by Gaelen Foley
“W-what’s going on, sir, please?” pleaded the skinny fellow in the next cell. “Has the Coast Guard come to take us away now?”
Spectacles perched atop his nose, but beneath it sat a scraggly attempt at a mustache, like a smudge of coal soot dirtying his upper lip. “Your Grace? Will you let me out, sir? I’ll cooperate, I promise. I don’t want to die!”
“Shut up!” One of the guards banged the bars with the butt of his musket.
The little man jumped back with a yelp, but when Kate shook her head to let Rohan know that this was not one of her kidnappers, the prisoner began to cry, seeing them moving on and leaving him behind.
“God! Let me out of here! There’s something down here, I tell you! Somethin’ unnatural!”
“Shut it, Fitch, you cockless worm,” Denny Doyle ordered from farther down the row in a tone of great disgust.
One of the guards scowled and marched back to tell him to pipe down, in turn, but Rohan merely sent Kate a dubious glance. “How are you holding up?”
“Well enough,” she answered grimly.
“Good. Charming fellows, aren’t they?”
She mustered a wry smile in answer.
He put his arm around her shoulders gently. “Come, we’re almost through. What about this one?” He nodded at the cell ahead.
It held a tall, lanky fellow with long, carrot red hair tied back in a queue. He unfolded his gangly limbs, shot up from his cot with a quick-tempered scowl, and glared at them.
She shook her head. “No.”
“One more, then,” Rohan murmured. “Another Doyle. This one is a cousin to the other. They’re both the old man’s nephews.”
Kate approached the last cell warily, gazed through the bars while Rohan held up the torch, and confirmed the last man’s guilt with a grim nod. “Yes. Him, too.”
“Me? What?” The fellow in the cell looked up with a blank air of utter innocence. “What’s she talkin’ about?”
“What, indeed?” Rohan answered dryly. “Peter Doyle, isn’t it?”
“Aye, Your Grace.” He stood and approached his overlord with a much humbler attitude than his cousin had shown. Sensible lad.
Rohan glanced at her. “You’re sure?” he clarified with a trace of regret in his low voice.
“Certain of it,” she replied.
“What do you want with me?” Peter Doyle whimpered.
The duke narrowed his eyes at him. “Oh, I think you know.”
“Huh?” He gulped at Rohan’s dark look and began backing away toward the corner of his cell.
Kate glared at the prisoner. “This was the man who held me at gunpoint in the carriage while the other two went in to rob my home, like I told you.”
“What the—what is she talking about?” Pete stammered, playacting amazement.
Kate seethed at his denial, but out of her three captors, he was the least intimidating.
Peter Doyle was a large but flabby rectangle of a man, also in his early twenties like his cousin, but with coarse and curly hair an uninteresting blond shade. He had nervous hazel eyes and something of a horse face.
“Is there something that you want to tell me, Pete?” Rohan focused his unnerving stare on the young man.
“Uhm, er, I . . .”
“Something to do with a kidnapping, perhaps, hm?”
“What? Sir!” he exclaimed with great indignation. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean!”
“Don’t you dare deny it!” Kate flew at him without warning, gripping the bars.
“Easy, Kate.”
“He was there! You dragged me from my home—”
“No, I—sir, the lass is daft. Kidnapped? What? Someone kidnapped you? I’m Caleb Doyle’s nephew!” he cried, his face beginning to look quite terrified by the flickering torchlight. “Sir, you’ve known my family for ages! Surely Your Grace cannot believe this harlot over me? Whatever she says, she’s lying!”
“Well, I believe her,” he answered softly.
“I am not a harlot,” Kate reminded him in a withering tone. “As you well know.”
“Aye, you are!” Peter insisted. “You want to become some rich man’s ladybird . . . in London! Remember?” His own conviction in his uncle’s lie seemed to be dwindling, but his eyes suddenly widened when Rohan took off his coat and handed it off to a guard.
Then he removed his gloves and loudly cracked his knuckles. “Show Miss Madsen upstairs,” he instructed his men. “Tell Eldred to see her settled into a guest room.”
