Chapter Twenty-Two
Oliver crept into the eerily silent building from which he’d watched Gideon be taken into a few hours earlier and later, from which he’d evacuated the women.
Nearly a dozen men had been prowling the darkened halls, perched atop the roof, and guarding the doors.
Now that he’d returned, however, there was no one.
Still, he was cautious as he crept on silent feet from one space to the next.
The three men he’d dispatched earlier still lay where they’d dropped, abandoned like rubbish by their cowardly comrades.
Room after room was either empty or filled with crates, none of which had been moved recently, given the layer of dust coating them.
Finally, he located something promising.
The room was a perfect square, no larger than a small study. A splintered chair lay near the doorway, and the watery moonlight from the single narrow window set high on the wall cast just enough light to reveal a bulky form lying on the far side of the room.
The body groaned.
Oliver crept over the detritus and approached the man who was most assuredly not his half brother.
His thick hands were coated in glistening blood as he futilely attempted to staunch the blood seeping from a wound in his abdomen.
Oliver recognized the blade at the man’s side as one of his own.
Gideon had been there. He’d been the one to do that damage.
Oliver looked back at the man’s injury and knew without a doubt that it would be fatal.
A blade in the gut like that would not kill instantly; death would come, but it would be a slow and excruciatingly painful process. The man groaned again.
Oliver crouched low and retrieved the discarded blade, wiping it on the sleeve of the dying man’s coat.
“Come back to finish me off, English pig?” the man spat in French, his lips and teeth stained pink from blood.
“Where have they gone?” Oliver demanded.
The man remained tight-lipped, though he squirmed in discomfort.
Oliver tilted the blade at him again, allowing the moonlight to gleam off the tip.
“You are dying, but you are still alive right now, and I have plenty of time to have some fun. Should I flay your genitals? Make you a eunuch? Send you to hell with—”
“La Genevieve!” The man released a wet cough and growled like a wounded dog.
“A ship? The Genevieve?” Oliver twisted his fist in the front of the man’s damp shirt when he did not answer. “Where is it anchored?” he demanded and gave him a shake. The man’s eyes rolled back into his head as he lost consciousness. Oliver dropped him to the floor with a curse.
The London dockyards were filled with dozens upon dozens of ships and boats of all sizes and ports of origin. It could take hours to locate the proper one onto which Gideon had been loaded, and if they planned to ride the tide out, then time was running dangerously short.
Oliver pocketed his blade and bolted from the building.
His usual calm was beginning to wear thin.
It was a relief to know that Emily was safe and in the care of a man whom he trusted, but now Gideon, his half brother, could be lost to him forever.
They’d just found one another and, though Oliver had been wary and still struggled with letting him into his life, he was not ready to give up on the opportunity to have more family than he’d ever known.
He would not fail Gideon; he would not fail to bring Caroline her husband.
He took a sharp turn down an alley which would have appeared nondescript to most passersby, but Oliver was no regular man…
and he had no regular connections. He located the door at the dead end and rapped thrice in quick succession, twice more slowly, then thrice quickly again.
It creaked open to reveal a room in far better condition than the building’s exterior suggested it would be.
What was once the kitchen and main living area of the flat had been converted into a safe meeting place for agents belonging to Ramsay’s Spy Society.
The man himself was seated at the head of a table and lifted his dark head from the papers he’d been reading. No less than six other pairs of eyes lifted at Oliver’s entrance.
“The women?” Ramsay asked, seeming not the least bit surprised at Oliver’s arrival.
“Safe. But Swanleigh has been taken. I need to locate a ship called la Genevieve before she sails.”
Ramsay nodded once and turned to the man on his left. “To the docks.”
The man, dressed in the salt-stained rough clothes of a sailor, donned his knit cap and gestured for others to follow him.
Oliver and the group slipped out into the night, some peeling away to collect more men for their search, others locating contacts who might know of the ship’s whereabouts.
If anyone could find the ship and Gideon before he was lost, then it was Ramsay and the complex web he’d woven over all of England.