Chapter 19 #2
“Let go of me,” Jonathan snarled, and there was real fear in it now, the first true fear Ronan had heard from him all morning.
“No,” Ronan said, and drove his shoulder into his brother’s chest, forcing him back another step, and another, his eyes fixed over Jonathan’s shoulder on the small white shape of his daughter’s nightgown, drawing steadily nearer to the tree line and the men who waited beyond it.
He held on even through the black spots that had begun to crowd the edges of his vision. Gregory burst through the trees at the far edge of the clearing, and he saw him drop to his knees and gather Sarah up into his arms.
Safe.
She was safe.
He turned on Jonathan with nothing left holding him back.
“You held a knife to my daughter’s throat.
” His voice did not sound like his own. “You made her cry out for me while you dragged her through the dark like an animal. You stabbed me, and you would have done far worse to her, and my wife…. my wife will carry the fear of this morning with her for the rest of her life because of what you have done.”
Jonathan’s eyes had gone wide with something that was, for the first time, unmistakably fear, and he began to stammer some manner of answer, some attempt at negotiation or apology, but Ronan was no longer listening.
He struck him again, and again, driven by a fury that had nothing left of the careful, controlled Duke of Ravenhill in it at all.
Jonathan tried to fight back, but his strength had never truly matched Ronan’s, whatever confidence he had carried into their meeting, and the weapon fell from his grasp somewhere in the struggle.
Ronan did not stop. He did not know how long he might have gone on, because it was at that moment that other hands seized him from behind.
“Ronan. Ronan, that is enough; he is done, let the constables have him now.” Gregory’s voice, close at his ear, breathless from his own run through the woods. “Ronan. Look at me. It is over.”
The words seemed to reach him from a very great distance.
He became aware, slowly, of the constables closing in around them, of rough hands hauling Jonathan up from the ground and binding his wrists, of Jonathan’s face, bloodied and swollen now, staring back at him with an expression Ronan could not entirely read.
“You were not supposed to fight for her like that,” Jonathan said, almost to himself, as the constables dragged him past. “You were never supposed to care that much.”
Ronan did not answer him.
“You are bleeding rather badly,” Gregory said, his usual easy charm entirely absent, replaced by something Ronan had rarely seen in his old friend’s face before. “Don’t you dare fall down on me now, Ronan.”
“Sarah.” The word came out of him rough and urgent, cutting through everything else. “Where is Sarah?”
“Safe. I promise you she is safe; I have not let her out of my sight.” Gregory’s grip tightened on his shoulder, steadying him as his leg finally, entirely, gave way beneath him. “Come. Let us get you to her before you fall.”
They found her a short distance away, wrapped now in a constable’s greatcoat far too large for her small frame, her face still streaked with tears but her eyes wide and searching the moment she caught sight of her father limping toward her, held upright between Gregory and one of the constables.
“Father!” She broke free of the woman who had been comforting her and ran towards him.
Ronan sank to his knees to meet her, ignoring the fresh, tearing pain the movement cost him, and gathered his daughter into his arms as though he might never again let her go.
She was sobbing now in earnest, her small fists gripping the front of his ruined coat, and he held her close and pressed his face into her hair and let himself, for one long moment, simply feel the impossible, overwhelming relief of having her safe against him.
“I have you,” he murmured, over and over, into her hair. “I have you. You are safe now, my darling. I promise you, you are safe.”
“You are bleeding.” Her small voice was thick with tears, and she pulled back just enough to look at the dark, spreading stain along his side with wide, frightened eyes. “You are hurt.”
“It is nothing,” he said, though the grey creeping in at the edges of his vision suggested otherwise. “It is nothing at all, compared to having you safe in my arms again. Do you understand me, Sarah?”
“I was so scared,” she whispered.
“I am so very sorry that you were ever made to feel that way. I should have kept you safer. I should have known sooner what danger you were in.” His voice broke on the words, and he did not try to steady it.
“I promise you, I will never let anything like this happen to you again. Whatever I must do to keep you safe, I will do it. You have my word.”
She buried her face against his shoulder again, and he held her there, kneeling in the cold, frost-bitten clearing with the sound of constables leading his brother away somewhere behind him and Gregory’s hand steady and anchoring on his other shoulder, and for the first time since he had woken to find his daughter gone, Ronan allowed himself to believe, truly believe, that the worst of it was finally, mercifully, over.
It was Gregory, some minutes later, who finally insisted they could not remain kneeling with a knife wound going unattended, and it took both his friend and one of the constables to get Ronan upright again, his good arm slung across Gregory’s shoulders, Sarah carried against his other side by a kindly-faced constable’s wife who had been summoned from the nearest cottage to help.
Ronan caught one last glimpse of Jonathan before the constables led him off through the trees toward whatever cart or carriage waited to carry him away to a gaol cell and, in time, to whatever judgment the law would see fit to pass upon him.
His brother did not look back. He walked with his head bowed and his bound hands held stiffly before him, and Ronan found, to his own considerable surprise, that he felt nothing so simple as triumph in the sight.
Only a deep, aching sorrow for the boy Jonathan must once have been, before grief and want had hollowed him into the man who had held a knife to a child’s arm without, it seemed, so much as a second thought.
He did not know what would become of him now.
Prison, certainly, and very likely worse, given all that he had done.
It was not Ronan’s place to decide that. It was enough, for now, that Sarah was safe.
The walk back through the wood seemed to take a great deal longer than the walk in had done, though Ronan suspected this had a great deal more to do with the blood he had lost than with any true distance.
“Augusta will have my head,” he said, somewhere along the way, half delirious with pain and exhaustion both. “I told her to stay at the house.”
“I imagine she did no such thing,” Gregory said dryly, “given that I passed no fewer than three of your own men racing toward the house not a quarter hour ago to fetch her the moment we knew where you had gone. If I were a betting man, and you know very well that I am, I should say she is very likely already halfway to meeting us on the road.”
He was not wrong. They found her not a mile further on, running toward them along the frost-hard track with her hair coming loose from its pins and her skirts caught up in both fists.
The moment she saw them, she gave a small, broken cry and closed the remaining distance at a dead run.
“Sarah.” She reached the child first, gathering her close, pressing frantic kisses to her hair, and then her eyes found him, found the dark stain spreading across his side, and her face went white.
“Ronan.” His name came out of her as barely more than a breath. “You are hurt and bleeding, oh God, how badly are you…”
“I will live,” he said, and found, despite everything, that he still had it in him to attempt something like a smile for her benefit. “It looks a great deal worse than it is. I told you to stay back at the house.”
“I could not simply sit and wait to learn whether you were alive or dead. I am sorry, I know I promised, but I could not do it.”
“I am glad you did not,” he admitted, and reached for her hand with the one arm not currently occupied by Gregory’s shoulder, and she took it and held. “I am glad you are here.”
They stood like that a long moment in the cold morning light, the three of them together at last, Sarah’s small hand finding its way into the space between her father’s and Augusta’s joined ones, and Ronan thought, even through the pain and the exhaustion and the blood he could feel steadily draining his strength away, that he had never in his life been so entirely, completely grateful for anything as he was, in that moment, for the impossible fact that all three of them were still standing.
“Home,” Augusta said firmly, wiping at her eyes with the back of her free hand and turning her attention, with sudden brisk purpose, to the practical matter of getting a bleeding duke and a shaken six-year-old both safely into a carriage.
“We are going home, all of us, and you are going to let the physician look at that wound properly. It’s going to be okay. ”