“What are you doing?” Kate murmured.
“Unlock the cell,” he ordered the guard in an almost amiable tone.
“Miss, if you’ll come with me.” The guard gestured to her to follow.
“I’m not leaving! This is my affair as well as yours!”
“Run along, Kate.”
“You won’t want to see this, Miss,” the guard advised her in a low tone.
“I’m not going anywhere!” she protested, shaking off the guard’s light hold and turning to the duke.
He was staring at Peter Doyle like a wolf homing in on the weakest sheep in a flock.
“M-maybe she should stay!” Peter said with a gulp as he pressed himself flat against the far wall of his cell. “Like she said, it is her business, too, uh, right?”
“You’d appreciate that, I’m sure,” Rohan murmured.
“I thought you didn’t know anything, Peter!” Kate reproached him.
“I think . . . I might be remembering.” He gulped. “Please, Your Grace . . . can’t the lady stay?”
“Oh, now I’m a lady?” She shook her head at Pete in disgusted surprise. Obviously, the only reason he wanted her to remain was in the hope that the Beast would not unleash his full wrath in front of a woman.
Rohan was staring at Pete when she tapped him on his massive shoulder. “May I have a word with you, please, before you sound the trump for Armageddon?”
“Of course, Miss Madsen.” He turned to her, looking as unperturbed if he did this sort of thing every day.
He took her aside.
“Is this all of the men you’ve got captive?” Kate whispered.
He nodded, gazing into her eyes. “Why?”
“I don’t see O’Banyon, the leader.”
“Do you want to look at them again? I can have them brought upstairs into the light.”
“He’s not here.” She shook her head, then shuddered. “There’s no mistake. I could never forget that ugly face.”
“Maybe the Doyle boys will know where he is. Now, Kate, I really do think you’d better go upstairs.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked uneasily.
“Get answers, like I promised you. Don’t worry, you just leave it up to me.” He gave her a rather charming smile that chilled her, given his murderous intentions. “Run along, now. Eldred will show you to one of the guest chambers. You haven’t eaten breakfast yet, as I recall. I’ll let you know whatever I find out.”
So you say, she thought with a frown, but she was not about to take his word for it.
“Don’t make me go, Rohan, please? After all they put me through, I deserve to hear for myself what this blackguard has to say! Besides, I’m the only one who can verify if he’s telling the truth,” she pointed out.
He took this in with a skeptical look, but as he straightened up, he shrugged to himself. “Very well, but I make no promises that what you see will not offend your sensibilities.”
“Sensibilities?” She snorted. “All I care about now is getting justice.”
His expression sobered at her fierce-toned words, but he nodded, then walked back to Peter’s cell.
Kate followed, masking her amazement that the mighty Beast had granted her request.
Eavesdropping by the bars, Pete began backing away again when he saw them coming. “She’s staying, right?” he asked nervously.
“Don’t look to me for help,” Kate replied in a breezy tone. “For my part, I hope he beats you senseless.”
“Now, then, Peter, dear lad.” Rohan sounded amused at her taunt.
“I don’t want any trouble, sir!”
“Then I suggest you take a seat and start talking.”
The guards slid back the door and let them in.
The duke stalked in first, filling up the space.
Kate hung back to watch the interrogation unfold from a safer distance, staying behind Rohan as her giant human shield. Peter didn’t sit down, he just kept backing away from the duke, like some poor Christian tossed in with a lion.
“Why was she taken? Did you three mean to sell her? Are there more girls you’re hiding down in the village?”
“God, no, Your Grace!” Peter blanched. “I swear, it ain’t nothin’ like that!”
“Then why did you kidnap her?”
There were several more rounds of denials before Rohan grabbed him by his shirt and threw him up against the rough stone wall. Peter squealed and looked away, squeezing his eyes shut in anticipation of a punch that did not come.
“You’d better start explaining.”
“It was O’Banyon’s idea!” he cried. “I was only doin’ as I was told!”
Kate held her breath.
