Chapter 11
She had vague impressions of a stately house—a substantial but soaring staircase in the entryway leading up to a landing, a timbered and vaulted ceiling above, corridors lined with portraits of esteemed but dead ancestors whose faces all carried echoes of Sir Harold, with the same disdain for everyone who hadn’t the good fortune to be born into aristocratic wealth.
Golden objects stood proudly displayed in carved glass-fronted cases.
Money, everywhere she looked. Money and privilege.
If there were servants, they stayed out of the way, surely driven off by the thud of the Guardians’ boots on the polished floors.
They dragged her up a side staircase less grand than the one in the foyer.
Then she was hauled down a hallway before being tugged into a small room with wood-paneled walls.
A fire burned in the hearth. She was shoved into a stiff-backed chair.
One of the Guardians pulled her hands forward and bound them together with coarse rope before he stepped back and hovered in the nearby shadows.
“I’ll scream,” she warned Mowbray.
The baronet stood in front of her, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a banyan and cap, clearly intending a quiet night at home rather than the presence of an unwanted captive.
“By all means, do so,” he offered mildly.
“My staff knows better than to interfere in the master’s business.
Nor does anyone live in close enough proximity to hear you.
Besides,” he added with a twist of his lips, “given that you are the accomplice of three deadly highwaymen, I rather doubt anyone gives a damn if you protest a violation of your rights.”
Terror was her enemy, so she refused to let it show on her face.
He was correct, however. Given that he was the local gentry, and she a penniless nobody who had, in fact, assisted a notorious gang, there was nothing and no one who would take her side, or even come to her aid. She was entirely at Mowbray’s mercy.
Discretely, she tested the ropes binding her. It was her bad luck that the man who’d tied her up was very good at his job. There was almost no give in the rope, and the knot was a secure one, likely practiced frequently on other captives.
How many of them had survived their encounters with the Guardians?
“I could hand you over to Page and the others,” Mowbray said, glancing at the captain as he strode into the room. “Let the lot amuse themselves with you.”
The head of the Guardians stood against the wall and looked at her as though she was a bit of meat stuck between his teeth.
“Try it,” Jessica snarled. “There are more ways to kill a man than with blade or bullet.”
“This viciousness would have served you better had you adhered to our original contract,” the baronet said.
“But as you’ve been disappointingly compromised by that trio of animals—” he spat this last word “—you’ll have to serve some better purpose.
Brody will come for you, and when he does, I’ll finish the job I started a decade ago. ”
She swallowed hard. “You had his family slaughtered.”
“Animals don’t have families. They have packs. And I was performing an important duty by cutting down that vicious pack of creatures.”
“People, not creatures.”
Mowbray curled his lip. “They aren’t people. Transforming into beasts—”
“They have hearts, can love—”
Sir Harold waved this away. “Their lives are immaterial to the greater good. Creatures like that are a danger and a blight. England is a shining jewel of purity, which must be maintained. That is my task.”
“Have any of them harmed you?” Jessica demanded.
“I have never given any of those monsters the opportunity to do so,” the baronet answered. “Strike first, strike often. This has been the sacred responsibility of my family for generations.”
“Is this old work, what you and your family do?”
“It began before this house was built. I have taken on their work, as I vowed I would when the title and obligation of slaughtering the animals fell to me.”
“They haven’t given you reason to hate them, and they hurt no one else. What you do is murder.”
“Their very existence is an abomination!” Mowbray snapped. “They are not like you and me. They don’t belong in England. Which is why I ensure that the Guardians have all the funding they need to persist in their important task. Why, Page himself was the one who led the attack against Brody’s pack.”
“Bastard left me with this as he escaped.” Page drew a finger along the scar running down his face. “I’ll repay the favor by slitting his throat and putting his flayed hide on the wall.”
Jessica swallowed down her gorge as she dragged her attention back to Mowbray. “All of this, bringing me into your plot, it was all a scheme to draw out Ezra.”
