Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,58

her latched between him and the wall, Raphael shoved past bodies who’d begun to flee down whichever hall they could find, not knowing they raced toward a dead end.

An acrid smell itched at his nose, smoke and something bitter.

He snatched a panicked footman clean off his feet. “What’s going on out there?” he demanded.

“Madness!” The gawky lad’s voice squeaked with the fear of a man barely out of his teenage years. “Someone spied the Bobbies and before we knew it, a tussle broke out right on the ballroom floor. Men at each other’s throats. Never seen anything like it. Someone tossed over an oil lamp and now the drapes in the gaming den have caught. Best we run, man.”

Cursing, Raphael released him and shouldered his way to the end of the hall.

He took a quick toll of the anarchy when they broke onto the landing that wrapped around the great room’s second story, at eye level with the ostentatious chandelier.

Morley’s men spilled into the courtyard like blue-coated rats. Some doing their best to contain the tide of panicked partygoers, funneling them out to safety.

Others brandished an asp to meet the blows of gangster cudgels.

Longueville was nowhere to be found, and without him and Raphael to maintain the temperature on the simmering tension between the Fauves and the Butchers, it had boiled over into this potentially lethal catastrophe.

It wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. Only the leaders and their closest comrades were to meet here and witness his challenge.

Then they’d gather their men to come after him in the night.

That was how things were done in their world. They were no street-rat ruffians, their wars were waged in the dark so there were no witnesses.

Away from the public and the police.

But Longueville had blatantly brought an army to a masquerade, willing to crush revelers if necessary.

The rules of engagement had been thoroughly breached.

Two staircases led down to the ballroom floor, one on the east wall and the other on the west.

Raphael and Mercy weaved through abandoned card games and a fortune teller’s upended table toward the west staircase as a fight began to spill up the east side toward the second floor.

“The Duchesse was in the billiard’s room when last I saw her!” Mercy called over the din. “There!” She pointed to a large solarium now crammed with people trying to escape the smoke beginning to seep up through the three open archways.

Raphael nodded, his eyes lasering everything else away but a bold figure who’d led the police charge into the courtyard. He already had two Butchers in irons and was dragging them roughly toward a police cart very much like the one in which Raphael had first kissed Mercy.

Chief Inspector Morley.

He’d get Mercy to him before returning for the Duchesse.

Her safety was paramount to anything else.

Cursing every fucking god in existence, Raphael tucked Mercy deeper against his side, readied his weapon, and waded into the fray. He was careful to keep his dagger away from drunken, panicked courtesans, artists, and actresses as they shoved and fled.

Keeping to the outskirts, he hoped to avoid the increasing intensity of the violence in the great room. Once on the main floor, he had no qualms about using his elbows, fists, or his blade to quell any who came close. Who thought to claim bragging rights by landing a blow against Raphael Sauvageau.

He had one eye on the brawl and the other on the exit that remained infuriatingly distant, when he felt Mercy lunge behind them.

Raphael whirled just in time to see her blade embedded in the chest of one of his own men, who’d apparently thought to attack from behind.

They thought to stab him in the back. Thinking, no doubt, that he wouldn’t see it coming, this coup against the rules of conflict.

Because he’d taught them the code and abided by it.

But Marco...he didn’t have a code. He would conduct his villainy out in the open, if only to amass the notoriety the Sauvageau brothers had taken a lifetime to procure.

Raphael would see him in hell, but first...

Gaining ground, he stopped an attacker with a swift elbow to the throat. He threw his dagger at another man who had a running start. It embedded in his eye, dropping him instantly.

Now Raphael was weaponless, but it didn’t matter, he only had five paces to the door and sharp fucking knuckles.

Anyone in his way had a death wish.The peal of a woman’s scream rose above the din, the desperation in the sound seeming to