Chapter 17 #2
Greer moved before the man could draw out whatever he’d intended to grasp.
He lunged at Dalhurst, grabbing him by the lapels of his coat and yanking him away from the bed.
Penny used the movement to rush for the bed in the hope that he could help the young man who had to be Lord Fabian.
It looked as though Lord Fabian had passed out.
“I will not let you do this,” Greer growled, then pulled back a hand to punch Dalhurst.
Unlike Hammond, Dalhurst was fast and saw the blow coming. He was forced to abandon his efforts to grab whatever was secured inside his jacket so that he could grapple with Greer instead. “You’re a dead man,” he threatened Greer, throwing a punch of his own.
Penny could only pray that Greer would come out on top of the fight. He had other problems to see to that meant he couldn’t watch it, though the sound of punches being landed, grunts, and struggling filled the room.
“Oy,” he said to Lord Fabian, who moaned slightly and rolled a bit on the bed, proving he wasn’t passed out entirely. “Lord Fabian. I need you to stand up, man. I need you to move.”
“Charlie?” Lord Fabian mumbled.
Penny wanted to shake the man and demand that he come to his senses and aid in his own rescue, but that would have been as pointless as all the lying and posturing he’d done downstairs to avoid being captured.
He’d seen more than a few men lost to opium on the streets and knew just how pointless it was to argue with them.
“You’ll regret this,” Dalhurst shouted from the floor, where Greer had evidently knocked him. “You’re a dead man!”
“I’m not the one on the floor,” Greer told him, the light of victory in his eyes.
“No, you’re not,” Dalhurst said, nose dripping blood on his smiling mouth.
Penny only had half a second to feel dread at the man’s smile before Dalhurst stood and lunged for the open doorway.
The brief lift of hope in Penny’s gut as the man fled was replaced by dread a moment later when Dalhurst slammed the door behind him.
A moment after that came a scrape and a click as the door was locked.
Somehow, at some point when Penny had been tending to Lord Fabian, Dalhurst had grabbed the keys. Now Penny, Greer, and Lord Fabian were locked in the tower room.
“Fuck,” Greer grunted, racing for the door. He grabbed the handle and tried to turn it, but it didn’t budge. “Shit!” He rattled the door on its hinges, but nothing happened.
Greer slammed his shoulder against the door once, but it appeared to be more to release his frustration than because he believed the door would give. He roared, slammed a fist against the door one last time, then pulled back, turned, and headed to the bed.
“What is his condition?” he asked Penny, deadly seriousness in his eyes.
“He’s intoxicated,” Penny sighed, juggling Lord Fabian into a sitting position, trying not to gape at the landscape of bruises that marked the young man’s body. “Probably opium.”
“Laudanum,” Lord Fabian sobbed. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any more.”
Penny and Greer both looked at him. Penny’s heart raced with hope. Perhaps the man wasn’t so far gone after all.
“Lord Fabian,” Greer said, sinking to a crouch in front of the bed, evidently of the same mind as Penny. “Are you well?”
It seemed a silly thing to ask, but Lord Fabian responded. He made a keening sound that had the hair on the back of Penny’s neck standing up, nodded loosely, then shook his head, then said, “I do not feel well at all.”
“But at least he’s responding to you,” Penny pointed out.
Greer nodded once curtly. “We have to get you out of here,” he told the young man. “I need you to gather your wits about you enough to help us help you to escape.”
Lord Fabian nodded a few more times, but the gesture became disjointed and meaningless.
Below them, Penny could hear the thump and rattle of activity in the castle.
It was too much to hope that anyone might come up to the tower to rescue them, though.
More likely, Dalhurst and Hammond were marshalling their forces to come take them.
That or they were preparing to burn the castle down with them inside.
“We have to move,” he told Greer warningly. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
“I know,” Greer sighed tightly. He winced, then slapped Lord Fabian’s face lightly in an attempt to bring the man to his senses. “Lord Fabian,” he said, managing to sound kind even in the midst of his seriousness. “My lord, we have to flee. And the only way out of here is through the window.”
Penny’s brow shot up. Did Greer actually think they stood a chance of carrying Lord Fabian to freedom through a tower window? In his current state? Naked?
Then again, they had no other choice.
“You’re stronger than I am,” Penny said, leaping up from the bed and striding across to the room’s single window. “You’ll have to carry him.”
He poked his head and shoulders out through the billowing curtains and looked down.
Immediately, his stomach churned and swirled.
It was much farther to the ground from the tower room than the window they’d climbed in through.
So high that it was obvious why Dalhurst hadn’t cared that the window was open.
A crumbled and potentially jagged part of the old castle wall stretched out directly below, and beyond that was the deep trough of the dried-up moat.
But beyond that were the dunes that marked the edge of the beach, and just past that, Penny spotted the boat that held their cases and stood waiting for them.
“If we can make it out the window and down to the beach, we might just stand a chance,” he said, then pulled back into the room and turned to glance at Greer and Lord Fabian.
What he saw did not fill him with confidence.
Greer had walked Lord Fabian to the washstand in the corner of the room, where he was splashing the man’s face with water.
Lord Fabian sputtered and twisted his head this way and that, like a kitten being played with.
It might have been sweet under other circumstances, but they did not need a kitten at the moment, they needed a man in full possession of his faculties who would be able to climb three stories down a tower wall, cross obstacles, and make it to a waiting boat.
“Is it helping?” Penny asked, striding across the room to join them.
Somewhere below, shouts rang out and more footfalls followed.
“Whether it’s helping or not, we need to move,” Greer said, meeting Penny’s eyes as if the connection forged between them could carry them through the impossibilities ahead of them on its own.
Penny nodded. “I think you’re going to have to carry him,” he said. “Or at least have him attached to you in some way.”
“You’re right,” Greer sighed, then rubbed a hand over his face. “It’ll have to be the bedsheets.”
“I can walk, I can walk,” Lord Fabian slurred, attempting to prove himself by swaying precariously back toward the bed.
“That may be, my lord,” Penny said, ripping the bed apart to get to the sheets, “but you’re going to need help.”
They all needed help, as far as Penny could see.
Whatever Dalhurst was doing below, it could catch up with them at any moment.
Lord Fabian was as good as a boulder they needed to carry to safety.
And while Penny prided himself on being nimble and capable of surmounting any obstacle placed in his way, he wasn’t certain if that included scaling castle walls in the middle of the night. At least it wasn’t raining.
“Help me fasten some sort of harness,” he said, approaching Greer and the naked young man.
Greer nodded and assisted Penny in winding the sheets around Lord Fabian’s body. What they were doing was utter madness and it had a high probability of failing and killing them all, but they had no choice but to fling themselves fully into all efforts to escape.