Prudence fought for breath, her panic flaring to a fever pitch as they neared the doors out to the docks. Honoria? And George? The betrayal of her sister sliced through her worse than any pain George might have caused her.
“I told her if you ever found out about them, I’d ruin you in a way she hadn’t yet conceived of. And she knew me well enough to believe me.”
“But, I’ve done nothing to you,” Pru said in a broken voice.
He’d finally made it to the far corner of the warehouse, and he dared to peek up to see if he could open the door without a hand blowing off.
The air remained still but for the clamor outside. “All wars have collateral damage, I’m afraid.” His voice echoed off the cold stone walls. “Besides, you deserve it now. That bloody husband of yours has been getting in my way. Confiscating my goods. Arresting my brokers and interrupting my supply chain all to clear your name.”
“The cocaine,” she realized aloud. “You were smuggling it in my father’s ships?”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “I care not for the stuff,” he said. “I was going to boil the frog slowly, establish the vulgar shipments to smuggle in goods, make a tidy fortune. Then, tip off the police so the Baron would be arrested. George too, as I forged his name on the papers. And I’d walk away with your father’s wealth as well.”
“But you killed him instead? On our wedding day?”
He made a noise of derision. “Did you know, by the time you were to marry, George was actually besotted with you? That he was thinking of trying at being a decent man. That’s when I knew, he didn’t get to claim happiness. None of them get to. And I ended him. Now open the fucking door.”
She reached out and fumbled with the latch, her fingers weak and cold from lack of blood. Wait, she paused. “None of whom?”
“The men my slag of a wife fucked beneath my own roof!” he roared.
Prudence froze. “The Stags of St. James,” she whispered.
“Whores!” Panic and rage, it seemed, was making him maniacal. “My wife paid whores. They defamed her. They turned her into a creature of vile lusts and tempted her to stray. Men like them, like George, cunning and handsome and charismatic.”
“So you…murdered them?”
“If only to make her pay twice. Thrice, even. She had bruises where no one can see. She has wounds that will never heal. I made sure of it. But still she wouldn’t keep to my bed. She didn’t obey me. She didn’t fear me! And so, she forced my hand. I’ve put every man who touched my wife into the ground. As a warning to her…she has no ground to run to, not even after we make our getaway. I’ll come for her. I will—”
“Why not take me now?” The door swung open, and the gun ground into Prudence’s head with devastating force.
At the sound of Honoria’s voice, William cinched his arm so tight, little stars danced in Prudence’s periphery as she fought for breath.
Honoria stood at the doorway draped in gingham and cream silk, her features almost serene in their perfection. Her beauty a beacon in the chaos of blood, bodies, and broken glass.
Prudence clawed at William’s arm, trying to warn her sister, to scream her name.
Honoria only shook her head. “William. Is all this really necessary? Could you not have just taken me with you today, instead?”
“Honoria,” he choked out, his hold slackening a little. “You came.”
“Of course I did,” she said with a coy roll of her eyes. “You’re my husband. Do you think I would have let you get away?”
The sound he made was pure anguish and abject joy.
It disgusted Pru, who couldn’t help but search the doorway for another shadow. For the man who could come put an end to the horror.
He was here. He’d already leveled the entire field. But…where was he now? What could he do?
“Go, Honoria,” Pru pleaded. “He’s mad.”
Her sister never broke eye contact with her husband. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. He always does, don’t you, husband?” She held a hand out, the elegant fingers steady and coaxing. “Now let us leave here, together.”
“The money,” he said, in the voice of a plaintive boy. “It’s not in the blasted crate it was supposed to be in. I haven’t found it yet.”
“Because I seized it last night.”
At the sound of Morley’s seemingly disembodied voice, William cocked the pistol at Prudence’s temple, drawing a shameful whimper from her.
No, Morley hadn’t seized the money. He’d been with her all night. Why was he lying? Why would he upset the man with the gun to her head?
