Chapter Thirty-Three
Maggie wasn’t sure what to feel as Ethan dragged her into the towering hall. “What was that?” she snapped, but Ethan didn’t
even slow down.
“Come on. We’re going to go check on Sir Jasper and then—”
“Don’t bother.” At the sound of the voice, they turned to see Kitty sitting at the bottom of the stairs, slumping against
the newel post like she’d started to climb but didn’t have the strength so she just sank where she stood. Maggie looked from
her tired eyes to her pushed-up sleeves. There was a deep black stain on her sweater.
“He’s dead...” Maggie guessed. But Kitty laughed and shook her head.
“No.” Then Kitty laughed louder. It was the sound relief makes when it collides with exhaustion. “He’s stable. Breathing on
his own.”
“Is he awake?” Ethan asked.
“Not yet. But he’s alive.” Kitty rested the back of her head against the post, looking up at Maggie. “The charcoal saved him,
you know? You saved him.”
“No, Kitty. You did. You and Dr. Charles.”
Kitty thought about it for a moment, then slowly climbed to her feet and gave her shoulders a sassy shake. “We rather did,
didn’t we?” Then she turned and started upstairs, shouting, “Rupert! I’m taking a nap!” And Maggie couldn’t help but smile
because if anyone in the world deserved a nap, it was Kitty. But also—
Sir Jasper was alive! He was alive and... Maggie realized something else.
Ethan was still holding her hand.
“Come on.” He tugged and started down a narrow hallway that led toward the kitchen.
“What was that?” Maggie said, remembering Dobson and the library and the way Ethan hadn’t even put up a fight. But Ethan didn’t
say a thing. He just kept dragging Maggie down the hall, then through the kitchen. It felt like walking back in time as he
glanced into a laundry room and a pantry, opening old, creaky doors and peeking into shadows, searching, looking—
“What was that?” she said, swatting his arm as he peered into a room that smelled like lavender and was full of fresh linens.
“Ow!” He rubbed one beefy bicep but didn’t even slow down. “You really are shockingly strong, you know that?”
She heard voices then. The duke and duchess were coming, so Maggie grabbed Ethan’s arm and pulled him through the nearest
open door.
“Wow. Seriously. Do you have a trainer or...” He looked around the dim, still space. Dying rays of hazy sunlight shone
through leaded windows, illuminating the kind of room that probably hadn’t been useful in decades.
There were worn wooden tables and shelves with tools for cleaning game, but Ethan’s gaze caught on the cabinet filled with
long, identical guns.
“Hey, you found it.” He sounded... excited. Not at all like a man whose entire world had just turned upside down.
“Why did you tell the inspector we have a motive?”
Ethan glanced away from the gun case long enough to tell her, “Because we do.”
“No! We don’t. Eleanor can’t choose a successor if she’s...” The words almost tasted like almonds as they turned to poison
on her tongue.
“Hey.” He dipped down to look in her eyes. “We also have alibis.”
“We do?”
He bit back a smile. “Someone shot at you, remember?”
She wanted to forget. “I remember. I just... I don’t think Dobson believed us.”
A chill reverberated off the windows as they rattled with the wind, but nothing was colder than the sound of Ethan’s voice
when he asked, “Do you believe me?”
No , she wanted to say. She wanted to fight and argue and bicker because that was what they did. In stressful situations, people
revert to mean, and Maggie’s mean was hating Ethan Wyatt because it was so much easier than hating herself. She wanted to
tell him he was a big, cocky blowhard who didn’t even recognize the sound of crashing ice when he heard it. She wanted to
say anything but—
“I believe you.”
She wanted to do anything but sway closer to him, shaking with shock and worry because things suddenly felt... real. This
wasn’t a novel or a contest or a game.
They were in the middle of twenty thousand acres with no phones and no internet and no help. The bridge was out and there
was more than a foot of snow on the ground with possibly more on the way. A man was unconscious. A woman was missing. And—
“Someone Eleanor Ashley invited to Christmas is trying to kill her.”
Maggie had only had two panic attacks in her life. The first was when she was eighteen and alone in a condo in Florida, surrounded
by boxes and bills. The second was in a dark room that was so quiet she could actually hear the waves of the Atlantic breaking
on the rocky shore. There would probably be a third someday, but not here. Not now. Not in front of him.
There was too much at stake. Eleanor’s life. Their fate. Her self-respect. She couldn’t risk it, but that didn’t change the
fact that—
“Dobson thinks we tried to kill Eleanor. But that’s crazy. Isn’t that crazy? I think that’s crazy. Because you are you , and I am me , and we are not a we ?”
“We could be a we ,” he muttered, but Maggie was having trouble forming coherent thoughts and words and conclusions.
“And even if we’re not a we , we could... Wait. What did you say?”
