Chapter 30
The knife rested too close to Adelaide’s throat for anyone to pretend Atlas had not already crossed the final boundary. Wind pushed through the broken boards over the window, carrying salt and the roar of the sea into a room where four people seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.
“Let her go.”
Eric’s voice was quiet.
Adelaide knew him well enough now to understand how dangerous that quiet was.
Atlas did too. His arm tightened around her waist, dragging her more firmly against him, and the blade shifted until Adelaide felt its cold edge touch her skin. Eric saw the movement. His face changed, but he did not advance.
“Stay where you are.”
“I am staying.”
“You were supposed to be in London.”
“And you were supposed to be my friend.”
Atlas gave a short laugh. “That accusation feels rather sentimental considering the circumstances.”
Adelaide looked at Eric rather than the knife.
He was filthy from riding. His coat hung open, his hair had been thoroughly destroyed by wind, and there was mud on one boot nearly to the knee. He looked nothing like the aloof Duke of Wolverton she had first met in her father’s study.
He looked terrified for her, and as angry as she had ever imagined him being. Something in Adelaide’s chest hurt far worse than the knife.
Atlas shifted behind her. “Back away from the door.”
Eric did not move. “Atlas.”
“I said back away.”
“And then what?”
Atlas hesitated because he clearly did not have a plan for this. His plan had required Eric to remain in London. It had required Adelaide to disappear quietly. It had required a forged letter and a grieving husband who would recognize the pattern and surrender to it.
Eric standing in the doorway had broken the entire thing. Adelaide flexed the fingers of her freed hand beside her skirt. Atlas did not know that hand was free. Neither, she suspected, did Eric.
Good.
She had no intention of waiting for the men to decide how her rescue ought to proceed.
“You cannot possibly believe you leave this room now,” Eric said.
“You are in no position to decide what I believe.”
“You have my wife at knifepoint.”
“Which would seem to put me in an excellent position.”
Eric’s eyes flicked once to Adelaide, and she held his gaze. Wait for the right moment, she urged in her thoughts.
Atlas began edging toward the opposite side of the room, forcing Adelaide with him. “You will have horses brought to the front. You will remain here while I leave.”
“With Adelaide?”
“Naturally.”
“No.”
The single word stopped Atlas. Eric’s voice remained calm, but Adelaide saw his hands. “Then she dies.”
Adelaide felt Eric’s fear from across the room, and she also felt Atlas’s breathing which was far too quick for him to be sure of what would happen next. His grip was strong, but not steady.
He was frightened now, and frightened men rushed. Adelaide needed him looking somewhere else. “Eric?”
His eyes snapped to hers.
“I should probably tell you something.”
Atlas jerked her backward. “Be quiet.”
Adelaide ignored him. “I was going to tell you before you left.”
Eric stared at her. Even now, of all ridiculous moments, understanding began to dawn. Atlas pressed the blade more firmly against her throat.
“I said enough!”
Adelaide winced, and Eric moved half a step.
“Don’t!”
Atlas nearly shouted it, and Eric stopped.
Adelaide smiled faintly. “Apparently we are still being interrupted.”
Eric’s mouth twitched, and Atlas had no idea what they were talking about. That made the entire situation belong to them. Then movement appeared behind Eric. A woman stepped through the ruined doorway.
Olivia.
Adelaide felt Atlas go completely still.
Olivia had removed the maid’s cap. Her dark hair had loosened during the ride, curls lifting around her face in the coastal wind. She wore the same plain clothes she had worn at Wolverton, but there was nothing deferential about her now.
Atlas stared, and the knife lowered a fraction.
“Olivia?”
Olivia stopped beside her brother. “Yes.”
Adelaide felt the breath leave Atlas. “No.”
“You said that you were curious yesterday, and now you seem scared.”
His arm loosened around Adelaide before tightening again. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“I escaped you.”
Atlas stared at her as though the dead had genuinely walked into the room, and Olivia lifted her chin. “I begged my father not to make me marry you. I told him what you were when no one else was there to watch you.”
Atlas recovered enough to sneer. “You were a hysterical girl.”
“No. I was frightened of you.”
“You were spoiled.”
“You told me whom I could visit. Where I could go. What I would wear after we married. You told me my opinions were charming until I understood that a wife’s opinions ceased to matter once the church doors closed behind her.”
“Olivia.”
“I hated when you said my name like that,” she said, voice still shaky but wrapped in strength and courage as she continued. “I was nineteen years old, and I believed the only way to escape you was to convince everyone I was dead.”