“Don’t you dare, Inspector,” William crowed. “I’m taking the boat and crossing the channel. These two are my tickets out of Blighty, do you understand?”
“That is where you’re wrong,” said the shadows. “You’re not taking one more step.”
“Or what, eh? Do you want me to paint the floor with her brains?”
“William, no,” Honoria pleaded, her façade of composure cracking. “She’s pregnant. I know you wouldn’t kill a child.”
“It seems I picked the wrong sister,” a disgusted William hissed in her ear. “Honoria’s dry and barren as the Sahara, and frigid as the Arctic.”
“Only toward you,” she said in a voice gone flat as death. “I made certain your seed never took root, but none of my other lovers found me cold.”
William’s entire body tensed, and for a moment, Prudence knew it was over. Time slowed to a fraction of its pace, and the greatest regret she could muster in her last moment was that she wouldn’t get to see her beloved husband’s face before the end.
A tear escaped her as she squeezed her eyes shut.
He jerked, and a shot detonated, the pain lancing the side of her head with a searing agony she’d not expected to feel before the end. Another shot blasted. And another.
The weight of his arm around her throat immediately released and she screamed in a long breath.
I’m…alive, was her first thought. But the pain…had she even been shot?
More puzzled than shocked, Pru opened her eyes in time to witness the immediate aftermath.
William’s gun was no longer aimed at her head, but forward, before his hand went slack and the weapon clattered to the ground.
Honoria’s eyes swung to hers and they held for a moment as the only sound Prudence could hear was the air screaming with one insufferable monosyllabic note.
The pain was only in her ear, because the pistol had discharged next to it.
A starburst of red appeared on Honoria’s buttercream bodice right above her heart.
They both stared down at the bullet wound in her sister’s chest as William’s body slumped to the ground, a puddle of blood rushing beneath her boots.
Her husband had killed him, but not before William had taken a shot at his own wife.
Prudence’s scream echoed from far away as she launched herself forward, hoping to catch her sister before the woman’s buckling legs failed her.
Chapter 20
Dorian Blackwell swooped inside, catching Honoria in his arms as she slumped forward.
Prudence panicked at the dire look he gave her as he lifted Honoria with a grunt and swept her from the warehouse, out onto the planked unloading dock.
Prudence scrambled after them, daylight blinding her as she seized her sister’s hand and brought it to her cheek.
“Honoria! No. Oh, please. Can you hear me?” she cried as Blackwell gingerly settled her sister down flat on the planks of the dock and ripped her petticoats to create a bandage. He shoved it into Prudence’s hands and guided her to press down on the bullet wound with brutal pressure.
“Keep this here,” he ordered before he surged to his feet and left them. “Don’t move.”
Pru couldn’t imagine how terrible the pain of a bullet was, but Honoria’s eyes merely fluttered, her features draining from pale to a ghostly shade.
“Don’t go. Don’t go,” Pru pleaded with her sister. �
�Not when you’re finally safe. Finally rid of him.”
Honoria’s dark eyes opened and caught hers for a moment, flooded with some awful emotion she couldn’t identify. Her lips moved, but the pressure and ringing in Prudence’s ears still impeded her from hearing such breathy tones.
“I can’t hear you. Dammit. I can’t hear you,” she lamented.
Honoria’s bloodless lips moved more deliberately, her porcelain features pinched with pain. “I’m sorry. I should have told you…I…was afraid…”
“Shh. Shh. Shh.” Prudence wanted to smooth her hair, but she dared not let up on the pressure of her wound. “Honoria, I didn’t know what he was. What he was doing to you. No wonder you strayed. I’m not angry about George. Please don’t blame yourself. Just—Just be well.”
“I love you,” her sister murmured through her tears, and Prudence was glad to note enough of her hearing had returned that she could make out the words. “We don’t say any of that, do we? We Goodes. But I do. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Pru said, tears leaking from the tip of her nose. “I will for a long time so don’t start saying that like you mean goodbye.”