“Ezra,” Mowbray mocked. “Here I went against my principles in hiring a woman, and you’ve gone and let your female sentiment cloud your judgment, proving I was right to have misgivings.” He peered at her closely. “Have you actually slept with that monster?”
His eyes were alight with repulsion and interest.
“I may have bedded him,” she said, “but you can go fuck yourself.”
Pain blinded her and her head whipped to the side as the back of Mowbray’s hand collided with her face.
“Foul bitch.” His face contorted and reddened with disgusted fury. “I’ll take pleasure in killing you.”
He marched to a box on a table and opened it. From the box, he pulled a thin but long dagger before stalking back to her. The blade bit into her throat.
She forced her breath to come in and out as slowly as possible. When men reached this state of hysteria, their movements were thoughtless, rash, and the only way to counter their enraged impetuousness was through scrupulous use of her own calm.
“Easy, Sir Harold,” Page said, from his place near the wall. “She’s most useful to us alive. For now.”
The baronet’s high color receded, leaving him his usual pale shade. He backed up, the dagger still in his hand.
Jessica permitted herself the quietest and most inconspicuous exhalation.
“True,” Mowbray said. “Brody and the others will come for her.”
“They’ll come,” she answered. “But not for me. They’ll have one purpose in coming here. And that’s to kill you.”
It wasn’t the wisest thing to say. The baronet did have a knife in his hand, but she couldn’t allow him to believe that all the power belonged to him. Men like Mowbray existed in the certainty that they were above all consequence.
They weren’t.
He actually smiled at her. “They can try, but three men versus my Guardians hold little advantage.”
“As you said, they aren’t mere men.”
“The full moon was last night.” His smile twisted into a smirk. “It’ll be twenty-nine days before they can transform into monsters once again. Until then, they’re only thieves with no great ability, no exceptional strength, and no match against over a dozen trained operatives.”
Her heart pitched into her stomach. If Ezra, Tej, and Rhys did come for her, they could be heading directly to their deaths. And she would be responsible.
Despite her attempts to keep her expression neutral, her dismay must have shown on her face, because Mowbray’s smirk widened into a satisfied grin.
“It would’ve been wiser for you, Miss Colfax, to have adhered to the original terms of our agreement. I’ll leave you to contemplate that.”
Still holding the knife, the baronet headed toward the door. At the threshold, he paused and addressed Page. “Post a guard outside.”
“Yes, sir.”
Once Mowbray was gone, Page peeled himself away from the wall and moved slowly to stand in front of her.
“I will keep you alive,” he murmured softly. “Long enough to make sure Brody sees you suffer in unspeakable ways. Only then shall I kill him.”
She met Page’s gaze but said nothing.
He made a huff of annoyance, clearly hoping to wring some kind of reaction out of her, before marching out of the room.
The two Guardians filed after him, closing the door behind them.
Judging by the shadows beneath the doorframe, someone stood sentry just outside.
Clearly, they didn’t consider her enough of a threat to have someone inside the chamber with her.
Their arrogance was a mistake. And she was not to be underestimated.
She waited, marking time by the pops of the logs in the hearth.
It was full dark now, and other than the light from the fire, everything was thick with shadow.
There was activity in the house, the sounds of people below.
Judging by the heavy treads, the lack of desire to suppress the noises of their movements came from confidence, and that meant that the building brimmed with Guardians.
This was the home of their patron. No need for concealment.
They were also certain that if Ezra, Rhys, and Tej came, the Guardians wouldn’t have to hide themselves or plan for any concealment or strategy. Their intention would be a full-on battle that left no survivors.
She pushed away the cold racing down her spine.
Hard to fully judge time without a clock, but she guessed it to be about ten minutes since Page had left the room. Then, she got to work.
Though her hands were bound, she had enough movement in her arms to reach into her right pocket.
They hadn’t searched her, believing her only defense would be from an obvious weapon—of which she had none.
She’d dropped her pistol back when Page had hauled her onto his horse. Yet, she didn’t need a weapon.