“Denny said it would be good money! We didn’t hurt her, I swear! Nobody touched her! If she said otherwise, she’s lying!”
Rohan glanced over his shoulder at her with a piercing look of question; she conceded this point with a nod and a shrug. At least she had not been subjected to the most extreme form of violation.
“O’Banyon wanted her for himself,” Peter added hoarsely. “He still does, once she’s served her purpose.”
“What purpose?” Rohan demanded.
“I swear, sir, I don’t know!”
At his words, Kate shivered from more than just the cold, but she rallied her courage. “Tell us about O’Banyon,” she ordered Pete. “What do you know about him?”
He glanced fearfully at Rohan.
“Answer the question,” the duke commanded.
Pete swallowed hard. “My cousin Denny said O’Banyon used to live just over in Brixham years ago.”
Rohan eased his grip on him slightly.
“He went to sea with the navy or something,” Pete continued. “He was gone for a decade or more. Then he came back. Showed up at Birty’s Tavern down by the pier, looking to find some help for some new scheme. That’s the first I heard of him or what he was planning.” He shook his head. “I knew right away Denny was gettin’ us both in over our heads. It was no good. I wanted to ask my uncle’s advice. But Denny said I was yellow. Twenty guineas apiece plus whatever we could carry from her house.”
“Not a bad deal,” the duke murmured in biting irony. “Was O’Banyon targeting other girls or just Miss Madsen?”
Pete frowned and looked at him for a moment. “Madsen, sir? No. That ain’t her name.”
Kate began to scoff. “Don’t start that again!”
But Peter was staring at Rohan with a gaze that seemed to plead for forgiveness. “O’Banyon let it slip her name is Fox. Kate Fox. As in . . .” His voice trailed off, but the duke appeared suddenly riveted.
“As in . . . Gerald Fox?” Rohan murmured.
“Aye, Your Grace.” Peter nodded slowly, holding his stare. “That is why Uncle Caleb vowed we had to get rid of her.”
Kate did not know why Rohan had gone so still. “This is nonsense,” she informed him. “I think I would know my own name!”
“Would you, now?” He turned around and pinned her in a stare full of sudden dark suspicion.
Chapter 7
Rohan’s whole body had tensed. Gerald Fox. He knew that name from his boyhood days. The ex-Marine gone bad, a bloody hurricane on two legs—the privateer captain who had got his start with the local smugglers.
Years ago, the bold, brash Captain Fox had served Rohan’s father in the same capacity that the tamer Caleb Doyle now served him. Delivering messages. Spiriting agents back and forth between England and the Continent, no questions asked.
Unwitting courier to the Order.
An extraordinarily dangerous job, but very well paid. A man could lose his life in it.
Or his soul.
At once, Rohan’s mind whirled back to the last case his father had handled for the Order before he died.
The DuMarin affair . . .
Twenty-odd years ago, while the Red Terror had raged in France, the previous duke had hired Captain Fox for the dangerous mission of secretly transporting a beautiful French aristocrat girl to safety in America.
Lady Gabrielle DuMarin—the informant’s daughter. The DuMarins had been a leading family of the Prometheans. Indeed, they were descendents of the very Alchemist who had laid the curse on Rohan’s line.
All he knew was that after Lady Gabrielle DuMarin had sailed away with Captain Fox, neither had ever been heard from again.
Now Peter Doyle’s claim that Kate’s last name was Fox suddenly had Rohan wondering if she might be the product of a forbidden union between the English captain and the young French belle.
“What is the matter?” Kate exclaimed. “You’re looking at me as if you’ve seen a ghost! Who is Gerald Fox, anyway? I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Twenty-two.” She shook her head with a mystified frown. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
The very ground seemed to toss beneath his feet.
The timing matched.
It was almost too uncanny even for his superstitious brain to accept. He stared at her with a chill in his bones, like someone had just walked across his grave.
God, he had known from the first moment he had seen her in the great hall that somehow their destinies were intertwined.
But if the suspicions now flooding his mind were true, then that meant that Kate . . . had Promethean blood.
And he trusted her at his own peril.
