by welis
Adam’s heart seemed to stutter to a stop as his gaze darted from Daphne to Niall, who remained in his place watching the entire scene with rapt interest. So, this was what the two of them had been about, running off from Fairchild House together to arrange all this behind his back. While Cunningham might be incorruptible, he also knew the man’s services did not come free, as magistrates were paid little to nothing at all to do their jobs ... except by peers like him who possessed the clout to compensate him for investigating crimes. How much had Daphne paid him to do this?
“Rape,” Bertram scoffed, waving a dismissive hand through the air. “A woman who surrenders her maidenhead and then feels regret afterward is not entitled to cry rape.”
He edged closer, glaring at first Daphne, then at Adam, his lips curving into a sly smile.
“Besides, prosecuting me means you would have to force Olivia to come forward as a witness,” he whispered so only the two of them could hear. “You will have to expose her as the lunatic she is.”
To Adam’s surprise, Daphne’s smile only widened, and she laughed as if Bertram had just told the most amusing joke in the world.
“There’s where you are wrong,” she declared. “You see, every one of the women standing here is willing to testify that you forced yourself on them … publicly.”
This time, Bertram proved unable to keep his indolent mask in place, his panic beginning to show as he shoved past Daphne and approached the nearest woman. Lady Cassandra Lane gasped when he came too close, beginning to backpedal until she bumped into Winifred, who took hold of her shoulders and whispered soothing words to her to hold her steady. The poor thing was terrified witless.
“You wouldn’t dare,” he spat at Cassandra, before leveling his malevolent stare at the other women. “To testify against me would be to ruin yourselves publicly. Everyone will know you for the whores you are.”
Drawing herself up to her full height, Lady Cassandra pulled away from Winifred’s protective hold, her gloved hand coming up swifter than a snake to strike Bertram across the face.
“Everyone will know you for the lying, scheming lecher you are,” Cassandra declared, her voice quivering with the force of her anger. “I do not care if no man ever offers for me … I will see you hanged.”
Another woman stepped up in her place, jabbing a finger against the center of Bertram’s chest. “You made me believe that what had been done to me was my fault. It was not until the rumors started and Winifred cried off your engagement that I realized there must be others. Now I know better. I did nothing wrong, and you will get what you deserve.”
One by one, the other women rose up to say their piece, promising to tell the world what had been done to them, ensuring that he received his due. When they had finished, Daphne approached him again, her smile downright predatory this time. She reminded Adam of himself when on the hunt, closing in for the kill, enjoying the moment her prey realized it could not escape. He could not help the surge of pride she made him feel, the way his shoulders squared and his lips curved as he watched her blossom right before his eyes, becoming the woman he’d always known her to be capable of being.
“There you have it, Bertram,” she murmured. “I will see you go down without ever needing to mention Olivia’s or Serena’s name. I will protect them, and the other women of London, from you. You will never exercise power over them, or me, ever again.”
Backing away from her, Bertram shook his head. “No … no! This is not the way things were supposed to happen.”
Adam came forward now, taking his place at Daphne’s side. The man he’d come to kill proved a pitiful creature, not worthy of his time or his anger. Why had he never been able to see that?
“How did you expect this to happen?” he asked. “Did you think you would get away with any of it? That you could escape the consequences of your actions?”
Bertram glowered at him, his chest heaving with rapid breaths as he took another step backward and found his way impeded by one of the Bow Street Runners. The man had edged around to block the only exit and stared down at Bertram with a slight shake of his head.
“You!” Bertram spat, pointing an accusing finger at Daphne. “I always knew you hated me. You have always been jealous of me for being born a man, an heir, important!”
Beside him, Daphne flinched as if he’d struck her, her lips parting in disbelief. Adam placed a hand at the small of her back to comfort her, even though they both knew this was no fault of her own … that she’d never truly done anything to deserve this.
“Is that what you’ve thought of me all these years?” she asked, hurt apparent in her voice. “I cannot believe you would say such things after how much I loved you, the way I was willing to do anything to save you. Even if you had hurt someone, I would have been willing to forgive you if you were truly sorry.”
Bertram spat at her feet with a sneer. “The only thing I am sorry for is ever having thought you cared for me.”
The Runner took hold of Bertram’s arm, and he flailed away from the man’s hold with a growl.
“Take your hands off me!” he bellowed, making a pitiful sight as he attempted to shrink away from the two large men closing in on him. “I am the son of an earl! You cannot do this to me!”
“Come along now, lad,” the magistrate said with a sigh, stepping forward and motioning for the Runners to get him under control. “It’s to the gaol with you until the trial. Let us be gentlemen about this, eh?”
“No!” Bertram insisted, ducking beneath the swiping arm of the Runner attempting to take him into custody. “No, I will not let you do this! It isn’t right!”
Adam sneered at the man shrinking away from his punishment, sniveling like a little girl, his eyes brimming with tears and his weak chin quivering. He could not believe this pitiful excuse for a man had ever posed any real threat to him. It was all so ridiculous, he almost laughed aloud.
Until Bertram reached into the breast pocket of his coat and came out with a pistol.
