Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
The village came into view as the first lamps were being lit in cottage windows — small, warm squares of gold against the gathering dark. Ordinary people living ordinary evenings. None of them knew what was coming.
Nell saw it before they reached the door. The dread in her bones had not been misplaced.
The bakery sign hung crooked above the entrance, knocked sideways by some violence she did not want to name. The front door stood ajar, and a wedge of lamplight spilled across the cobblestones. A bread knife lay on the ground near the step, its blade catching the last of the dusk.
She was off her horse before the animal had fully stopped, her boots hitting the cobblestones at a run. Dominic caught her arm.
“Behind me.” Dominic ordered. He drew two pistols and went through the door first.
The shop was wrecked. Flour covered the floor in a fine white drift, disturbed by boot prints — large ones, a man’s — that tracked from the front room into the kitchen and out through the back.
A stool lay on its side near the counter.
The display case was cracked, a spider’s web of broken glass glittering in the lamplight.
One of the bread racks had been shoved sideways, its contents scattered across the floor like fallen soldiers.
“Daphne!” Nell pushed past Dominic the moment she saw there was no one standing in the room. “Martha!”
A sound came from behind the counter. Low, ragged, thick with pain.
Nell rounded the corner and found them. Daphne was propped against the wall with her legs stretched out in front of her, one hand pressed to her ribs and the other cradling her wrist at an angle that made Nell’s stomach lurch.
Blood matted the hair above her left ear, and her face was the colour of tallow.
Martha knelt beside her, pressing a cloth to the wound.
The girl’s lip was split and swelling, her dress torn at the shoulder, and her hands shook so badly the cloth kept slipping.
“The children.” Nell dropped to her knees, her fingers framing Daphne’s bruised face. “Where are the children?”
“He took them.” Daphne’s voice came out scraped thin. She blinked, her eyes struggling to focus. “He came through the back, maybe ten minutes after you left. The children had just come in from the vicar’s. Oliver was still hanging his coat.”
“Tell me what happened.” Dominic crouched beside them, one pistol resting across his thigh. His face was stone, but a vein beat hard at his temple.
“He had a pistol.” Daphne swallowed, wincing at the effort.
“Martha heard the kitchen door and went to check. He backhanded her into the wall before she could scream.” She glanced at the girl, something fierce and protective cutting through the pain.
“I grabbed the bread knife from under the counter. Went at him. But he was fast — caught my wrist, twisted it.” She held up her damaged arm, her fingers dangling at a wrong angle.
“Snapped it like kindling. Then threw me into the shelves.”
“Oliver.” Nell could barely form the word.
“Brave, stupid boy.” Daphne’s tears cut tracks through the flour dust on her face.
“He grabbed the poker from the kitchen hearth and swung at Gabriel’s knees.
Caught him, too — Gabriel stumbled, cursing.
But then he wrenched the poker away and shoved Oliver down.
Put a boot on his chest. Lily was screaming.
He bound Oliver’s wrists with a curtain cord and dragged them both out through the back. ”
“Where?” Dominic’s hand tightened on the pistol.
“He told me to deliver a message.” Daphne’s jaw clenched, and something dark and furious burned behind the glaze of pain. “He said — ‘Tell Eleanor the old Hargrove cottage. Past the churchyard, through the east field. She comes alone, or they die.'”
Dominic went very still. “I know the cottage. It has been abandoned for years.”
“It is on the edge of your estate.” Daphne looked between them, her broken wrist held carefully against her chest. “He has been squatting there. He told me — bragged about it, the sick bastard. Said he has been living in that cottage for months, watching the village from the hill. Watching the bakery. Watching Nell.”
Nell’s stomach turned to ice. Months. He had been sleeping a mile from her children, eating in the dark while he planned this, watching the smoke rise from her ovens every morning.
Dominic stood. The motion was fluid and controlled, and the soldier in him had taken over completely — every trace of warmth, of tenderness, of the man who had kissed her in the drawing room a week ago, had been locked away behind something hard.
“Martha.” He looked at the girl, his tone steady and commanding. “Can you ride?”
Martha nodded, wiping blood from her split lip with the back of her hand. “Yes, my lord.”