“You are a wonderful sister. And I…I’m not…”
Prudence looked up at the almost-deserted docks, noting some brave souls began to push themselves away from the places behind which they’d taken shelter. “Send for an ambulance!” she shrieked at them.
“I’ve done one better,” Dorian said, leading men back toward them. They set down two poles and spread a canvas material between them, presumably erecting a makeshift stretcher. “There’s a sawbones not two streets over I’ve used for a decade to dig bullets out of men who don’t want questions asked at hospitals.”
“Absolutely not!”
Despite her near-hysteria, his features softened as he regarded her. “Lady Morley, I’ve seen a lot of wounds like this. It’s unlikely to be fatal if we get her immediate care and cleaning. Allow me to—”
“I will allow you nothing,” she threw her body over her sister’s, bracing her weight on her hands. “You will get an ambulance and she will be taken to a hospital, not some underworld sawbones. I’ll not have it!”
Blackwell made a sound of impatient consternation. “Where is your husband, I wonder?”
“He was supposed to wait for us.” The man she recognized as Millie LeCour’s husband, Argent, peered into the doorway and took stock of the significant carnage inside. “He didn’t leave aught for us to do but clean up the corpses.” If she didn’t know better, she’d have thought he sounded plaintive.
As if he were looking forward to the violence.
“I suggest you get to it then.” A voice from above drew their notice, and they all looked to the roof of the warehouse where Morley stood against the slate grey sky.
Of course. He hadn’t been shooting in through the windows. At least not the ones on the ground floor. He’d somehow scaled the building to the second or third floors and shot down through the smaller portals above. He’d have had to navigate the sharp angle of the roof and steady himself on precarious perches to shoot from such angles at such distances into the dimness.
His skill was nothing short of miraculous.
Morley dropped his rifle down to Argent, and then deftly levered himself over the edge of the roof, controlling his drop with only the strength of his arms until his feet were far enough from the ground to drop into a crouch.
He scanned the area, his gaze skipping right over Prudence as he stood and adjusted his cravat that had gone only slightly askew through the entire ordeal.
“Morley,” Blackwell held up his hands helplessly, though he was no longer armed. “You know Conleith; he’s more than an adequate surgeon.”
“Titus Conleith?” Morley’s sharp jaw hitched as he stalked toward them with the predatory grace of a jungle cat. “That Irish devil dug more bullets out of more soldiers than any man alive. He could do it blindfolded.”
Prudence didn’t budge, something inside her had snapped. “This is no battlefield surgeon’s tent,” she hissed. “This is my sister and—”
“Titus Conleith?” Honoria astonished them all by breathing out the name in a ragged sob. She clutched at Prudence with clawlike fingers. “Take me to him,” she begged. “Take me to him, now. You must let them, Pru,” she said, her eyes overflowing with desperate tears. “You must.”
Pru peered down at her, trying to remember the last time she’d seen Honoria cry. “Are you certain?”
Honoria’s eyes were wild and extra dark in a face drawing paler by the moment. “I—I need him. Please, Pru, let me up. Let them take me.”
Scampering back, Prudence felt herself being lifted to her feet by strong arms and anchored to her husband’s side as Blackwell and the men gingerly boosted her sister onto their makeshift stretcher and navigated the docks back toward the road.
“I should go with her,” she fretted, her legs suddenly feeling like they’d lost their bones.
She’d never liked William. She’d never been very close to her sister; Honoria had always made it impossible. Was it any wonder she’d been so aloof? So alone. She’d been locked in a private hell inside her own home.
Married to a monster.
“You are going nowhere.” Her husband still refused to look down at her, his mouth compressed into a tight hyphen as he sized up a few of the dock workers looking on in slack-jawed amazement.
“You,” he ordered, pointing to a steely-eyed laborer in his fifties. “Go to M Division on Blackman Street. Ask for Sgt. Catesby and a contingent of men to secure the docks.”