The women gasped, backpedaling as Bertram waved his weapon about, his eyes wide and wild with desperation.
“Stay back,” he commanded, pointing the gun at the nearest Runner. “It is loaded, and I will shoot!”
Adam’s hand closed around his own pistol, but he stayed himself, knowing that if he could not move fast enough, Bertram would fire before he could even pull his weapon free. He edged forward, using his shoulder to block Daphne from harm.
“Bertram, don’t be a fool,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “It is over. You have lost. Do not make this worse than it has to be.”
The man’s hand shook as he swiveled his weapon to point it at Adam, his nostrils flaring and his lips pinching tight. “This is all your fault. You turned her against me, and you … you … If I must die, then I will take you with me.”
Adam pulled his pistol free just as he realized Bertram’s intent. He lifted it in his right hand, angling his body left to shield Daphne who stood behind him. But then, a pair of hands pressed his lower back, shoving him off balance. He lost his grip on his own weapon, and Daphne’s shrill cry rang out just as the gun went off in Bertram’s hand.
“No!”
Adam fell onto his side on the ground, the wind momentarily knocked from him. All around him, chaos ensued, the women crying out and screaming, the men grunting and groaning as Bertram screamed and bellowed like a madman. He could feel nothing, though surely, he had been shot. Why couldn’t he feel anything?
He rolled onto his back and shook his head, his ears ringing from the gunshot. Then turning his head, his gaze fell upon the prone form of Daphne, lying on the ground a few yards away from him. Her wide, dazed eyes met his, and she shuddered and convulsed, her lips parted on a silent cry.
Blood stained her gown and cloak, spilling over the stones beneath her.
“Daphne,” he rasped, coming up onto his hands and knees and crawling across the space separating them.
Niall approached from the other side, fal
ling to his knees and snatching his cravat free, using it to stifle the flow of blood from the wound in her shoulder. Even in the dark, Adam could see it proved a grievous injury, too close to her chest and likely having struck an artery. She might bleed to death or lose the arm entirely.
“Hart!” Niall bellowed as he knelt there, staring numbly at the woman on the ground, her gaze fixed on him, tears in her eyes. “Hart, she needs a doctor, now!”
He knew that … he did. But he was frozen to the spot, the wind still knocked from him, his stomach in so many knots, he was surprised he did not cast up his accounts. Shaking his head at her, he furrowed his brow, unable to fathom how she could be so foolish … why she would willingly take a bullet meant for him.
Across the room, Bertram fought against the hold of the two men taking him into custody and affixing iron shackles on his wrists. He was practically foaming at the mouth, bellowing to be let go so he could finish it, so he could murder the man who had caused him to shoot his own sister.
Between them on the ground, Adam’s pistol lay, having fallen from his grasp. He could reach it … he could fire it. He had a clear shot. The man had hurt Daphne … he might have killed her. It was an offense he was not willing to forgive.
One shot, and it would all be over. He would have done what he’d come to do in the first place.
He would have his final revenge.
But Niall was calling his name, and his little dove was bleeding to death. There wasn’t time for both … he had to choose.
Choose, Adam … me, or him?
Her words echoed through his mind as he glanced from the gun, a means to an end, to the woman who had saved him tonight, not once, but twice.
Choose, Adam …
With a shaking hand, he reached out and made his decision without hesitation.
Darkness crowded Daphne’s vision, seeming to encompass her entire world, blotting out all other sounds and smells. Snatches of things flickered against the backs of her eyelids, memories, perhaps. Or, dreams. They passed her by so swiftly, she could not grab onto a single one for long. She only knew there was chaos—screams and the loud clap of a gunshot, feet pounding over the hard ground. And there had been blood, so much of it everywhere, sticky and wet, its scent stinging her nostrils with a coppery tang.
There had been motion—arms lifting her, carrying her, running. The bounce and jostle of it had hurt her shoulder, sending fiery tendrils of agony into her arm and chest, but she had been grateful for it … it proved to her that she lived. The darkness had come and gone, choking out everything one moment, then relenting and allowing her a glimpse of her surroundings the next.
The night sky above her, then the interior of a hired hack, then the familiar ceiling of a bedroom at Fairchild House. A man with kind, blue eyes looming over her, calling her brave, crooning that he knew it hurt, but she must let him operate. Then … pain. Blinding pain as he’d shoved something into her wound, digging around so forcefully, she thought he might rip her arm off. She’d tried to form words, tried to tell him he could take her arm as long as he stopped poking and prodding about inside her like this. But, either she had been incapable of speech, or she’d been ignored, because the man had continued digging, slicing, tearing her apart in his quest for … well, something. She had never figured out exactly what, because the pain had proved enough to cast her back into the darkness.
There were other things after that … voices she recognized but could not place. Movement around the soft bed she lay on, and the taste of laudanum and spirits being poured down her throat.
She slept. Fitful sleep filled with dreams of blood and pain and torment, a beautiful monster of a man in the midst of it all with eyes made of green and gold fire.
It seemed to go on for days, her fading in and out in a dizzying muddle she could not sort out.