Atlas’s face twisted. “You cost me—”
“What?” Olivia stepped forward. “Say it.” Eric reached for her arm, but she shook him off. “What did I cost you, Atlas?”
“The settlement your father promised.”
Olivia laughed, and Atlas’s grip on Adelaide shifted again. Adelaide moved her foot backward an inch, and then another.
“You never wanted me,” Olivia said. “You wanted what came with me.”
“I had earned that place.”
“You earned nothing.”
“I was more a son to your father than Eric ever bothered to be.”
Eric flinched.
Olivia saw it.
Her expression hardened.
“And when I disappeared, you found another way to punish him for being his father’s son.”
Atlas said nothing.
“You watched him grieve me. You watched him blame himself.”
“Olivia, stop.”
“No.” Her voice rose. “You spent five years keeping my brother alone because you thought his loneliness belonged to you. You encouraged every fear that kept him from marrying. You took from his estate. You waited for his title as though you had already inherited him along with everything else.”
“That title should have been mine.”
“It was never yours.”
Atlas’s arm jerked, and the blade moved. Adelaide drove the heel of her shoe down with all her weight onto the top of Atlas’s foot.
He shouted and his grip broke for half a second.
Which was more than enough.
Adelaide twisted hard beneath his arm, caught his wrist with her freed hand, and shoved it away from her throat. The knife scraped her collar rather than skin. Atlas cursed and reached for her again, but Adelaide drove her elbow backward into his ribs.
She tore herself free, and Eric lunged forward. “Adelaide!”
She ran toward him and Atlas did not follow her. He looked past her toward Olivia. Something in his face had broken completely.
“You.”
Olivia froze.
Atlas launched himself across the room.
Theodore came from Adelaide’s left so quickly she scarcely understood where he had been. One moment Atlas was moving toward Olivia with the knife still in his hand; the next Theodore struck him from the side.
“Violet, move!” Theodore shoved her backward with one arm and turned his body between hers and the blade.
Atlas swung and Olivia screamed as the knife caught Theodore’s coat as he grappled for Atlas’s wrist, tearing fabric near his shoulder. Theodore drove him into the wall hard enough to shake dust from the stone.
Olivia did not run.
She stared at Theodore, who had simply seen Atlas coming for her and put himself in the way. “Theodore?”
He glanced back. “Are you hurt?”
Olivia looked almost offended. “You are asking me?”
“Answer me.”
“No, I am not hurt.”
“Good.”
Atlas surged beneath him, and Theodore turned back just in time.
Eric reached Adelaide. His hands caught her shoulders, then her face, moving over her as though he could not decide which part of her he needed to confirm was real first.
“Are you hurt?”
“Not at all.”
“The knife—”
“Did not cut me.”
“Adelaide please do not lie to me…”
“I am unharmed,” she said, and his forehead nearly touched hers.
Behind them, Theodore swore as Atlas fought beneath him. Adelaide caught Eric’s wrists. “Later.”
Eric stared at her as she looked toward Atlas. “Help him.”
For one second Eric resisted, but Adelaide squeezed his wrists. “I am here. I am unharmed. Theodore needs you now.”
That reached him.
Eric nodded once.
Then he turned.
Theodore had forced Atlas’s knife hand against the stone floor, but Atlas was fighting with the desperation of a man who understood that every future he had constructed had ended in this room.
Eric crossed the distance and seized his cousin’s wrist.
The knife clattered free, and Adelaide kicked it away before anyone could reach for it again, and it spun beneath a broken table.
Olivia stood against the wall, one hand pressed to her mouth.
Theodore remained between her and Atlas.
And Atlas, pinned beneath the two men he had believed too foolish to stop him, looked across the room at the woman whose death had begun his plan and the woman whose marriage had destroyed it.
“Take him.”
The command came from Eric, but it was a constable nearest the door who moved first. Two others followed, boots grinding grit across the stone as Theodore hauled Atlas upright by the arm.
Atlas fought them even then, not wildly now but with the offended fury of a man who had spent too many years believing consequence was something that happened to other people.
“You have no authority to do this.”
The senior constable caught his wrists and secured them behind him. “I have enough.”
Atlas twisted toward Eric. “On whose accusation?”
“Mine,” Adelaide said.
His head snapped toward her.
She stood beside the wall where Eric had left her only long enough to help Theodore disarm him. Her wrists were marked red from the rope, her hair half fallen from its pins, and she suspected she looked dreadful.
She had never felt more like a duchess.
Atlas stared at her. “You have no proof.”
Adelaide almost laughed. “Other than the abduction?”
“You came willingly.”
Loretta made a sound from the opposite side of the room, and every face turned toward her.