Chapter Six
Blackwood Townhouse, Highgate Hill
The present…
The door had just closed behind her. Thea Blackwood. His fiancée.
Bloody hell.
He was a grown man. A respected officer. A bloody detective inspector with fifteen commendations, one war medal, and a reputation for handling chaos with the calm precision of a surgeon.
And yet… and yet he was stomping. Down the fog-laced street, coat flaring behind him like the wings of some avenging bat, jaw locked tighter than the armory safe, and eyes full of murder—and longing, God help him.
He grunted and continued his long march back to Highgate Cemetery to retrieve her damn camera tripod and whatever spiritual nonsense she’d left behind, probably with grave dirt still clinging to the brass.
He’d dropped her off at home with a tight jaw and a stricter warning about trespassing laws than his mother used to give about Sunday mass.
But, gods help him, he hadn’t wanted to let her go.
Not after she’d looked up at him with those blasted storm-soaked eyes and whispered, “Thank you.” Not after she’d bit her lip like it was his thumb.
Not after he’d watched her disappear inside and swore he could hear Alice Blackwood giggling somewhere in the mist like she’d already picked out curtains for the afterlife.
He was not all right.
He hadn’t been all right since she’d kissed him back in the cemetery like he was the answer to every wild ache in her chest. He hadn’t been all right since she’d made that soft, startled sound when he palmed her breast. Since she’d moaned his name into the fog.
His fingers twitched at his side. Cuffs still clipped to his belt. Still warm from where she’d tested his restraint.
Christ.
The sound of footsteps ahead made him lift his head. The mist peeled back just enough to reveal the stern face of Chief Inspector Castlebury, striding in from the opposite direction like a man with no time for sentiment—and even less for another incident.
“Ward.”
Alaric exhaled slowly. “Sir.”
Castlebury stopped him with a single look. “Tell me I’m not about to find you knee-deep in tombstone rubble chasing your fiancée across Highgate again.”
“I’m not,” Alaric said stiffly. “She’s home.”
Castlebury’s eyes narrowed. “On your way to the scene of the crime, then?”
Alaric braced. “To retrieve her things. She left… all of it. Tripod. Plates. Half her coat, I think.”
“Did she leave her bloody morals too?”
Alaric didn’t answer. Which, in itself, was an answer.
Castlebury sighed long and low. “Ward, I’ve seen things. Before, as captain of the Bow Street Runners, and these past years as the chief at Scotland Yard. I’ve got three sisters, one wife, and two daughters. I know the signs. That look you’ve got? That’s a man undone.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re besotted. Hornswoggled. Bewitched by a walking misdemeanor with a waistline.”
Alaric’s ears went red.
Castlebury squinted at him through the mist. “She yours?”
A pause.
“She is,” Alaric said softly.
Another sigh. This one… not unkind. “You marry her,” Castlebury said, “you’ll never have a peaceful day again.”
“I know.”
“She’ll probably fake her own death just to photograph the ghost of her own damn funeral.”
“That makes sense.”
Castlebury grunted. “Good. Long as you know what you’re in for.”
Alaric blinked. Then blinked again. “That’s it?”
Castlebury leveled a look at him. “Son, I married a woman who once faked a demonic possession to avoid dinner with my mother. You think I’m going to judge you?”
*
The fog had thickened in the cemetery while he was gone.
Alaric’s boots struck the cobbled path with heavy certainty, each step pulling him deeper into Highgate’s belly, where the air clung damp to his coat and the trees whispered things no rational man wanted to interpret.
He raked a hand through his hair, still disheveled from her, and tried not to think about Thea’s mouth.
Or her corset. Or her bloody lip nibbling that made his spine melt and his temper coil.
But no, of course, he was thinking about her. Thea Blackwood, plague upon his peace, current possessor of his heart, and his patience.
He had never been a man who questioned his instincts.
Not when they told him to duck, or strike, or pull his revolver at the edge of a breath.
But as the fog curled thick and soupy round his boots, and the iron gates of Highgate groaned open with the kind of theatrical menace his fiancée would no doubt narrate aloud, he began to suspect that what he was doing, in full daylight, on All Hallows’ morn, alone, was more than instinct.
It was insanity. And devotion. Maybe both, in equal measure.
His steps were silent, but the weight of what he carried—Thea’s bag, a camera case, a few loose film plates she’d abandoned in her haste—felt like a ghost pulling at his shoulder.
Or perhaps it was just the knowledge that he was head over damned heels for a woman who routinely trespassed, instigated the supernatural, and made every rational thought in his head spiral into ruin.