At last, a bright light came hurtling at her through the darkness, a pinpoint that grew and swelled until she was wincing, turning her head away from it with a groan. Sunlight streaming through a window … far too bright after so much darkness.
“Close the drapes,” a rough voice commanded … a voice she knew well.
She waited until the sting of brightness faded beyond her eyelids, then she opened her eyes with a contented sigh. The dimmer lighting proved more forgiving as she took in her surroundings. She was back in the chamber she’d been sharing with Adam at Fairchild House, laid in the massive bed with the coverlet pulled up to her chin. Turning her head the opposite way, she winced at the pain it caused, agony exploding in her shoulder and stabbing her in the chest.
She bit back a whimper and fought to focus her vision, which had begun to fade from the sudden pain. Breathing through it, she fought to remain conscious, to search the room until she found the source of that voice, the one that had greeted her after her ascent from the darkness.
Her gaze settled on his hulking form, slouched in a chair at her bedside. Still wearing the clothing he’d had on that fateful night in the Mint—sans his greatcoat—he looked as if he had not slept for days, his hair a bedraggled mess around his face, dark circles ringing his eyes, his mouth pulled taut as he leaned forward and braced his elbows upon his knees.
His eyes were pure gold, brimming with exhaustion and sadness and … and a hundred different mysteries she might never solve. They simply stared at each other for a long while, her remaining still in her bed, him leaning forward, his gaze seeming to trace every line and plane of her face.
Finally, he reached out one hand, his fingers gently stroking the line of her jaw, angling back up and then toward her hairline. That touch sparked warmth in her, and the pain became a distant afterthought in the wake of his tender caress.
“Little dove,” he whispered, inclining his head. “You’re back.”
She tried to nod, but thought better of it, remembering the pain. Instead, she gave him a weak smile. “So it would seem. How … how long?”
“Three days,” he replied, the heaviness of the sigh he emitted on the heel of those words carrying the weight of each day.
She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to think past the spinning of the room and the dryness of her mouth. She was thirsty, hungry, and aching all over … as if the bullet had made its way through her entire body, inflicting damage everywhere it touched.
“What …” She trailed off, opening her eyes to look at him. “What happened?”
He scowled. “You were shot.”
That made her laugh, then wince and groan, earning her a scathing glare.
“Do not do that again,” he chided.
She pinched her quivering lips together to stifle another laugh. “Yes, well, I am quite aware that I was shot. I was there, remember?”
He sighed, lowering his head and running a hand over his mussed hair. Had he been at her side this entire time? He looked as if he’d occupied that chair for every hour of the past three days.
“After … you were fading fast,” he said slowly, glancing down at his hands. “You lost so much blood, we thought … we thought you might not survive.”
That same fear had occurred to her as she’d lain there with a bullet in her shoulder, her world going dark.
“It was fortunate that the hack you and Niall took to the Mint waited just outside,” he continued. “Otherwise, we might never have gotten you here in time.”
She wrinkled her brow, trying to remember how she’d gotten here, but could fathom nothing more than the sway of a carriage and the pain of being jostled. Before that, there had only been Niall’s cravat pressed to the wound to stifle the blood, and Adam … Adam had been stunningly silent while she lay there dying.
“You carried me out?”
Still avoiding her gaze, he nodded. “Aye. You … you would have died. And I … I could not let you.”
His words pricked her chest, awakening something she had tried to keep dormant … feelings she knew better than to surrender to. It was foolish of her to let herself long for things she could not have, to s
ee things in him that simply were not there. But, oh, how that feeling grew and swelled the longer she lay there, searching his face, waiting for him to look at her again, to say the words she craved.
When he finally looked up and met her gaze, she was stunned by what she found there. The torment he usually carried in those green and gold depths seemed more acute than ever, radiating at her with … was that anger? Was he angry at her?
“Why?” he rasped, shaking his head as if in disbelief. “Why, little dove?”
Ah. She understood. He was angry with her for putting herself in danger, for pushing him away and taking that bullet for him.
It took her a moment to answer as she thought back over the events of that night, remembering the moment she’d realized Bertram had pointed that gun squarely at Adam’s chest. She’d seen his intent, knowing he would pull the trigger, knowing the bullet would tear through his heart and kill him. Something within her had reacted on instinct, and she had been unable to stand there and watch him die.
Her heart ached, even now, as she remembered the taste of fear in her mouth, the moment when she’d realized that Bertram would kill him. She found herself surprisingly remorseless in hindsight, no matter how angry he might be with her. She would do it again if faced with the same choice.
“You know why,” she whispered, holding his gaze and willing him to see it, to acknowledge it.
She knew … she’d known for some time, even when she’d actively avoided the truth. He had to know. After all that had happened, she was still his, would always be his.
He shook his head again, nostrils flaring, chest heaving as if he held his breath, waiting … waiting for her to say it.
Sighing, she closed her eyes and swallowed. Damn it, he would force her to say it, to put the words into the atmosphere and make them real.
“Look at me,” he snapped, leaning closer, reaching out to touch her face.
She obeyed, because she always did when he demanded it. Tears stung her eyes, one of them leaking from the corner of her eye and racing back toward her ear.