Chapter 19 #2
“You’ll end sooner than that, with a bullet in your chest, if you don’t put down that pistol.”
Beyond the room, a woman’s voice sounded. It streaked through him like a bolt of electricity. Audrey. She was shouting to be released.
“But if you help me, Stevens,” Hugh went on, his pulse rising as he realized Audrey was likely being led to this room, to the cages. “If you can be the officer I know you truly are, I will use all my leverage to make certain you don’t hang. You have my word.”
The officer looked torn, his nerves shredded, as his eyes skipped between the other door, the cages, and Hugh.
Before he could give any answer, the coming commotion surged through the door across the room. A brawny man dragged Audrey behind him, wrenching and thrashing to free her arm from his grip. She saw him and went still.
“Hugh!” she cried.
Stevens swiveled on his heel. “Martin, let her go.” He aimed his pistol toward the man—and at Audrey.
“Don’t shoot, you idiot!” Hugh shoved the officer’s arm aside. But Stevens’s had already fully cocked the hammer, and at the slightest pressure of his finger on the trigger, the pistol went off.
A mirror on the wall shattered, and Gwendolyn screamed as the man holding Audrey flinched and crouched.
Audrey, however, did not. Using her captor’s distraction to her benefit, she swept her arm across a table and gripped a metal candelabra holding three burning tapers.
Hot wax extinguished the flames as she bashed the man in the head and tumbled out of his grip.
“Audrey, get down!” Hugh shouted, and she did—throwing herself back out through the door just before Hugh fully cocked his flintlock and fired off his first shot. The man swiveled from the impact of the bullet and crashed onto the floor.
“Stevens—” Hugh turned toward the officer, but he was no longer there. The coward had fled.
“I knew you were here somewhere, Neatham.”
Audrey reappeared in the study, her arms up, her hands splayed. Hammond Abbey practically stepped on her heels, his pistol trained on her back. “Your doctor friend wouldn’t say where, not even when I broke his fingers. True loyalty, that.”
Thornton. Damn it.
“You bastard,” Hugh seethed. A strange, new feeling of futility and doom closed in around him. But he couldn’t allow it to gain traction. If he did, he would be finished. And not just him, but Audrey, Thornton, and even Gwendolyn.
Abbey pulled an aggrieved face. “Our erstwhile Bow Street officer. Couldn’t leave the detecting behind. Toss your weapon aside, if you will.”
Audrey’s eyes filled with an expression he couldn’t read.
He thought it might be regret. Maybe even fear.
But when she rolled her eyes up, to look at the empty cage hanging above her and Abbey, and then pointedly shifted her attention to a spot behind Hugh, he realized she was plotting something.
He presumed that she was looking at the panel of levers.
What was she thinking? All he knew was that Audrey hadn’t yet given up. So, neither would he.
Hugh kept his grip on his pistol. “I don’t think so, Abbey. Release her.”
Abbey scoffed at the suggestion and urged Audrey forward a few more steps, using her as a shield.
“How bored you must be as a lordling if you would rather continue to play at inspector,” he said. “My members here understand that dead feeling inside. You have it all, and yet nothing just the same. Excitement, that’s what they want. You’re not unlike them.”
“I am nothing like them,” Hugh gritted out.
“No, you’re not, are you? Stevens said you’re the kind that wouldn’t bend, even under a steel hand.”
“Stevens isn’t the traitor you think he is,” Audrey said. “He tried to shoot Martin.”
Abbey laughed. “That weasel? I never would have expected it of him.”
“If he isn’t heading off the police, how much time do you think you have?” she pressed on, her eyes again going to the levers and then the cages behind Hugh. His muscles tightened in anticipation of something, though he didn’t know exactly what was going through her head.
Abbey sighed. “I have no fear of the police. Do you have any notion of how many powerful men my Sanctuary caters to? Every one of them have sold their souls to me, and to keep their names unspoken, their reputations unsullied, they will protect me.” Abbey reached forward, his hand curling around Audrey’s chin.
Fury boiled under Hugh’s skin as the steward put his lips to her ear.
“So, in answer to your question, I have all the time in the world. A good thing, I think, since I’m not quite finished with you yet. ”
“Yes, you are. Now, Sir!” Audrey shouted before sinking her teeth into Abbey’s hand, which he’d made the mistake of putting too close to her mouth. He roared in pain and ripped his hand free as the sound of chains suddenly rattled overhead. Audrey threw herself aside and Hugh raised his pistol.
“Oi!” a familiar voice screeched as the empty cage above Abbey came down fast.
He twisted to leap aside, but the base caught his shoulder, knocking him down. However, it failed to pin him.
Abbey staggered to his feet and wheeled, his pistol aimed toward Hugh. The percussion of two pistol shots filled the room. Pain bit into Hugh’s shoulder, but he remained standing. Abbey did not. He dropped to the floor, a groan of anguish ripping from his throat.
“Hugh!” Audrey was at his side in the next second, her attention riveted to his shoulder.
“I’m only grazed,” he said, though he kept that arm tight to his side and reached for her with his other arm instead.
Pea whistles pierced the air as Abbey, blood expanding through the fabric of his waistcoat, tried to crawl for the door. Shouts and commotion erupted in another part of the house. Bow Street had arrived. “In here!” Hugh shouted.
“Oh, thank god,” Audrey said as he gathered her to him. “Have I ever told you that you have excellent timing?”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. “A time or two.” He then noticed she, too, cradled her arm close. “You’re hurt.”
“No, only bruised.” Her body quaked with shivers. “Sir! Lower the middle cage.”
Only then did Hugh see the boy at the panel of levers.
That’s what Audrey had been looking at over his shoulder.
Sir. He’d left the coach field and somehow sneaked his way in.
Sir tipped the brim of his hat and began to crank the middle lever at a more cautious pace.
Gwendolyn broke into fresh sobs as her cage began to lower.
“You aren’t mad I left the phaeton, are you? I saw that shifty bloke, Stevens, and figured I’d follow him at a distance,” Sir said as the cage came to rest on the floor. Hugh and Audrey joined him there.
“Considering you just saved our hides,” Hugh said, grinning, “I’ll give it a pass.”
Several patrolmen entered the room then, their eyes going wide at the scene before them.
And then, Sir Gabriel Poston entered on their heels.
He pulled up short and stared down at Hammond Abbey.
The steward had given up on his escape and sat against the wall, bleeding heavily from the wound in his side.
“Glad to see you made it,” Hugh said, earning a scowl from the magistrate.
“I take it this is the man that needs arresting?”
Hugh nodded, his shoulder beginning to throb now. “I’d hurry up about it. He might not be breathing for much longer.”
Sir Gabriel stared down at one of the men responsible for the death of his niece. “With any hope, he won’t be.” The magistrate snapped his fingers, and the patrolmen got to work.