hang? Who knew? Maybe to be tortured to death. Maybe … but speculating was worse than useless.
    Julian could smell the fear of his cellmates even above the stench of their excrement, which lay in an open pile in another corner as no other facilities had been provided to deal with it. With the coming of the guard, the fear-smell intensified nauseatingly.
    “Chase!”
    Good God, surely they weren’t going to torture him on his last night on earth? But of course they were. They wouldn’t get another chance to wring his supposed knowledge from him.
    Corpses keep their secrets.
    “Chase! Get yer bloody arse out ’ere!”
    The guard was a fine Cockney lad named Shivers, all six and a half feet and three hundred pounds of him. Julian was willing to bet that for sheer meanness, he hadn’t an equal even here, on Murderers’ Row.
    “You gonna make me come in an’ get ya, Chase?” Shivers’s voice took on a taunt. Wincing inwardly while still careful to keep his face blank, Julian rose to his feet. His cellmates, relieved that the call was not for them, had already cleared a path to his corner. As he stretched to his full height—still some inches short of Shivers’s—he hurt in places he hadn’t known he possessed.
    None of the dread he felt showed on his face.
    “We both know you know better than that, don’t we, Shivers?” The insolence would cost him, Julian knew, but his pride was about all he had left. He wouldn’t let that be stripped from him along with everything else.
    “Get out ’ere, ya bloody bugger! An’ it’s Mister Shivers to the likes of you!”
    His movements severely hampered by the chain linking his ankles, Julian was not quite able to achieve the careless saunter for which he strove. Still, the leisureliness of his gait earned him a clout on the head from the stout staff Shivers carried.
    Julian’s ears rang, but he didn’t even wince. By this time, he thought sourly, he’d grown almost accustomed to skull-splitting blows on the head.
    “You deserve ’angin’, you do, and drawin’ and quarterin’, too! I jest wish … ah, weel. Some things a body’s got to do to live.” With this obscure speech, Shivers relocked the cell door and turned to prod Julian along the narrow corridor. From either side came the catcalls and jeers of desperate men. None wasted a word of sympathy on Julian. Instead of promoting camaraderie among the prisoners, the brutality of life in Newgate turned them into