Chapter Nineteen #2
“Here, sit.” Donal brought over one of the straight wooden chairs from the dining table and set it beside the bed.
“If you can manage without me for a minute or two, I’ll take the rent down to Mrs. Clark in the lobby before she thinks to come up here for it.
” He smiled at her, that same charming smile that she’d had a weakness for for most of her life.
Its effect had faded considerably, she was glad to realize.
In fact, it didn’t charm her at all. “Born to find trouble” was what Granny had said of him, much to Rynn’s irritation at the time.
But Rynn was beginning to see that once again Granny, uncanny prescience or not, was right.
“And I thank you very kindly for the loan, by the by.”
Dropping into the chair, Rynn waved him off and started to unwind the bandage. More knots held the whole together, and on
those, too, she had to use the knife. She heard, rather than saw, Donal leave. Her attention was all on Seamus, who was panting
and moaning and pouring sweat. Getting uncomfortably hot herself as she worked, Rynn cast more than one longing glance at
the window. The heat was bad, the stench was worse and what she wanted most right at that moment was a blast of fresh air.
The leg was every bit as bad as she’d feared. Looking down at the red, swollen flesh that she’d exposed, Rynn grimaced. The
thigh was twice its normal size. The bullet itself seemed to have passed right through it, missing anything vital while leaving
a small, puckered black hole that, on its own, would have healed readily enough. But infection had set in, and that was what
posed the danger, to his leg—and his life.
As she gently prodded the wound, Seamus yelped and shuddered. His eyes rolled back in his head. He went limp. Had he fainted?
If so, it was probably for the best, because she was just getting started. That wound had to be opened and drained.
“I’ll be as gentle as—” I can was what she was in the middle of saying when the door opened again.
She glanced around to see Donal, as she’d expected, enter the room. What she didn’t expect was that he would have both hands
raised high in the air—and a man with a gun jammed against his spine following close behind.
Her pulse leaped. She froze, her hands suspended over Seamus’s swollen leg.
The man shook his head in disgust as he entered.
Dressed in a long black overcoat and bowler hat, he was about Donal’s height, fortyish, with a squint-eyed, pockmarked face that twisted into a sneer as he kicked the door shut behind them.
“Blimey, you Irish stink! Got a pig or two under the bed, do you?”
Donal’s eyes met hers. From his expression she could see just how dire the situation was.
There was nothing she could do. Her hands dropped to her lap, clenched into fists.
“Well, lookee here, I got me a trifecta,” the man crowed, spotting her, perched still as a statue on the hard chair, and Seamus,
sprawled out, limp and seemingly unconscious, on the bed beside her. He smirked with satisfaction. “The boss told us you was
the key.” The words were addressed directly to her. “O’Reilly’ll come back for her, he said. You mark my words, he said. You
watch her, you’ll catch him. And, by God, Kenney was right. We been watching you, missy, since you ran off to London. Today,
it paid off.”
A jolt of terror made every nerve ending she possessed quiver: Kenney. Major Detective Kenney, MI5. He’d sent people after
her, set them to watching her. She’d never really escaped at all.
Suddenly she found it hard to breathe.
“Get over by the bed,” the man instructed Donal, his tone brutal now as he prodded him hard in the back with the gun. As Donal
obeyed, grim-faced, his hands still in the air, the man looked past him at Rynn. “Stand up, sweetheart. You’re going to be
tying this one to that chair for me. As for this one . . .” He was close enough to the bed now that he could see the state
Seamus was in. Eyes closed, limp and pale, his grotesquely swollen leg on full display, Seamus was clearly in a bad way. “Eh,
it don’t look like he’s going to make it to the firing squad. But it’s all one to me. I get paid either way.”
He shoved Donal into the chair and stepped behind him, out of Donal’s sight.
“Keep your hands up in the air where I can see ’em.
Try anything, and I’ll blow your head off,” he warned, adding to Rynn, “Don’t you move.
” Keeping the gun on them both—she could see it, Donal couldn’t—he shucked his long overcoat and tossed it and his hat on the bed, muttering, “It’s a damned furnace in here.
” Then he stepped up behind Donal and pressed the gun squarely to the back of his head.
“I should probably tell you, I get paid whether you’re dead or alive. So for me, it’s whichever’s easiest.”
Rynn broke out in a cold sweat. It was clear that he wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.
“Them rags will do fine to hold him while I shout down to that lady at the desk to get the police here, so grab ’em.” He shoved
Rynn to the floor. Donal’s jaw tightened, but any other response would have been suicidal, and it was clear he knew it. On
her knees, Rynn started gathering up the stained bandages, moving as slowly as she dared.
“If it’s pay you want, I can top anything you’ve been promised.” Desperation restored Rynn’s wits—and her voice. “My father-in-law
is a rich man, and so is my husband. They’ll pay twice what you’ve been offered if you let us go.”
The man huffed skeptically. “Jonas Bingle ain’t one to fall for empty promises. You might be right, one of them might pay
handsome for you, but then I’d have Kenney to deal with. And he’s a mean bastard with a long memory and an army of agents
to call on. And on top of my pay, there’s the rewards. So—”
A piercing whistle from the other side of the room made Rynn—all of them—jump and look around. She was just registering what
it was—the water in the teakettle reaching a boil at last—when something large and heavy launched past her in a fast, low
dive that made her gasp even as she fell back out of the way.
Seamus—it was Seamus!—tackling Bingle while his attention was on the kettle and sending him crashing to the floor. A startled
cry from Bingle, and then Seamus was straddling him with a hand over his mouth and plunging the knife from the kitchen into his chest again and again with a savagery that was like nothing Rynn had ever imagined him to be capable of. Seamus’s grunts, the driving thuds as
the knife landed, Bingle’s heels drumming the floor—the sheer horror of it froze her in place. Blood shot up like a fountain
as an artery was sliced. Bingle kicked and bucked and gurgled—and went still.