She’d promised not to come back. He’d told her—ordered her—not to. And yet he was here. At her mother’s grave. At her grandmother’s. At hers. Collecting her things.
And God help him, he’d do it all again.
The air reeked of damp stone, turned earth, and distant lantern smoke. Trees loomed like sentinels, bark slick and weeping with the last of the mist. He passed the angels carved in sorrow, the urns perched on marble pillars, and the ravens—watchful, silent, judging.
His boots crunched to a stop by the crooked yew at the Blackwood family plot.
The bag slid from his shoulder. He crouched, brushing away the leaves near the headstone.
Her grandmother’s. Alice Blackwood. The stone gleamed faintly in the light.
Recently cleaned, he noted, with a pang that struck far deeper than he expected.
He adjusted his waistcoat, flicked a glance around. Still alone. Still quiet.
Then the wind shifted. A prickle crawled up his spine.
Not wind.
Not alone.
He turned, hand instinctively going to the cuffs on his belt. Something had moved just beyond the angel statue. A scrape. The faintest grunt. And something else—
That was when he saw them. Two men. Hooded. Half buried in shadow. One holding a pickaxe. The other crouched at the lip of a freshly disturbed grave.
Thea’s mother’s grave.
Alaric surged forward. “Oi!” he roared, voice slamming through the stillness like a bell in a tomb. “Step away from that grave or I swear to God I’ll put you down where you stand!”
The taller one froze. The shorter bolted—but not fast enough. Alaric’s boots hit the earth like judgment itself, and hell followed after.
The first man didn’t make it far.
Alaric’s arm shot out like a whip, snatching the bastard by the collar and slamming him against a moss-slicked crypt wall as his fist cracked his jaw. The man grunted, twisted, shoved back, but he may as well have tried to wrestle granite. Alaric drove a forearm into his throat. “Drop it.”
The man gurgled.
“I said”—Alaric increased the pressure—“drop it.”
A rusted pickaxe clattered to the ground.
Snap.
Alaric froze. What the hell was that sound?
No, not a twig. That was metal. A buckle? A camera hinge?
No, the camera’s flash powder.
BOOM.
Thea’s camera exploded with light. A phosphorescent wumph echoed like thunder through the graveyard.
Alaric’s breath caught and he blinked from the brightness. He spun, instincts kicking in as the second man scrambled for the grave’s edge, knee-deep in stolen soil and sacrilege. He turned, mud-streaked, lantern-eyed, and raised a shovel like a threat.
Alaric’s revolver was already out. “I dare you,” he growled, voice like smoke dragged through gravel. “Give me a reason.”
The shovel wavered. Fell.
Both men froze under the weight of Alaric’s glare—a look that had made seasoned inspectors sweat and street thugs piss themselves in corners.
“Grave robbing.” He spat the words like poison. “In broad bloody daylight. On All Hallow’s. From the plot of the woman I—” His voice caught. The hand not holding the revolver fisted at his side. “From her family.”
A snarl rippled beneath his skin. He wanted to hit them.
Wanted to cuff them to the wrought-iron gate and leave them there for the crows.
But instead, with the slow, terrifying calm of a man who’d already lost his temper, Alaric holstered his revolver and retrieved his cuffs.
Two sharp clicks. “On your knees. Both of you. Now.”
They obeyed, fast. The shorter was already sniveling.
Alaric cuffed them wrist to wrist, then hauled them both to their feet with a grunt of effort and a muttered curse. “You’re going to spend All Hallows’ in lock-up,” he growled, “explaining to my chief inspector why you thought it was a good idea to desecrate the Blackwood family plot.”
As he turned them toward the gates, the fog thinned just enough to catch a faint shimmer in the corner of his eye. He paused and frowned.
The camera.
The flash plate—it had gone off. But there was no one here. No photographer. No spark cord or timer. Just that old tripod rigged exactly where he’d set it, covered in a scrap of linen that now lay flung wide open.
The angle was pointed directly at him. At the grave. At the moment he’d stood between the robbers and the women buried beneath.
And for a second—just a flicker—he could’ve sworn he heard a voice in the wind. “That’s our boy.”
It hit him like a punch to the ribs.
Alice Blackwood.
His hand tightened around the chain between the cuffs. His jaw flexed.
And he did not look back.
*
At the Blackwood family plot…
Fog wreathed the headstones like it, too, needed a moment to catch its breath. Silence settled, heavy, holy, and edged with awe. From just beyond the veil, two familiar figures hovered.
“Well,” said Alice, hands on her ghostly hips as she floated a scandalous six inches above her own stone, “I never thought I’d see the day.”