“Nothing,” he said as Maggie crept toward the frost-covered windows and fading light. That time of year and that far north,
the sun set so very early, and the darkness was just one more thing stacked against them.
“What if she’s hurt? What if she’s...”
“Hey. They wouldn’t be shooting at Eleanor if they’d already killed Eleanor.” The room was warmer then. By a little. “Which
reminds me, someone shot at you. It’s okay to save a little of that pity for yourself, Margaret Elizabeth.”
“That’s...” she started to snap but trailed off, realizing... “ my name .” And then she couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Well, I guess you were bound to get lucky eventually.”
She waited for the quip, the tease, the wink that didn’t come. But he was the most serious man in the world when he told her,
“You’re Margaret Elizabeth Chase. Born January fifteenth, which does make you a Capricorn. I don’t know your rising sign, but I could look it up for you if you want. You’ve written twenty-eight
novels under four different names—three of which you just started using in the last year. I don’t know why, but I’m gonna
find out.”
He looked at her stunned expression but didn’t smile. Didn’t sneer.
“How...” She wanted to tell him it was a lucky guess, but there was something about him in that moment. Serious and...
dangerous. He looked dangerous and yet for some reason that just made her feel safer.
“I’ve been paying attention.”
Gulp.
“To the competition?”
He took a step closer. “To you.”
Double gulp.
“Because I’m the competition?”
“Because you’re the best.”
He was so close then. Breath fogging on the cold glass, eyes looking down at her. Had he always been that tall? Had his shoulders
always been that broad? Really, how were shoulders like that possible in nature? But the main thought she could pin down was
simple: He’d noticed her not because she was Colin’s wife or Emily’s friend. He’d noticed her because he thought she was the
best.
But she wasn’t.
“Eleanor’s the best,” she reminded him. Herself. The world. Eleanor was the best and Eleanor was...
Maggie felt the tears come. She had to hold them back.
“Hey, it’s okay.”
She looked around the dim room, trying to understand, but mostly just wanting to look away. “Why are we in here?”
“Because of the Remington rifle that’s missing from that case.” Ethan pointed to the cabinet but never took his eyes off Maggie.
She made a sound that was something between a hiccup and a laugh. “You mean the case with the broken lock?”
“That would be the one.”
There was something about the way he kept his eyes on her, about the warm timbre of his voice or the cold chill of the room
that was now mostly shadow that made it all seem real.
“Because someone shot at me.”
He nodded slowly, like now she gets it . “Because someone shot at you. Which means, right now, Maggie my dear, you and I are the only two people in this house that
we can trust.”
By the time the group was reassembled in the library, Maggie’s heart rate was almost back to normal. Because Ethan was right.
They wouldn’t be trying to kill Eleanor if Eleanor were already dead. Which meant there was still a chance to stop them.
Whoever they were.
She looked around the room at Eleanor’s guests. Rupert and Kitty, the duchess and duke, Cece, James, Dr. Charles, Freddy Banes.
And, of course, there was Ethan. She was grateful for the sure, steady weight of him, for the heat. He didn’t feel like the
competition in that moment. It was the two of them against the world, which should have been terrifying, but something about
the way he was looking at her made her feel calm and Maggie made a silent vow to chastise herself for that later.
James must have found Inspector Dobson a cane because he was leaning on one as he stood at the front of the assembled group
like they were about to have a game of charades and it was his turn to draw a movie out of a hat.
“When the weather clears and the roads open, we’ll get the contents of that tray to our lab. Don’t you worry. We’ll find out
if Sir Jasper was poisoned.”
“Which he was,” Maggie muttered under her breath as Ethan slipped an arm over the back of the couch and gave her a little
nudge.
Dobson glanced their way but kept on talking. “Dr. Charles and Kitty tell me he is resting comfortably in a guest room upstairs.
In the meantime, I think we should proceed as if he were poisoned by someone or something in that office. It’s a crime scene,
ladies and gentlemen. And it’s dangerous, so stay out.”
The wind howled outside and the sky was dark. The whole world felt ominous and cold, but the strangest thing was how she felt
herself leaning against Ethan, depending on Ethan, finding comfort in the very person who—twelve hours earlier—she might have
fantasized about killing.
I’m the guy who takes the bullet , he’d said. And Maggie couldn’t stop thinking that the person he would have taken one for was her.
“In the meantime, I’m afraid to say, you would all be wise to be careful,” Dobson finished.
“Well, what does that mean?” Cece asked.
“It means he thinks Sir Jasper was poisoned,” Victoria said shrewdly. “It means he thinks one of us...”
“Is a killer.” Dobson nodded while looking at them all in turn.
For a long time, there was nothing but the crackling fire and howling wind and the too-heavy thoughts of strangers trapped
together for the worst Christmas ever.
Then Freddy Banes looked around and asked, “Say, is it time for dinner?”