The Virgin Who Ruined Lord Gray - Anna Bradley Page 0,106
found out why.
His life’s blood was gushing from a long, jagged slit in his throat. Sophia gagged as a heavy, metallic smell filled her nostrils and more of the thick, sticky warmth flowed over her fingers. For one endless, dreadful moment she froze, her mind reeling, but then she jerked her fingers to the pulse point behind his ear. The blood was flowing so quickly from the gash in his throat she despaired of finding any flutter there, but she pressed her fingers hard against his flesh.
No, not a twitch. She hovered her damp fingers over his nose and mouth, but he was no longer breathing.
Dead.
Another man murdered in St. Clement Dane’s churchyard. Sophia fell back against her heels, her heart squeezing with shock in her chest. Another man, nameless and faceless, lying lifeless in his own blood, his throat glutted with it, breathing his last alone in a deserted graveyard.
Who was he? Not Thelwall.
Who, then?
Tristan.
Dread rolled over her, but she’d spent hours touching Tristan’s body, his face—had spent the night wrapped in his arms. She’d never forget the warmth of his skin under her fingertips, the long, smooth muscles of his body moving over hers.
Sophia’s brain recognized at once it wasn’t him, but her heart wasn’t so easily convinced. It was thrashing about inside her chest like a frantic bird, demanding certainty. She reached for the man with shaking hands, trying to avoid touching his blood again as she searched his face with desperate fingers. His chin, the bones of his cheeks, his lips, gasping all the while with hope and terror.
She might have stayed there all night, her hands moving over the dead’s man’s face, rocking and muttering incoherent pleas and prayers if a sudden dull gleam of light hadn’t fallen over her. Sophia stared down at the features under her fingertips, and her heart rushed into her throat.
It wasn’t Tristan.
It was Peter Sharpe, blood still oozing from his ravaged throat, his eyes open and staring blankly up at her.
“Shame about Sharpe, innit it, Miss Monmouth?”
Sophia froze. The light that had fallen across Peter Sharpe’s ghastly face had come from a lamp. Again, her first thought was it must be Tristan, but it wasn’t Tristan’s voice. No, there was someone else looming over her, a lamp in his fist. She turned slowly, holding up her hand to protect her eyes from the light.
“I been after ye for days, but yer a cunning one, aren’t you? Sneaky, like.”
Sophia couldn’t see his face. The light blinded her, rendering the man before her nothing but a dark, hulking silhouette, his features hidden in shadows, but she recognized his voice at once as the same voice she’d overheard arguing with Lord Everly yesterday morning.
The fourth man.
The man who’d killed Henry Gerrard all those weeks ago. The man who’d let Jeremy stand trial for his crime, and who’d gladly have seen him hang for it.
The man who’d killed Peter Sharpe tonight.
Sophia’s mind was sluggish with shock, and she had to grope for the connection between the man standing over her now and the villain who’d made an attempt on her life on Pollen Street two nights ago. Tristan had said he’d had a club, or a stick…
Her gaze darted to the heavy walking stick in his hand. He let it dangle loosely between his fingers, tapping it repeatedly against the heel of his boot with a careless flick of his wrist.
“Knew I’d get ye alone sooner or later, an’ now here ye are.”
He grabbed the brass knob at the top of the stick, and Sophia heard the unmistakable clash of steel being drawn from its sheath. She gasped as a long, wicked blade emerged from the hilt.
He run the sword across the man’s throat…
It had to be the same walking stick that had disappeared from the scene of Henry Gerrard’s murder, and inside it was the murder weapon. Jeremy had called it a sword, but the lamplight revealed the deadly edge and the ornately carved hilt of a dagger.
“Looks like yer luck’s run out, girl.”
There was no time to speak, to move, or even to think before he grabbed her by her hair. Sophia cried out in pain when he wrenched her to her feet, but it died to a whimper when he pressed the cold blade of his dagger to her throat.
Sophia reacted instantly, without thought or reason, her defense born of an instinct honed by years spent wandering the most dangerous streets in the grimmest neighborhoods of London.