From her pocket, she pulled out a length of thick cord. Charlie had always urged her to keep cording on her person at all times, and for that, she was grateful.
It wasn’t easy work, to tie a loop at each end of the cord when her hands were bound.
Yet at Charlie’s insistence, she’d practiced many times before and thanked his diligence now.
Her fingers moved quickly. She kept casting glances toward the door, yet the sentry outside maintained his position in the corridor and didn’t come in.
At last, she had loops tied at both ends of the cord. This next part was the most difficult. It had taken her many tries to master it when practicing.
The space between her hands was small, leaving little room for the cord, but she rubbed her palms together, urging the length of cording between her wrists.
Finally, the looped end of the cord emerged, and she twisted her fingers to grab hold of it and pull, until the length of cord was half on one side of her hands, half on the other.
Carefully, quietly as she could to keep the chair from creaking beneath her, she lifted her feet. She took one loop of cord and hooked it around the toe of her shoe, before repeating the movement with the other.
It was an awkward position, her feet hovering in the air, her hands suspended just above them. Yet she clenched her stomach to maintain her balance. Then, she began to move.
She kicked her feet up and down in a sawing motion. This, too, she had to do as noiselessly as possible, and she winced when the chair shifted beneath her. She paused, but the guard remained outside.
She resumed the movement, as though she was quickly working the pedals of a pipe organ. Up and down. As she did, the cording rubbed against the rope binding her wrists. Both cord and rope grew hot, and she bared her teeth as the heat singed her skin. Yet she didn’t relent.
In increments, the cord wore away at the rope, cutting through the thick hemp. Until, at last, her hands snapped apart as the rope broke.
Pulling the remains of her bindings from her wrists, she permitted herself a bare moment to touch her chafed and burned skin.
Silently, she murmured her thanks to Charlie, and his doggedness in ensuring she learned this skill. Then she was on her feet.
A quick search of the room revealed no knives, guns, or objects she could use as a weapon.
She crept to the window, silently unlatching it and pushing it open.
Poking her head out, she noted that the room faced the back of the house with a wide terrace below, where a lone guard marched back and forth, a musket laying on his shoulder.
It took him three minutes to walk from beneath her window to the other side of the terrace and back again.
Ivy grew up the wall. She gripped it and tugged. The old growth held firmly to the side of the house. At least there was some benefit to the fact that the Mowbray’s had lived here for generations.
Twenty feet stretched between the window and the terrace.
She took off her shoes, set them on the floor, then hiked up her skirts and climbed through the open window. Her gaze firmly on the sentry below, she gripped the ivy’s twisting vine, and carefully positioned her feet on the thickest parts of the plant.
Jessica held her breath and kept as still as possible as the armed guard walked directly beneath her. Fortunately, he didn’t look up, never expecting that she might free herself and attempt an escape.
Pivoting on his boot heel, he marched back toward the other end of the terrace.
She climbed quickly, trying not to rustle the ivy and alert the sentry.
When she was halfway down the side of the house, she debated jumping the rest of the distance, but that would make too much noise.
She continued her downward climb, her attention always fixed toward the guard.
One minute passed. In another minute, he’d turn and start back in her direction.
Jessica hurried the rest of the way down, still cautious about shaking the foliage she clung to. At last, her feet touched the terrace. Without her shoes, she managed to silently sprint across the veranda before vaulting over the railing.
She landed in a crouch in a garden. At least, she thought it might be a garden. Night had fallen and covered everything in darkness. Yet she could make out the rigid shapes of topiaries and ruthlessly pruned hedges, and thorny rosebushes plucked at her clothing as she darted down a path.
Just beyond the garden’s boundaries, the forest loomed. It formed a thick dark wall, black against the indigo night sky. Once, the woods frightened her, but Ezra, Tej, and Rhys had made it safer than any other place.
Though it wasn’t a full moon, it still cast far too much light for her liking. One of the sentries might spot her.
Her breath heaving, she ran from the garden, and plunged into the woods.