“Sir.” The man touched his cap and hopped too, as men tended to do when Morley gave an order.
“Argent.” He turned to where the heavy-built man in a sharp auburn suit was examining the rifle in his hands. “Send our men round to the Commissioner Goode’s residence in case Viscount Woodhaven had any thugs making mischief there. Then, I want Detective Inspectors Sean O’Mara and Roman Rathbone to tear through any of the Baron’s warehouses to find the missing crates with the contraband Woodhaven was looking for.”
Argent gave a sardonic two-fingered salute and sauntered off.
“The rest of you, this dock is closed until further notice, clear off.”
A few laborers, obviously unhappy about the loss of a day’s wages, looked as if they’d argue. Others, perhaps the ones who’d witnessed Morley’s capabilities on the roof, dragged them away without making eye contact.
Her husband was not a man in the habit of repeating himself.
That handled, he hauled Prudence with him as he strode for the river-side corner of the warehouse beyond which steam barges and various pleasure boats churned the river with their relentless traffic.
The moment they turned the corner, she gasped to find herself immediately trapped between a rock wall and a hard place—the hard place being her husband’s body.
His hands were everywhere as a torrent of curses spilled from his lips. “Jesus Christ, Prudence. Did he hurt you?”
His fingers searched her face as if he were a blind man, his thumb hovering over her cheek where William had struck her. His glacial eyes flared with unnerving intensity he visibly struggled to contain.
Drowning in the unspoken but not invisible tension between them, she opened her mouth to speak, but nothing emerged. No words came forth to express the sheer incalculable emotion sweeping through her in knee-weakening waves.
An emotion she could now identify but didn’t have the courage to express.
“I’m—we’re—all right,” she finally assured in a voice much wobblier than she’d intended.
“Well, I’m bloody not!” he burst, pushing away from her to rake shaking hands through his hair. “Never,” he said with a hostile glare. “Never will you put yourself in danger for the sake of another, is that clear?”
“But…she’s my sister. Surely you can appreciate the importance of that. You put your life on the line for people every day.” She kep
t her voice even, soft, appreciating the volatility simmering through the heavy musculature of his shoulders and arms, heaving his chest into swells of uneven breaths. “Every night,” she added meaningfully.
“I’m well aware of my hypocrisy, Prudence,” he snapped. “But it doesn’t fucking matter. You can’t—I won’t bloody—God! I’m not built for this.” He paced three steps away, and then returned as if ricocheting off an invisible wall.
His words lanced through her, and she went taut with fear, grateful for the wall behind her, holding her up. “For…for what?” she asked in a watery breath, wondering if everything was about to change.
If she was about to lose him.
“For loving you, goddammit,” he said with an almost savage antipathy. “I have to fight the image of that bastard’s gun against your temple every time I close my eyes. For the rest of my damnable life. I have to relive the agony of possibly losing you. Of losing both of you.”
“Oh…” she breathed, her heart giving a few extra thumps.
“It’ll drive me mad,” he ranted. “This unholy, unhealthy need I have to bask in your presence. This possession—no—this obsession. How am I supposed to run London’s entire police force when I’m so consumed by you?”
“I—”
He wasn’t finished by half. “I’m tempted to haul you to work with me and throw you in the cell, just so I can be certain of your safety. What sort of lunatic does that make me? Do you think that I could have survived this had it turned out differently?” He gestured to himself with sharp, wild arms. “And all of this right after last night. Right when I have everything I want in my grasp, everything. If he’d have—” His voice broke and he covered it with a rough sort of growl. “I swear, I’ve never felt fear like that before, Prudence. I’ve had you for a blink of time in my life, and yet, I’d have eaten a bullet before facing the rest of my years without you.” He turned to her, his face mottled and the tips of his ears red as he nigh trembled with unspent emotion. “Now,” he demanded. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
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