Free Demon's Bride by Zoe Archer

staked their fortunes.
    Leo had an advantage no one else possessed. And that made him one of the most feared and respected men in the Exchange. Him. A saddler’s son, who’d never drunk tea from fresh, unboiled leaves until he was fifteen years old.
    He and Norwood managed to find a table, pushing aside the newspapers stacked there. As they sat, the proprietor flung two steaming mugs of coffee toward them and quickly trundled off.
    “Have you change for a bob?” Leo asked Norwood. He held up a shilling.
    “Only a tanner and thruppence.”
    “That shall suffice.”
    “Are you sure?” Norwood raised a brow, believing that the benefit would be all to him.
    “Truly, it’s satisfactory.”
    With a shrug, Norwood slid his coins across the table and accepted Leo’s shilling. The moment Leo touched the coins, he smiled, for though he had lost three pennies in the exchange, he now gained something far more valuable.
    To Norwood, and to all the men in the room, Leo sat at a table within the same coffee house. He did not rise up from his seat. He barely even moved, except to curl his fingers around the coins. Yet with just the brush of his fingers over the money’s metallic surface, Leo’s mind became a spyglass. Time folded in on itself, collapsing inward. Dizzying. The first few times Leo attempted this, he’d found the unexpected sensation unpleasant, like drinking too much whiskey too quickly. Now, he’d learned not only to anticipate the feeling, but to welcome it, for it meant that soon the future would be his.
    Leo felt the rough wooden table beneath his fingertips, heard the voices of men around him, yet his eyes beheld not the coffee house but a distant port. Palm trees and golden-skinned people in colorful wraps. Tall-masted ships bobbing at anchor. Buildings both Oriental and European—no, not just European, but the tall, narrow facades of Dutch structures, and battlements. He knew this place, never having been there, but by reputation: Batavia, in the East Indies.
    The lurid light spilling over the city’s walls came not from the setting sun, but a ship burning in the harbor. Sailors tried to douse the flames. Their water buckets failed to stem the fire—it spread like a pestilence over the hull, up the masts, engulfing the sails. The sailors abandoned their task. They shoved themselves into jolly boats and dove overboard, and people on the shore could only watch as the ship became a black, shuddering skeleton, its expensive cargo turning to ash upon the water. The crew had escaped, but the pepper they shipped did not.
    A disaster.
    “Bailey?”
    Norwood’s voice broke the scene. Leo quickly pocketed the coins and the vision of distant calamity faded. He was back in a London coffee house, amidst news sheets and talk of business, with Norwood gazing curiously at him across the table. A phantom scent of burning wood and pepper pods remained in Leo’s memory.
    “Are you well, Bailey?”
    “Forgive me. My mind ... went somewhere else for a moment.”
    A knowing grin spread across Norwood’s face. “Back to your new bride, I imagine.”
    Leo manufactured a smile. His ability to foresee financial disaster had been his particular gift from the Devil, a gift that remained a secret between Leo and the other Hellraisers. Anne would never learn of it—for many reasons.
    “Are you at the ’Change today in search of new ventures?” he asked.
    “There are several, all clamoring for my coin,” answered Norwood, “and the matter remains only to discern which would be the wisest investment.”
    “I’ve more than a little intelligence in such matters. Tell me which have commandeered your attention.”
    Norwood raised a brow. “To what end? That you might seize an opportunity and leave me out in the cold?”
    Leo placed a hand on his chest. “Injurious words. My offer was extended in friendship, that I might advise you.” He glanced down at the heavy ruby he wore on his right ring finger. “And I’ve no