“Take my horse. Ride to Bramwell Park. Tell Philippa to send the magistrate’s men to the Hargrove cottage — east side, past the churchyard wall. Do you know it?”
“Yes, my lord.” Martha was already on her feet, swaying slightly. “The one with the collapsed roof.”
“That is the one. Tell them armed men are needed. Tell them children are inside. Go.”
Martha fled out the front door. The sound of hooves followed moments later, fading fast into the dark.
“Stay with Daphne,” Dominic said to Nell, reaching for the door.
“No.” The word came out quiet and absolute. Nell stood, her hands steady for the first time since Gabriel had walked into her shop that morning. She looked at Dominic and did not blink. “He has my children. I am coming.”
“He said alone. If he sees me —”
“Then we do not let him see you.” She stepped closer, her chin lifting. “I walk in the front. You find another way in. The cottage has a back window — I remember it from when the Hargrove widow kept chickens. It has been boarded up for years, but the wood will be rotten.”
Dominic stared at her. Something shifted behind his eyes — the soldier reassessing, recalculating, factoring in a variable he had not expected. Then his jaw set.
“If he has a pistol aimed at one of the children, you do not rush him. You talk. You stall. You give me time to get inside.” He gripped her arm above the elbow, his fingers fierce. “Promise me.”
“I promise.” She held his gaze. “Promise me you will not miss.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “I never miss.”
They left Daphne with Mrs. Potts, who had already set water to boil and was pressing a clean cloth to the worst of the cuts, clucking softly as she worked. Daphne would be safe there.
The walk to the Hargrove cottage took fifteen minutes through the dark — past the churchyard with its leaning stones, through the east field where the frost crunched like broken teeth beneath their boots, and up the gentle rise to where the cottage crouched against the tree line like something that had been trying to hide for a very long time.
The building was a ruin. Half the thatch had collapsed inward, and the walls were black with damp.
A single window faced the lane, its glass long since shattered, and a faint glow leaked around the edges of a board that had been nailed across the frame from inside.
Firelight. Someone had lit a fire in the old hearth.
Dominic pressed his mouth to her ear. “Two minutes. Give me two minutes to reach the back, then go in.” His lips brushed her temple — not a kiss, not quite, but a touch that said everything a kiss would have said if there had been time.
Then he melted into the darkness around the side of the cottage, moving with the trained silence of a man who had stalked French sentries across Spanish hillsides.
Nell counted her heartbeats. One. Two. Three. She made it to sixty before she could not bear it anymore, and she had promised him a hundred and twenty but her children were inside that cottage with a monster who had nothing left to lose.
She pushed the door open.
The cottage was a single room, low-ceilinged and filthy.
A fire burned in the old hearth, throwing jumping shadows across crumbling plaster walls.
The floor was packed earth, and the air stank of smoke and damp wool and something sour underneath — the smell of a man who had been living like an animal for too long.
Gabriel stood in the centre of the room.
He looked worse than he had that morning.
Wilder. More desperate. The ruined half of his face twitched with a rhythmic tic she did not remember, and his eyes burned with a feverish, unhinged light that told her Daphne had been right — there was nothing human left in him.
His clothes were splattered with blood that was not his own.
He was gripping Lily by one arm. Oliver sat against the far wall, his wrists bound with curtain cord, a bruise darkening along his jaw where he had hit the floor at Daphne’s.
His dark eyes were wide and bright with fury, not fear.
He was watching Gabriel the way a cornered dog watches a bigger animal — looking for the moment to bite.
“Mama!” Lily’s scream pierced the close air, and she reached toward Nell with her free hand. “Mama, he is hurting us!”
“Let them go.” Nell held her hands out, palms open, her posture rigid as she fought to keep her composure from cracking apart. “This is between us, Gabriel. They have nothing to do with what happened between you and me.”
“They have everything to do with it.” Gabriel shoved Oliver hard against the wall, making the boy grunt as his shoulder cracked against the plaster.
He yanked Lily against his chest and pulled out a rusted pistol, pressing the barrel against the girl’s temple.
“You ran from me carrying a bellyful of child, Eleanor. You let me burn and then you brought my blood into this world and raised them without me. Gave them a life so sweet they do not even know my name.”