a ragged sob. She clutched at Prudence with clawlike fingers. “Take me to him,” she begged. “Take me to him, now. You must let them, Pru,” she said, her eyes overflowing with desperate tears. “You must.”
Pru peered down at her, trying to remember the last time she’d seen Honoria cry. “Are you certain?”
Honoria’s eyes were wild and extra dark in a face drawing paler by the moment. “I—I need him. Please, Pru, let me up. Let them take me.”
Scampering back, Prudence felt herself being lifted to her feet by strong arms and anchored to her husband’s side as Blackwell and the men gingerly boosted her sister onto their makeshift stretcher and navigated the docks back toward the road.
“I should go with her,” she fretted, her legs suddenly feeling like they’d lost their bones.
She’d never liked William. She’d never been very close to her sister; Honoria had always made it impossible. Was it any wonder she’d been so aloof? So alone. She’d been locked in a private hell inside her own home.
Married to a monster.
“You are going nowhere.” Her husband still refused to look down at her, his mouth compressed into a tight hyphen as he sized up a few of the dock workers looking on in slack-jawed amazement.
“You,” he ordered, pointing to a steely-eyed laborer in his fifties. “Go to M Division on Blackman Street. Ask for Sgt. Catesby and a contingent of men to secure the docks.”
“Sir.” The man touched his cap and hopped too, as men tended to do when Morley gave an order.
“Argent.” He turned to where the heavy-built man in a sharp auburn suit was examining the rifle in his hands. “Send our men round to the Commissioner Goode’s residence in case Viscount Woodhaven had any thugs making mischief there. Then, I want Detective Inspectors Sean O’Mara and Roman Rathbone to tear through any of the Baron’s warehouses to find the missing crates with the contraband Woodhaven was looking for.”
Argent gave a sardonic two-fingered salute and sauntered off.
“The rest of you, this dock is closed until further notice, clear off.”
A few laborers, obviously unhappy about the loss of a day’s wages, looked as if they’d argue. Others, perhaps the ones who’d witnessed Morley’s capabilities on the roof, dragged them away without making eye contact.
Her husband was not a man in the habit of repeating himself.
That handled, he hauled Prudence with him as he strode for the river-side corner of the warehouse beyond which steam barges and various pleasure boats churned the river with their relentless traffic.
The moment they turned the corner, she gasped to find herself immediately trapped between a rock wall and a hard place—the hard place being her husband’s body.
His hands were everywhere as a torrent of curses spilled from his lips. “Jesus Christ, Prudence. Did he hurt you?”
His fingers searched her face as if he were a blind man, his thumb hovering over her cheek where William had struck her. His glacial eyes flared with unnerving intensity he visibly struggled to contain.
Drowning in the unspoken but not invisible tension between them, she opened her mouth to speak, but nothing emerged. No words came forth to express the sheer incalculable emotion sweeping through her in knee-weakening waves.
An emotion she could now identify but didn’t have the courage to express.
“I’m—we’re—all right,” she finally assured in a voice much wobblier than she’d intended.
“Well, I’m bloody not!” he burst, pushing away from her to rake shaking hands through his hair. “Never,” he said with a hostile glare. “Never will you put yourself in danger for the sake of another, is that clear?”
“But…she’s my sister. Surely you can appreciate the importance of that. You put your life on the line for people every day.” She kept her voice even, soft, appreciating the volatility simmering through the heavy musculature of his shoulders and arms, heaving his chest into swells of uneven breaths. “Every night,” she added meaningfully.
“I’m well aware of my hypocrisy, Prudence,” he snapped. “But it doesn’t fucking matter. You can’t—I won’t bloody—God! I’m not built for this.” He paced three steps away, and then returned as if ricocheting off an invisible wall.
His words lanced through her, and she went taut with fear, grateful for the wall behind her, holding her up. “For…for what?” she asked in a watery breath, wondering if everything was about to change.
If she was about to lose him.
“For loving you, goddammit,” he said with an almost savage antipathy. “I have to fight the image of that bastard’s gun against your temple every time