Good God, if she was a creature of the enemy, then he saw that she had played him expertly so far. Laudanum? A perfect ruse to make him lower his defenses.
Obviously, no well-trained spy would ever willingly take leave of their senses on the job—and that could be exactly what she wanted him to think.
Perhaps she had even tricked the smugglers into playing an unwitting role in her game.
If Drake, the Order’s captured agent, had given up Rohan’s identity under torture, then the Prometheans need only look at his rakish mode of life in London to see that, while any man attempting to come at him with a weapon would probably not survive, a woman would have a much easier time getting close to him.
Close enough to sink a knife into his back?
Was Kate the one they had sent to slay him in her own delicate way—to beguile him and perhaps, in time, to lead him to his doom?
Impossible! he thought, unable to believe it as he searched her troubled green eyes, trying to discern the truth.
On the other hand, he had battled the Prometheans long enough to know better than to put any sort of elaborate ruse past them. What lengths would they not go to, especially if they thought they had finally found a way to target one of the Order’s most capable assassins?
He had to find out more.
Like who Kate really was, if there was any truth to her kidnapping tale, and, if not, what the hell she was really doing here.
Turning back to Peter Doyle, Rohan was now doubly eager to continue his interrogation, but until he knew the truth about Kate—whether she was an innocent or some enemy spawn—he did not want her made privy to the rest of this conversation.
“Why did you ask me how old I am?” she pursued, while Rohan stared at Pete.
He kept his back to her, so she wouldn’t notice any change in his demeanor—and because he suddenly did not want to face the acute temptation of her beauty. Promethean blood! God, and to think he had almost made love to her last night.
“Naturally, Miss Madsen, if you were underage,” he said smoothly, “th
at would make their crime against you even more abominable.”
“Oh. I see.” She sounded mollified, but Pete, meanwhile, cringed before his dark stare.
“I’m tellin’ ye the truth, m’lord! Her name is Fox, not Madsen!”
“Peter, I don’t know sort of game you think you’re playing,” Rohan replied in a businesslike tone, “but you can quit wasting your breath and my time on these foolish lies. Obviously, the lady would know her own name, just as she said. Go upstairs now, Kate,” he ordered. “I’m afraid this conversation is about to get more serious. I warned you to cooperate, Peter.”
“But, sir!”
“Rohan, you needn’t shield me—”
“Parker! Wilkins!” he barked, ignoring her protest. “Escort Miss Madsen upstairs. Have Eldred show her to one of the guest rooms. And stay with her, in case she needs anything,” he added with a sharp glance over his shoulder at his men.
Parker’s eyes instantly registered the stern warning behind his communicative look. “Yes, sir! Miss Madsen, if you’ll come with us now.”
“I will not! Your Grace, this is as much my business as yours! Besides, as soon as my back is turned, this weasel is going to start lying about me, I know it!”
Her protests sounded a little too emphatic for his peace of mind. “Miss Madsen, you will go, now, of your own accord, or I will have you forcibly removed.”
She stopped, looking startled at the rumble of thunder in his command. “Fine,” she replied stiffly after another stubborn heartbeat. Pivoting in her borrowed boots, she flounced out of the cell, muttering under her breath, “If that’s the way you want to be about it!”
Watch her, he told his men with a hard look as she marched back up the shadowy corridor ahead of them.
Parker nodded to him and followed her. Wilkins also fell into step. At least he could count on his men to obey, whether or not they understood the whys and wherefores.
When Rohan turned back to Peter Doyle, the young man braced for a thrashing. “Please don’t kill me, sir! I swear on me granny’s grave, I’m tellin’ the truth—”
“Be quiet!” he whispered harshly, grabbing him by his grimy lapels. “I believe you!”
Peter stopped, his eyes widening. “You do?”
“Peter, our two families have been associated for a very long time. Your people have long been the Warringtons’ tenants, and we have always looked out for the Doyles. Now, I don’t want to inflict any unpleasantness on you, God knows. With the lady out of the way, perhaps we can speak frankly.” He released the lad’s coat.